jokes only, please
The Year in Posting
I've spent the last year--really the last few years--deleting and re-upping my Twitter account. Unless I'm sharing something I published (rare!), I've also been off Facebook for years. The latter has been easier to ignore, but probably more costly as an actual facilitator of socializing. Even my cool friends, the poets and professors and former youth pastors (☺), are mostly on Facebook and use it to some degree to plan events and update the wider world as to their lives.
Whereas Twitter? Twitter is an experiment in the limits of mob-mentality to drain the intellectual class of its ability to think. I'll probably return to it forever.
Instragram, meanwhile, is all but dead to me. Why every social media app insists on making its interface as bad as possible, and its timeline as garbled and ill-navigable as possible, is explicable in terms of "user engagement models" but not in anything like human terms. Whenever I delete Instagram and come back a few months later to post pictures for the benefit of far-flung family and friends it's worse. Not only does every cool mom and hip dad who first learned that policing might be structurally problematic this last year (a good thing!) post the most banal ideological bumper stickers (a bad thing!), I can't even see their post to heart it if it's two days old (the whole point of Insta!). "Sorry, Kayleigh and Ben, I also think Avery looks so cute in her BLM product placement, but Instagram has memory-holed your valiant posting."
I, of course, am the greatest of sinners. I am! But from such iniquity I feel I can speak with authority: unless you're someone people are already following for other reasons, or an actual political/community leader, posting about yourself is vanity and political posting is simply groupthink vanity. That might mean it's fine and harmless to post, but it's probably not that *important.* (Usually!)
A newsletter is more or less posting x100, absolution for which I pray every time I press send.
Anyway! What I'm trying to say is that the last twelve months, given the pandemic and the election and the national unrest both admirable and destructive, have been a real roller-coaster for being online. I deleted Twitter for my longest stretch sometime last June--I wanted to think clearly about our national crises and act decisively and with as little mob-fog as I could manage--only for my return the last few months, and certainly the last few weeks, to be...a super fun time? Not the coup de la idiots of January 6th, which was uncanny when it wasn't unsettling, and not the days I scroll and scroll and have to unplug for another reset, but other than that? Twitter has been almost a silly solace more than otherwise.
The secret is that I'm a nobody, less than a small account, and it's time all the nobodies started enjoying our anonymity. If the trolls have ruined being strictly anonymous, certain internalized press clippings have ruined not-mattering-under-my-own-name. Fears of exposure and political backlash--aren't those personal, for most of us, even in terms of social media? Maybe we have some fears about work, many people I know who are very offline are genuinely anxious about mis-stepping in their place of work vis-a-vis the growing list of baroque moralisms. The Right always thinks this is true of the Left (and it is! some of y'all need to relax!), but try telling half the pastors I grew up with you're a Democrat. "Heresy!" Still, ayet your frustrating cousin and too-political high school friends commenting or even texting in anger hardly compose a cancelling.
For some reason (or several obvious ones), many of us have been deluded into thinking we're public figures, that We Must Take Stands and so on and so forth. Even if we don't act on these impulses, a social anxiety rides us as we scroll such that there seems to be a general inability to resist thinking of posting as if *matters by default*.
What trumps all of this hesitation, what lets posting matter by exception, arguably, is if you're really good at social media, have in some way unlocked its aesthetic vagaries. Possibly you're still hollowing yourself out personally and even more likely saying very little of lasting value, but if the hot take hits, it hits. (I'd contend, of course, even this requires a concern with voice, forthrightness, and so on as antecedent to whatever point of the day is being made. But you get the point.)
So, what? Well, I've decided I like Twitter. I also hate Twitter, of course, which is how you know I really like it. I've found more interesting thinkers, books, and sources of information the last four of five years than I ever would have done not only in a previous age, but during my own previous stages. I've stopped reading anyone for homework on Twitter, though I still seek out "the best of one's enemies," the conservatives or HR leftists or monarchists or anarchists or, you know, Methodists or whatever whom I substantially disagree with but who I nonetheless can stand to read. And I've stopped pretending my own posts are a sufficient substitute for anything not already in my life. Tweets aren't op-eds, aren't activism, aren't useful solidarity unless they are an outgrowth of other, more substantial activities. And even then, in my opinion, they're still superfluous more often than they are complementary. Again, for most of us.
The day the Capitol was overrun by wingnuts weaponized by Donald Trump and his cadre of caviling erstwhile competitors, for example, I tweeted mostly about a short piece of fiction I'd published. Electric Literature issued the story that day, so I asked people to give it a read, then watched the cosplay revolution in various states of alarm and wry bemusement. Whatever social media can be, it's too often some kind of murder-suicide pack to posture, a peer-pressure to "speak, or else" the levers of which are mostly in our own heads. Even when we don't speak, the peer-pressure becomes "internalize posting, or else" and we might as well have just posted.
None of this is new, but in a twelvemonth of such high stakes, the light purpose of social media became for me not only undeniable, but convicting. Either I care about racism in my life, the whole of it, or I don't. If I follow Christ (surprise, cool friends!), either my life reflects this esoteric belief in a resurrected first-century Jew or it doesn't. Twitter is a joke-machine at heart, an RSS feed with commentary at best, and when its handlers inevitably ruin it by top-down censorship less exceptional than the President Actively Fomenting Violence (all rules need exceptions!), I hope all my funny nerds will find somewhere else to congregate.
Not TikTok, though. Ye gave us sea shanties, TikTok, but we ask ye now, and forever, to depart.
Reading: Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson; Major Works of Samuel Johnson (OWC edition; not sure if I'll go straight through this, but he's funny and wise, even when stuffy!); old issues of The New Atlantis and The Point Mag. I also recently read Will Arbery's Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a play that hit big off-Broadway in 2019 or so and which set various parts of Twitter afire. I think I've come down in the pro-camp! I do recommend, whether you'll read the play or not, BD McClay's piece on it, and maybe Susannah Black's and Leah Libresco's as well, to be safe. Hopefully I'll get to to see it live sooner than later.
Writing: "After Life," on Electric Lit, which I'm still very happy about. And on the nonfiction side, I scraped some perseverating thoughts from my cranium in April 2020 (or thereabouts) and finally decided to send it to a few places this year and Dappled Things ran it today.
I keep hawking these pieces on Twitter and such, which is the real reason for social media--advertising!--but it's amusing how most people politely scroll past. Several writers I know are blithe wits on Twitter and then they publish a story and they turn PR agent (which they should!). If they're big enough, everyone sort of drafts on their clout by recommending and hearting the writer's post, etc. (and of course, if they're big enough people often actually like them!). But there's something mildly embarrassing about recommending yourself on social media that everyone, like a British father hearing his son say "I love you," blushes to witness. Especially among the unknowns trying to push from private to public social media attention. Still, this is my newsletter dammit, and I hope you enjoy!
I love you all.