Browsing through Politico the other day, I came across an account of a recent in-group dust-up among progressive journalists and commentators. The specifics of the controversy are not worth reviewing—they will almost certainly be consigned to the abyss of forgotten news cycles, if they have not been already. But what struck me in reading the piece was an all-too-familiar tone that all the combatants seemed to be using.
Many of the quotes in the article, after all, were drawn from various commentators' Twitter accounts. And all had the same style: the vituperative outburst; the sense of the exaggerated, world-jeopardizing significance of what they were condemning, and thus of the supreme importance and heroism of their own willingness to speak out against it; the shrill note of denunciation, as if we were all seated in a cell meeting of a secret society, and the speaker had just stood up to thrust an accusing finger at an alleged spy or traitor. I recognized all of this too well, I repeat—because it is the tone I myself routinely adopted, when I was a more regular presence on Twitter.
It's hard to say exactly what it is about the medium that makes people talk this way. It may simply be the aggregating effect. Get a large enough group of people together in one space, and they will quickly start trying to outbid one another for attention. And the quickest way to do that is to be the most severe and unbending in one's outrage. But I think it also has something to do with the platform's character limit. When people are cramped for space, they have no choice but to resort to jargon and received phrases as a convenient short-hand. This makes Twitter especially conducive to what Robert Lifton called the "thought-terminating cliché."
Whatever the cause, however, the result is plain: a condition known as "Twitter brain." I suffered from it myself when I was still routinely posting (to do so is all-but-required in any policy or media job, for it demands knowing the news and responding to it before anyone else does; and for years now, the news has always happened first on Twitter). Its symptoms are a kind of jumpy readiness to respond to every idea one encounters based not on its merits, but on how it would play on one's feed. "Oh, that take's already been tried;" one says, "that was, like, three take-cycles ago." But was the take right, nonetheless, even if outdated? Was it just? As Auden's faceless bureaucrats reply in "The Unknown Citizen," to a similar set of queries: "the question is absurd."
Listening to a podcast on current events, for instance, one can always tell which co-hosts are on Twitter and which are not. Those who are not will often express opinions that would be considered perfectly normal and defensible in ordinary society. But those experiencing Twitter brain strangely tense up, at the first scent of them: they recognize in these opinions the echoes of some take that was already briefly tested and discarded on Twitter several hours previously, and which therefore now seems retrograde. And when it comes time for the Twitter brain sufferers to speak for themselves, there is often a tell-tale quaver in their voice: they are weighing each word carefully, conscious always of how each might go over on their feed, speaking under the ever-looming threat of getting "ratio'd."
The only clear comfort one can find is that the phenomenon appears—while plainly exaggerated by the social medium—not to have originated with it. Reading Flaubert's 1869 novel Sentimental Education—discussed in more detail last time—one discovers already, in that now-distant nineteenth century, that people in the journalistic and commentarial professions were already experiencing a version of Twitter brain. Flaubert's novel is full of exaggerated characters satirizing various social "types" of the era—and one of these is the "bohemian" Hussonet, who begins with pretensions to become a great journalist, only to gradually turn his magazine into a rag hawking spurious gossip and sick humor at the expense of society's less fortunate, before finally becoming an all-purpose business agency.
In portraying the disadvantages of Hussonet's company, Flaubert describes a nineteenth century equivalent of Twitter brain: "Through writing daily on all sorts of subjects, reading many newspapers, hearing a lot of arguments and dazzling paradoxes, he had lost all exact sense of things and was blinded by his own damp squibs." (Constantine trans.) That really is just it. What Twitter does to a person is to make them believe in the supreme importance of the fleeting controversy of the day (or the hour); it is to make them mistake the instantaneous reception of an idea-- which is often approved on Twitter precisely for being a "dazzling paradox"-- for a metric of the idea's proximity to the truth. It is to believe that all one's hastily-concluded denunciations and obsequious approbations must be strictly merited, judicious, and righteous—in short, to think like the people quoted in the Politico article.
Why, then, does one spend one's time on Twitter? Why does one subject one's mind to such a warping effect by continuously checking back on the platform? When I still did this routinely, I told myself it was because it was necessary to my then-job. It was the only way to stay au courant with the news. Everything happens first and faster on Twitter, and if one is only reading about it from the newspapers, one will only be clued into the conversation several days after it has ended, like people standing on Earth and regarding some light from a supernova long after the distant star actually exploded. If I wanted to "know what was happening," that is-- I had to be on Twitter. And as a result, I began to think like Twitter too.
For all these reasons, I feared ever leaving Twitter. It seemed like to do so would be to fall into an abyss. The light would never reach me. I would lose track of everything that was happening in the world. Where would I go for my daily hit of raw terror and dopamine? Nonetheless, a combination of Elon Musk's acquisition of the platform and leaving my previous social media-heavy job eventually prompted me to reduce the time I spent on the platform. I tried my luck in the abyss.
And what one discovers is not only how much more peaceful it is out here—but also how little one is really missing. Perhaps one no longer sees the supernovas as quickly as everyone else does; but one is also much less likely to mistake the fleeting glare in one's telescope lens for a galaxy-destroying cataclysm. One therefore begins to doubt the very foundation of the argument for staying on Twitter: namely, that it is necessary to keep in touch with what is really happening. For what if what is happening on Twitter is not the truth of what is actually going on in the real world, or not the sole truth? What if it is, instead, a series of "dazzling paradoxes" and "damp squibs" which, if one spends too much time in their presence, merely succeed in duping one into mistaking them for reality?
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