I deleted my twitter account (and more)

2025-01-24

As the title suggests. Yesterday I got too sick of that website and finally severed my final tie to "social" media. Not counting youtube I guess, but that's a whole different can of worms. The final nail in the coffin is being unable to escape just an endless repetition of the same exact posts about trump and elon. The same copy pasted jokes, the same copy pasted "can you believe that liberals are making jokes instead of doing something" while themselves not doing anything other than posting on tiwtter. In one word, politics. Politics is a scourge upon the internet. In fact, let's turn this post into a complete mess. I have multiple tangents which I would love to force upon you.

Everything Is Political

Is it though? I mean sure, politics is a field of inquiry, just like any other field of inquiry it may be applied broadly. Everything is also physical. If one were to take a political debate, and analyse the fluid dynamics of the air as it excited the politician's mouths, you would have correctly learned factual information about the debate. It's just that the information is completely irrelevant. It's not untrue, it's just not the point. You couldn't say "I have a thorough understanding of the debate" after doing that. The same is true for the idea that everything can and must be analysed for political content. It's not wrong, you can do that, and a lot of the time, just like fluid dynamics, it is genuinely really useful and interesting. But it is also the case, I think it's fair to say, that a political lense is not always the most useful or relevant framework for understanding the world. So while it's not technically incorrect that "everything is political", it would be more accurate to say, "everything can be political".

So where does that leave us. Well a common slogan which gets pulled out, particularly by leftists when in this sort of discussion goes something like the following: anything "apolitical" is actually a tacit endorsement of the status quo. In other words, if you're not actively positioning yourself in favour of change, that's no different from supporting the way things currently are. Things which appear apolitical actually just follow the political status quo.

Once again I have found myself questioning this lately. Let's actually look at our present conditions and see what the status quo actually is. It's not hard to see, that in fact the status quo is nothing but constant political bickering! No matter where you go, all you see are people having political arguments. Everyone has an opinion on politics and almost no one's opinion is "I think things are pretty good as they are right now actually". And I'm not just doing an enlightened centrist bit here, it's also plainly the case that a large number of people seem to hold the opinion "anyone with a different skin tone than me isn't really a person", and unsurprisingly, I think that's bad. But have you ever actually seen one of these people change their mind? Does arguing (especially on the internet), "letting your voice be heard", does it actually mean anything? I contend that the ultra-saturation of politics, especially on the internet, does nothing but reinforce the status quo: the status quo of everyone arguing politics on the internet. In fact, abstaining from, or prohibiting political discussion is the only substantial way to break from the status quo. Just like that one Deleuze quote I love, repressive forces don't prevent you from speaking, the force you to speak. Shutting the fuck up about politics, being not naively but self-consciously apolitical, this is the correct radical subversion of the present order, and it had better be, since it's the only choice we have left.

And now I will talk about politics

I noticed a strange pattern today. It seems to me that "platforms" with a primarily algorithmic content delivery system (does that just sound dystopian in itself) seem to skew right wing, and "platforms" which aren't primarily algorithm driven tend to skew at least liberal. The popular less algorithmic platforms are reddit, bsky, tumblr, mastadon. All of those lean maybe not actually left wing but definitely liberal. Whereas youtube, twitter, instagram, facebook, all lean right wing and are all algorithm driven. I wonder if there is a reason why the corpo controlled algorithms want to show you this stuff. Curious.

Of course, there are exceptions. Tiktok is entirely algorithm driven, but while there is a significant right wing presence, it seems to tend liberal. Meanwhile 4chan has no algorithm and leans heavily right wing.

And you can too

I deleted my twitter account, and you can too. I had grown tired of twitter quite a while ago, feeling guilt whenever I used the website. But it's not all bad. I have genuinely learned many interesting things I wouldn't otherwise have come across, found communities of cool people, seen great art, been introduced to great music. In the end, there were three things keeping me on twitter.

Network effect

I have many friends who use twitter, and it's nice to see what they're up to. That being said, I also talk to all of them outside of twitter, so this was the least big deal.

Memes and factoids FOMO

Who doesn't love a meme. With twitter being my last connection to the mainstream internet, I experienced a fear of missing out on the new memes, trends, interesting or important news or information. I still do fear that, but I have began to make peace with being out of touch. Memes have been getting progressively worse for a while now. When was the last actually genuinely funny meme?

Artists

I follow a lot of mostly japanese artists on twitter, and I have a huge folder where I hoard anime style artworks and fanart. It's an old habit I picked up from collecting reaction images for posting on image boards. This I'll probably miss, but I can also easily just browse boorus or pixiv if I want that, and that in itself is a fun activity, and a lot more focused than mindlessly scrolling twitter. So in the end, my experience might actually improve. We'll have to see.

So this is my final statement. I'm not doing a call to action, god knows we're all already far too activated. Instead I'm positing simply: You might also delete your twitter account. You might also not "move" to blue sky, or any other "social" media platform. You might want to become a little more out of touch. You might want to leave the corponet behind.