The twitter I once knew & loved

An ode to the blue bird

In the summer of 2009 I decided to take a break from Facebook, which led me to scramble through the internet—surf, if you will—where I ended up creating the very Twitter account I have to this day. At the time, we didn’t have a word to describe the feeling of meeting people online, and today that word is Cringe. I began following all of the people who I (sort of) knew, the people who carried names I had heard only at gossipy gatherings and various social occasions that were not at all ill-intended. I would often run into those people on a Saudia flight to Heathrow and in places like the Geneva carnival. I would hear about their parents’ illustrious careers and their trips to Forte Dei Marmi and their nonchalance of a life, a life that resembled what I wanted. I thought I wanted to be them, but looking back now I really I just wanted to be friends with them. One time, at a secluded fancy restaurant in Riyadh called Tao, where the family section consisted of curtained and egregiously large couches which basically gave each group of patrons their own living room, I overheard a group of Saudi girls having a very heated yet friendly philosophical discussion about the word Nothing, where one of them insisted that the definition of nothing is nothing and the other one kept saying yes, but it’s still nothing. The conversation went on until one of them calls the waiter and asked for “the Oreo thing to go.” In other words, they were the cool kids. My kind of cool kids. And unlike the ostensibly private and untapped social structure at Tao, Twitter offered me a seat with those people.

One thing led to another and we became friends. Online and irl. They spoke (and typed) so articulately that I was motivated enough to write and speak just as articulately. I tweeted multiple times a day, every day, for the seventeen years that followed. Somewhere within that timeframe, while those people still remained in my life, they quietly began disappearing from Twitter. The profile pictures that showed their real faces were swapped with blank photos. Their tweets replaced with an endless stream of brainrotty pop-cultural references. My timeline moved from words written by real humans sharing real life experiences and entered a world of rage, social wrath, news slop, and an unprovoked need to be miserable and, worse, project misery onto others. It sort of felt like the decline of a once civilized city. Think San Francisco pre & post Covid, or an arcade that converted into a nonplace, or a kids playground that suddenly turned into a homeless camp. Twitter became a sad place. But just like any loyal resident who calls their city home, I chose to stay.

I guess I had a subconscious will to maintain my loyalty to a platform that gave me so much. Twitter changed my life. I discovered myself and showed who I was to others. It made me love to write. I wrote my college essay about it and got my first job because of a follower. How could I abandon something that gave me so much all because of a slight inconvenience of these new visitors? So again, I chose to stay.

What really made me reconsider moving happened sometime in the last year or so, when I realized that despite my pseudonymous identity on the platform, people still knew who I was. They remained anonymous, and I became a blindfolded solo performer on stage with audiences who excitingly waited for me to fuck up. I’ve always daydreamed about all of this being the Stone Age of the internet where it is completely acceptable for someone to anonymously attack a real person online, and that somewhere in the (hopefully) near future an act like this would be deemed violent. Illegal, perhaps. I became the only man standing, with their true identity, to write about silly things and casually express. But the stakes were growing too high, and I always remember Nassim Taleb when he said “Never take risks without potential rewards.” It became clear that this was no longer a place for me to benefit from a genuine connection.

My tweets over the past one and a half decade started serving as a publicized journal used as material for those crazy anons to try and use against me retroactively. And while I’ve always been less of a “what will people think?” person and more of a “this is me, fuckin’ take it or leave it” type of person, THIS WAS TOO MUCH. Why am I still here? Why am I giving them more ammunition for them to use against me in a year?

I often wonder about those cool kids. How early they were to adopt social media. How smart they were to delete all of their digital footprints. Where are they now? Can they come back and can we all talk normally on the internet again? I hate this place so much and I don’t know how to get out.

Earlier this year, I joined Twitter (X🤢)’s revenue sharing program, which basically gives users about $10 for every 1mn view. When I got about $150 in my first payout, I felt more inclined to post shit that attracted more views. I was less interested in actually writing about what I want, and more about what would go ephemerally viral. I was at risk of losing my voice and adopt a tonality that fit a certain criteria. But I don’t want to be a bitch to the algorithm. I don’t want to write what people want me to write. The blue bird was set free, and so I should also set myself free.

I sometimes daydream about downloading my entire Twitter archive and uploading it onto a decentralized storage provider or private server before scraping it off the internet entirely. I no longer want my thoughts to be public here. I no longer want to engage with these people. My home is no longer a safe space and this is officially stolen land. I surrender. I am letting go. I have begun the first stage of grief.