As Twitter has gasped its dying breaths over the better part of the last year, I’ve thought a lot about my relationship with the Internet. I’ve written about myself online in chat rooms, newsletters, and pitched pieces for websites for more of my life than I haven’t. My first blog, something that felt more permanent than the ephemera of AIM away messages or Yahoo Groups, was a Dead Journal1 in 2000.
Writing for Dead Journal—and then Live Journal—carried a certain degree of anonymity, not just because you could use any name you wanted, but because there weren’t very many readers. My journal friends were either people who liked writing and wanted to be writers or tech people who had fun experimenting with HTML and other early customization options.
I signed up for Twitter in 2007, my sophomore year of college.2 In some ways, Twitter was an extension of my personal online writing, and in some ways it was its own thing entirely.
What eventually made Twitter different than anything that came before it was that it had buy-in. Maybe not at the beginning, in the early aughts when it still had the same kind of user base that populated the journaling sites. (Who better to try micro blogging, after all, than bloggers?) But eventually, ~social media~ became a cultural force, something to pay attention to, something that you could make money from. Creatives came first. Comedians—Rob Delaney3 essentially tweeted his way into fast-forwarding his career—and writers and then serious journalists. Then news brands, who started breaking news and finding sources on Twitter. Then companies. And then Twitter was no longer a niche thing, it was its own brand. For a minute there, it was just as likely that someone would have an @ as they were to have a Facebook or an Instagram.
None of this is new information, or groundbreaking, and I’m sure it’s been summarized in all the death-of-Twitter pieces that have been going around. I assume, because I haven’t been reading them. What’s interested me more is people’s own reflections on their creative practice in the wake of Twitter.4
The amount of writing I’m doing hasn’t changed—it’s still almost none, thanks to a full-time job, two kids, and lingering burnout from getting a pandemic graduate degree. My screen time percentage hasn’t gone down, I’ve just replaced doomscrolling on Twitter with scrolling nonsense on TikTok. But I feel like less of a writer.
I do, however, continue to write the only thing I know how to write anymore. The Drafts folder in my brain continues to fill up with pithy sentences—almost always less than 140 characters—about my life and the culture I’m consuming. Except now there’s nowhere for them to go. I signed up for BlueSky but skeeting5 just didn’t feel the same. It reminded me of being homesick for Texas while living in Washington. It’s an ojbectively better place, not run by people who don’t think I should have rights, but…it’s just not home, for all the good and bad that word encompasses.
Anway, RIP the hell site. And maybe RIP ~posting on social media~? In lieu of pouring one out, here are the contents of an email in my drafts that I created in May, subject line “Not Tweets.”
Only Hozier could make Jonathan Swift horny.
NO GODS NO MASTERS I chant as I pull into the Starbucks drive thru seven minutes before I need to be at my desk.
Love is Blind asking a question Live Journal and AIM answered decades ago.
Trying to figure out if we're going to refuse to pay if our student debt doesn't get cancelled like I'm at a Chili's trying to suss out if I should order fries for the table.
Dead Journal was a Live Journal clone that was more accessible in the days when you still needed an invite token to sign up for an LJ. The code for LJ, if you can believe it, used to be open source. I signed up for a real Live Journal the second I could because it was obviously the cooler place to be, Journal-wise. I’m pretty sure I got the invite token from my middle school crush.
Hilariously because of some SMS verification glitch, I’m locked out of my original Twitter account, but it does appear to still exist, unlike the website linked in the profile.
Not all of these are explicilty about creative practice in the wake of Twitter going down, but they’re all posts that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:
Everything Happened: “Around 2010, I noticed that I’d begun thinking in tweets.” -
You’ve Run Out of Complimentary Articles: “It all leaves me wondering: what do we even want out of social media anymore? What do I get out of it? This place where I post my dumb thoughts for my friends to see, which are monetized by the sale of my personal data to faceless data brokers.”