I bailed off Twitter today. I announced my departure and where to find me on Signal, Insta and Mastodon, and yanked the ripcord.
It’s transparent at this point. GamerGate, the alt-right, the whole Trumpiss ecosystem is all of a piece. There is no daylight between QAnon and Elon Musk and antivaxxers and the whole miserable miasma. And I am tired of being even tangentially complicit.
I’m down to only about half a dozen people I don’t really have available in another social media. It sucks, because the friends in my phone have been the bulk of my friends in recent years as everyone moves away. And it doesn’t feel good to go back to Insta, even protected by the mobile web interface. But what Twitter brings to the table isn’t worth what it takes off any longer.
It’ll suck, it’ll be difficult, but at some level it also feels like my soul just took a three pound shit. And now we wait to see what happens – because the future survival of Twitter depends on what people are willing to countenance and what comes of their willingness. At this point, though, it’s safe to say it will probably be necessary to destroy Twitter in order to save it.