For some reason or another, I have been spending way too much time paying attention to my Twitter timeline lately.
I don’t know if it’s the failed attempt to reduce my screentime that’s producing the exact opposite effect and causing me to engage with the bird app more than I should–or my need to find ideas to pontificate on for this very newsletter–but my use of Elon Musk’s latest endeavor has terribly spiked.
At times, I find it cathartic and fun. Other times, I find it damaging and annoying. Each time, though, I realize how far removed from reality1 this app is.
I remember when I first signed up for Twitter, before making the choice to delete my account and focus on more important things like, I don’t know, actually building a career instead of tweeting about it. It was approximately 2010, and the use my generation made of this space was definitely already chaotic, but at least we all agreed it was for the sake of comedy and satire.
Subliminals were a (big) thing. People used to fight and most of us were completely unchained in our stream of consciousness. Twitter used to feel like a lawless room where everything and anything could go.
It was “The Purge” of the Internet, an unregulated room where teenagers would teenage on one side, and politicians would politic on the other.
Obviously, cancel culture didn’t exist then. We all were more lenient–maybe we understood context better–but whenever something suspicious or controversial happened, people would actually do something about it.
We were figuratively ready to catch a fade. We would argue with a capital A.
I don’t remember how many times I partook in debates that would go on for hours due to the depth and dimension of the discussion. People would come ready with facts and opinions. The argument didn’t end until both parties either found a solution or sourly agreed to disagree—friendships were formed, relationships flourished and what went on online matched what we were doing offline.
Problematic behavior reigned supreme but people also understood when to discern real evil from juvenile stupidity. We had FUN. There were no battles of the sexes, no gender mishaps, no misogynistic threats, or political polarization.
It was used as a way to click with your friends, learn about new music, to be an active participant in budding subcultures.
Without Twitter, there would be no internet (AAVE) slang, no YOLO moments, and no #onfleek hashtags.
Certain iconic pop culture situations would have not flourished and many of us would not be writers.
But–oh my god–has the platform changed throughout the years?!
I say this at the risk of sounding like an old hag, which I guess I am according to the demographic currently in charge of what gets talked about on these apps.
Social media has changed so much in the course of the past decade that nowadays it’s all about the media and none about the social. There’s no friendly aspect to these apps.
They incite division and polarization, they purposefully promote outrage and clickbait takes. The algorithm does the exact opposite of what they were initially designed to do.
And we, the people, have become—or maybe we always were at this point, as I refuse to believe we collectively became dormant—so blind to it that not only do we contribute to the crumbling of society by taking part in futile moral debates that lead nowhere when we set our phones aside and go on about our day, we actively fuel it by spewing out hypocritical takes that make us look good in the eyes of our yuppie peers but actually have no impact or benefit on the real world.
Matter of fact, can we all just agree that the public discourse readily available on the internet is always about topics that nobody really cares about or spends more than 10 minutes discussing offline?
Every time I open my social media apps—Twitter and Instagram only, I refuse to download that lobotomizing device called Tik Tok–all I see is some annoying discussion about men vs women, dating vs singlehood, gender vs biology, and a bunch of other crap regular people do not give a damn about, nor it is that relevant in our day to day.
Not even the same progressive, liberal leftists nor the conservative, terf, right-wingers spend any time hosting open conversations about these futile ideals when they log off and go to work or socialize.
Think about it, how many times have you actually discussed the fact that you are a happily single woman that has no intention of delivering children into this world when your grandmother asks “What about a family?” at Christmas dinner unless it was to record it to post it online and prove your strong allegiance to the feminist movement to the other fighters of the cause?
Or how many times have you partaken in a debate about the patriarchy and how everything in society is a result of its oppressive system that feeds into capitalism to keep the rich elites rich and the poor, poor?
Or, then again, as a white person, how many times have you told a black person “I am here to listen and learn” in moments of distraught?
Do internet allies even have a diverse network of friends that they nurture and invest in for no other reason than loving them as the people that they are?
The dichotomy between what the Internet makes us believe is happening versus the reality of what is relevant offline is so stark that I do not blame anybody, young or old, for falling for the information wars.
If you are even remotely active on social media, it’s literally become impossible to dodge these discussions. So much so that even those who are supposed to be respectable establishments draw upon these topics to build their campaigns and policies while completely overlooking the matters that actually need addressing.
Homelessness is not going to be resolved by changing the term to a more politically correct one–houseless or “people experiencing homelessness”–and the patriarchy will not be eliminated by pitting single women against women who chose to dedicate their lives to raising children and being homemakers. Isn’t equality about doing whatever is good for you without being judged for it anyways?
The world and society simply do not work like that.
Matter of fact, the people who are actually doing the work or live under an oppressive regime–like idk…the youth who is forced to mine the cobalt needed to produce the smartphone we tweet our misery from–have no time to spend on social media complaining about how some random blue-collar worker they don't even know violently misgendered them as they were handing them their foamy coffee.
The vast majority of the population doesn’t even know what pronouns are or why certain people feel they are such a big deal. There are people out there who don't even have access to learning how pronouns are used grammatically in the first place because their government is rigged and the schooling system is messed up, or they need to work from a young age to help their family stay afloat.
These elite ideals will eventually trickle down into society regardless. That’s how culture and trends work—we pick things up as we go, eventually absorbing them into our vocabulary and mannerism.
If instead of enforcing them, we let go of our egotistic, visceral need to always be a victim and we simply demanded and offered respect to others, we’d collectively be happier (or would we?).
We would even free up some time that we could employ to help people who are in dire situations and need our support.
Normalize this, normalize that. We need to normalize not being so gullible and thinking *critically* for ourselves for once.
For today, I'd like to finish this thought here.
As there’s much more I want to say and could potentially keep going off on a tangent that could easily turn into a book.
And for the time being, I’d like to only think about writing my father’s biography.
However, before I press send, I want to share what a fellow Substack writer, Rob Henderson, published on the topic of do-goodism. It’s a brilliant article titled “Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update”. It’s definitely worth giving a read.
I will leave an excerpt down here:
“The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. Only academics educated at elite institutions could have conjured up a coherent and reasonable-sounding argument for why parents should not be allowed to raise their kids, and that we should hold baby lotteries instead. Then there are, of course, certain beliefs. When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or defunding the police, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class.”
Affluent people promote open borders or the decriminalization of drugs because it advances their social standing, and because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than others. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption. If you have $50 and I have $5, you can burn $10 and I can’t. In this example, you, as a member of the upper class, have wealth, social connections, and other advantageous attributes, and I don’t. So you are in a better position to afford open borders or drug experimentation than me.
Or take polyamory. I recently had a revealing conversation with a student at an elite university. He said that when he sets his Tinder radius to 5 miles, about half of the women, mostly other students, said they were “polyamorous” in their bios. Then, when he extended the radius to 15 miles to include the rest of the city and its outskirts, about half of the women were single mothers. The costs created by the luxury beliefs of the former are bore by the latter. Polyamory is the latest expression of sexual freedom championed by the affluent. They are in a better position to manage the complications of novel relationship arrangements. And even if it fails, they have more financial capability, social capital, and time to recover if they fail. The less fortunate suffer the damage of the beliefs of the upper class.
Then there’s the finding that in 1960 the percentage of American children living with both biological parents was identical for affluent and working-class families—95%. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact. For working-class families, the figure plummeted to 30%.
Reality as in the hard truth of the world. What happens in real life through an objective, analytical and scientific lens.
Ps. For the past couple of years, I have been helping my friend Idrissa raise some funds to fix his football academy “Academia Juzepe” in Guinea Bissau.
We already did a lot, but now he’d like to buy some new goalposts, so we created a GoFundMe to get it done.
Please consider giving it a read and potentially donate to it here:
https://gofund.me/5da3d94d