I QUIT TWITTER and Instagram in May, in the same manner I leave parties: abruptly, silently, and much later than would have been healthy. This was several weeks into New York City’s lockdown, and for those of us not employed by institutions deemed essential—hospitals, prisons, meatpacking plants—sociality was now entirely mediated by a handful of tech giants, with no meatspace escape route, and the platforms felt particularly, grimly pathetic. Instagram, cut off from a steady supply of vacations and parties and other covetable experiences, had grown unsettlingly boring, its inhabitants increasingly unkempt and wild-eyed, each one like the sole surviving astronaut from a doomed space-colonization mission, broadcasting deranged missives about yoga and cooking projects into an uncaring void. Twitter, on the other hand, felt more like a doomed space-colonization mission where everyone had survived but we had to decide who to eat. Or like a drunken 3 AM basement fight club, a crowd of edgy brawlers circling each other, cracking their knuckles, waiting for an excuse. Only, it didn’t have any of the danger, or eroticism, or fun you might expect from a fight club.
It seemed obvious that unless you were passing around a GoFundMe link, no good could come from social platforms at that moment. The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself, and it was hard to think of a worse time to be doing so. It wasn’t like you were going to get a job thanks to a particularly incisive quote-tweet of President Trump; in the midst of a lockdown, your chances of getting laid based on your Instagram Story thirst traps plummeted. The already paltry rewards of posting disappeared, while the risks skyrocketed. And yet: people kept on going. Founders and executives at companies with “empowerment” brands posted vague bromides about social justice to their Instagram Stories, unwittingly calling attention to systemic racism and sexism at the companies they oversaw. An editor I vaguely know posted his salary and was swiftly accused of acting like a creep to women he’d worked with; a writer at the New York Times took to Twitter in the middle of a fraught meeting to condescendingly castigate her peers, thereby alienating herself from her workplace to the point of resignation. A student at Brown tweeted a long, excoriating list of the scions of wealth and privilege who had matriculated alongside her, and then capped it off by revealing that her mother is the president of ExxonMobil Chemical—like an aristocrat rushing to the front of a crowd of sans-culottes, shouting “don’t forget about me!”
By Max Read
The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour, Brooklyn, NY: Verso
