Thoughts on shutting up online
Even now
APOCALYPSE was featured in Anya Kamenetz’s climate and mental health newsletter The Golden Hour this week! She calls it “a less boring way to think about the apocalypse” and says, “as things fall apart, we might have a chance to also compost the nasty, brutal, idiotic parts of our society that serve no good purpose.” I couldn’t agree more!
The first big news event I missed after soft quitting Twitter was Donald Trump getting COVID. People of my particular online persuasion still rhapsodize about that evening on the internet—the jokes, the karma, the catharsis. I didn’t find out until the next morning. Part of me is still sad to have missed an all-timer of a communal transmutation of existential uncertainty into the funny kind of online derangement. Most of me knows that whatever I missed wasn’t worth the cost of what Twitter extracted from me back then.
Five years later (!), I no longer feel a compulsive pull to refresh my feeds during a big news day, and I have no illusions that anyone is waiting for me to weigh in. Mostly because I don’t have feeds to either read or write to. The posts still reach me, but in private-ish spaces and not via algorithm. I recommend it.
This week, though, the internet threatened to draw me back in, and I’m not alone. Here’s Brian Merchant, writing in his newsletter Blood in the Machine:
It’s not that there hadn’t been other notable and wide-ranging atrocities recently, obviously, that I and millions of others have watched slack-jawed in anger through an app. But a truly and awfully ideal Social Media Event demands not just that you feel outrage, or even respond to others’ outrage, but that you succumb to that compulsion to join in, to simulate a kind of participation in history.
We all know by now that saying something isn’t the same as doing something, and knowing everything stands in the way of doing anything. I don’t know what I want to do, exactly, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to figure it out by reading just one more post.
The week that Trump got COVID, I sent out a newsletter that was just quotes from The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour. Here’s one of them:
In a way, the hyper-productivity of the machine might have the effect of producing a new kind of silence. The cathartic effect of writing, reacting to stimulus, can be a way of filling the void with endless monetizable chatter. A new form of stifling that leaves no space to say what matters.
