hu cares | what happened was: we reached the moon

Twitter is dying and I am surprised by how little I care. I’m not one for acrimonious break-ups but as soon as I decided to leave Twitter, I wanted to set it all on fire. I was so angry about what it had become that I had trouble remembering the good times — the friends I’d made, the professional opportunities it led to, the genuine moments of connection and fun it fostered. Like, remember the llama chase? Birds’ Rights Activist? Horse ebooks? It was rare, I was there, I remember it all too well.

I took a page out of Jaboukie’s book: I changed my display name to Elon Musk and I let it burn.

I tweeted a bunch of silly stuff. This was my last one, which I suspect is the one that got me booted:

I’ve since learned that this product manager has been going out of her way to get noticed by Elon, and has been tweeting about sleeping in the office. Dystopia meets pick-me energy. Anyway, goodbye Twitter! Screen shot courtesy of my friend Emily.

I could write a whole boring post about Elon’s terrible new policies, and how hypocritical it is to claim you stand for free speech and “comedy,” only to create hasty rules to hamper both those things when people begin to roast you. But this isn’t just about Twitter and Elon, though it’s definitely about both those things. I’m furious that the world is rich white men’s playground — that they can buy anything, ruin it, and fire thousands of people at the drop of a hat. While the rest of us are passing around the same $1,000 by referring each other to freelance gigs or donating to GoFundMe campaigns, Elon can just drop $44 billion. His unexamined overconfidence is maddening, and he has enough money and influence that he’ll never have to examine it. There will be no consequences for men like him. The only thing money can’t buy him is love or respect, and the only power we have left is to refuse to give him those things.

My friends are asking where we go next. I made a Mastodon account back in 2018, when Twitter had already started to become toxic, and I’ve seen a huge migration of Twitter folks to the site. On the one hand, that means there’s a lot more in my feed; on the other hand, all those posts look exactly like Twitter. I don’t want to see a million @s on your #FollowFriday! I don’t want to see all the same people I saw on Twitter with thousands of followers tweeting their latest article! I don’t want to recreate the rage-and-congratulations machine! We have a chance to make something new, something better, but we’re squandering it already, and I’m not even sure I want to be on Mastodon now, either.

I took a mental survey of the other social media sites to figure out if I might adopt some other platform as my primary online hangout. TikTok? Love the dog videos, but I’m not about to become one of those people who talks into their smartphone camera. Instagram? Already on it, but it’s a terrible platform for discussion or print media. Facebook? Dead. LinkedIn? Everyone there posts as if they have brain worms, even if they’re mostly normal in real life.

There’s a reason I found myself here. I’ve been whining about the end of Livejournal since I left the site in 2009, and it’s time for the blog to make a comeback. We need a text-centric platform, one that allows for nuance and conversation. I want to know what people are really thinking about. I don’t just want the link to your latest piece; I want to know what led you to write it, and that interesting tidbit that got cut last minute. I’m not saying Substack is necessarily the place for it, but the type of writing this platform allows for is my spiritual home on the internet, and it feels good to come back to it.

I went quiet on here for a couple (!) years, for a few reasons:

1. I got extremely burned out writing about COVID.

2. I started writing another newsletter. It’s about psychedelics. Follow along if that sounds interesting to you. And if you’re here because of that newsletter, welcome.

3. I joined the good folks over at the Last Word on Nothing, and most of my bloggable musings became LWON posts instead of Substack posts.

…but you know what?

I’m coming back for you, baby.

Letters of Recommendation

• Carly Rae Jepsen live. Her U.S. tour just ended, and she’s headed to the UK and Australia next year. If you have an opportunity to see her, you should absolutely go. Yes, she has continued making music after Call Me Maybe, and yes, it is all very good.

• A Time Timer. The name is extraordinarily silly but I have found this super helpful for doing writing “sprints.” Yes, I know I have a timer on my phone, but something about having a tangible, time-telling object is soothing, and I like to keep my phone in another room while writing so I don’t get distracted.

• Bikes? It’s been so long since my last post that I’ve picked up whole-ass new hobbies. Friendship ended with running, now cycling is my new best friend.

• Leah Sottile’s podcast Burn Wild. And really anything Leah creates — go check out her newsletter.

• Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series. So far there are two books, both delightful and uplifting. Like all good fantasy, it asks big questions about existence and being while exploring a new universe, but unlike a lot of fantasy I come across, Chambers’ books are optimistic about people and our future.

• Ace by Angela Chen. I cannot shut up about this book. You’ll come away with a new understanding of sexuality and how attraction and sex are viewed in our culture.

I’ll leave you with some good life advice, brought to you by Costar: