Dear Writer,
I was born when the last vestiges of the old world were fading. I got to see it, although in a rearview mirror of sorts. Technology was just starting to ramp up, and the changes it brought would fundamentally alter human existence. In the time I’ve been alive, the world population has more than doubled. That is only the second time in world history that the population had doubled in a single lifetime. Now, the population will not double again; estimates are we’ll stabilize at about 10 billion people by the time I’m 100 years old. I don’t expect to see that stabilization, but that’s not the point.
The point is that from Boomers to Gen Z, everyone who is alive on the planet now has seen more fundamental change than any generation before us, ever.
No wonder we’re all freaking the fuck out, right?
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The Anthropocene epoch is a proposed designation for the period of earth’s history during which the impact of humans on the world’s geology is considered significant. I feel like we need a similar classification system for societal shifts. We have some; agrarian, feudal, industrial, post-industrial… but those all refer to specific societies in specific places at specific times.
Until the technological era, which is what we’re in now. I think the vast majority of us are in this unprecedented era together. The whole world is basically one society now. Human brains are physically designed to have relationships with about 150 people, and throughout most of history, those people have been physically close; they were our neighbors, our personal, touchable, IRL communities.
Now? Shit, most of my relationships at least started online. Aside from my kids and my kids’ dad, I’ve met almost every significant person in my life via the internet. They come from different backgrounds, different places, different experiences and I never would have met them if it weren’t for the internet.
This is wonderful, and I love it, but y’all… we were not built for this. We’ll evolve for it, don’t fret, but you and me? The ones who have been here a minute? Were not built for this. Nana and Pop-Pop were definitely not built for this. Everyone is freaking out and in the end, I think it’s going to be more for the good than the bad, but right now? We are losing our collective shit because we don’t know how to exist in this kind of world.
Which is why I find the breakdown of Twitter fucking fascinating.
Twitter has been poison for a long time. There’s this thing that happens when I play a video game with a lot of running forward. I start to sweat, and then my stomach turns, and then for a few hours, I have to lie down and sip water. My response to being on Twitter too long wasn’t quite that severe, but it was still pretty bad. It was like soaking in fear and anger and despair for as long as I was on there, and I found that for my own mental health, I needed to be there less and less in order to get through the day. But I have to admit, the recent Twitter meltdown has brought me back because… well… I feel like I’m a witness to history.
I think I am.
I was at a friend’s for dinner the other day. This friend had worked for Twitter and left a few years ago, and when I mentioned that Twitter was a town square, he said, “You know, I hate when people say that. It’s not a town square. It’s a company.” And he was right, but he was also wrong. Twitter is a company that didn’t intend to become a major avenue of mass communications… but it did. Not since radio and TV—both of which are federally regulated, if increasingly deregulated as we go—have we seen this kind of reach through mass media. Social media is a societal commodity as well as a business, and it has a moral and ethical responsibility to the global community. But business interests rarely align harmonically with societal interests, and that’s why we’re seeing a business decision participate in the crumbling of what has become, for better or worse, a global point of interpersonal connection.
So now, everyone’s running off to different places. Back to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or branching into new territory with Hive, Mastodon, Post. There’s a thing called Plurk; I nabbed my namespace there, but I’m not gonna hang there. I’m going with Post for now; it seems like a good place for writers.
At this point, I think Twitter is more likely to go out with a whimper than a bang. Some users, like me, are fleeing; it was poisonous enough when the hate speech was being regulated. Most, I think, will stay just to see what happens, and Twitter might limp along like that if 75% of the staff hadn’t quit or been fired. I think the lights will start to flicker, the programming will bug out, and the degradation in performance will generate more user flight. The decrease in users will correspond to a decrease in revenue, and Musk will lay off/fire more people, and then there will be even fewer to make sure it works… lather, rinse, repeat until Twitter either dies or scrapes out a living going niche, becoming to the alt-right what MySpace has become for musicians.
It’s sad. I’ve spent much of the last 12 years or so on Twitter, and I have a lot of memories—both good and bad. I started using it in earnest when Jennifer Crusie and I were recording Popcorn Dialogues, and we needed a way to live chat with people while we were watching the movies. The worst thing that ever happened to me was broadcast live on Twitter, but it’s also where I met my husband. It’s where Neil Gaiman said I had a killer instinct about what a story could do. It’s where I followed people I admired and learned their thoughts on things I hadn’t yet thought about. It’s where I experienced a pandemic, figuring shit out in real time with both friends and strangers. It’s where I’ve been for a lot of this incredible, wild, global transition from people with the capacity to form150 relationships, to people developing the capacity to form thousands of relationships.
It’s where I’ve… been.
For everyone who came here because I shouted for you to follow me on Twitter, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. I would have missed you if you hadn’t come.
And now, I guess we just keep going. As Jed Bartlet would say… what's next?
Everything,
L