Yeah, well, you can keep your tweets, mate

So the first thing to say is, it looks like the motherfuckers finally succeeded in getting me perma-banned from Twitter, and, in what will no doubt be a blow to those who say rumours of Russian influence on that site are exaggerated, the straw that broke the camel's back was the proximity to each other of the words 'Putin' and 'cunt' in one of my tweets. To be honest I'm not that pressed about it - since I was forced to move permanently to the alt I had previously used only for tweeting while on psychedelics, I had found Twitter a straitened experience stripped of access to the followers and followees I had built up over my decade or so on the site, and was becoming more and more conscious only of its negative effects on my behaviour. I swapped the Today programme for Radio 3 when the deficiencies of the BBC's alleged 'news' content began driving me into a rage every morning (and I gave up on Radio 3 when it stopped doing programmes about obscure composers and began doing populist crap about film soundtracks), why couldn't I quit Twitter when it was clearly also making me mad in the mornings? Because like most victims of social media (and, assuming we somehow get out of this nostalgia trap in time to not all be wiped out by climate chaos, I think in decades to come we will realise the degree to which these platforms did exploit us, for profit - if loot boxes in videogames are a tactic engineered to prey on the neurodiverse, a digital drug which hacks directly into the brain's rewards system to incentivise the worst kinds of human behaviour is worse - has made us, in a very real sense, their victims) I was addicted to the dopamine hits. Well, being restricted to an alt for my last few months on that site seems to have functioned like a methadone program, because I find myself cured of my dependency. Arguably I was going to have to abandon the platform at some point anyway - as a product which metastasized into the culture about the same time as the KCACO egregore it's notable how much Twitter itself seems to still get hung up on the same arguments that were floating around the platform when it first came to prominence: trans rights, freeze peach, embarrassing 'tech' billionaires, incel shit - I swear if I see that sealion cartoon one more time I'll head to Fisherman's Wharf and start suplexing the cunts. 

Twitter itself - indeed arguably all social media - is an example of the disappointing technology of late capitalism which David Graeber nailed down in his essay 'On Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit'. Twitter was four years old when Graeber wrote that piece, and already showing its age. There is nothing technically all that impressive about Twitter as a platform. Indeed, the fact that in its earliest incarnation it aped the format of the text message, a form of communication which became popular with the spread of mobile phones at the start of the 21st century, shows that in a way Twitter had nostalgia baked into its DNA just as much as KCACO. Jon Stewart's oft-quoted description of the Internet as 'the world passing notes around a classroom' is often misquoted as being about Twitter (including by me before I checked the quote and hastily rewrote the start of that sentence), and in that context it actually nails two aspects of its retrograde nature: both its lack of technological sophistication and the fact it enables and rewards the kind of behaviour most of us probably ought to have left behind in school. I mean, not to let traditional media off the hook, but it's surely no coincidence that after less than a decade of this digital note-passing the US wound up with its first Mean Girl President. 

Actually another reason not to let traditional media off the hook is that their laziness is as much to blame for the outsize influence of Twitter on our culture as it is for the ubiquity of KCACO and its variants (indeed, arguably, meme culture thrives on laziness, which shouldn't be seen as a knock - coming up with original thoughts all the time is exhausting, which is why this blog attempts to avoid doing so as much as possible). Twitter satisfied the laziness of our modern media class in two ways: first and most obviously, because it was a simple and effective way of disseminating stories. It wasn't perfect, and you were still dependent to some extent on the whims of the algorithm, though if you had a paper or a broadcaster behind you you could be reasonably certain that algorithm would be having a train ran on it by a whole complex of your org's linked accounts. But the second and more insidious way in which Twitter satisfied the laziness of the London-based journo was that it very quickly became apparent that Twitter could itself be the news. Spats, crazes, The Discourse and, in recent years, the phenomenon of The Main Character: all were grist to the media's mill. And because our media is largely composed of the worst people in the world, it was inevitable that the way they would present these Twitter controversies would be harnessed to their hateful agenda: witness, for example, the way some half-human hack at the Daily Mail was shameless enough to wring literal inches of newsprint out of the earth-shattering revelation that Joanne Harris had liked a Midnight Society tweet taking the piss out of that self-important sexual sassenach JK Rowling. 

If the laziness of the media class is what enabled Twitter's rise, however, it is the overweening self-regard of that class which will probably be what destroys it. Nothing tells you how seriously you should take these people better than the lengths they will go to to have a special little badge by their username, and their apoplexy should their blue tick of approval be rescinded. For a group of people who claim to be Fearless Defenders of Free Speech they sure do seem to get extremely put out when someone criticises their position in language earthier than the sort you hear at the Spectator garden party. I don't think it's a coincidence that the really egregious abuses of Twitter's broken moderating system only began after the blue tick system was in place: as Twitter became, increasingly, just another media aggregator (and an increasingly poor one, at that), protecting the feelings of its 'high value' caste became ever more important. Whatever they may say, this is why I get kicked off while that weird nonce who runs Libs of TikTok is allowed to continue getting her jollies on the platform - because that freak, as much as she's a court case for abusing minors waiting to happen, gets views, and for media companies - which is what Twitter is now - views are what counts. The world is still passing notes in a classroom, but it is increasingly obvious Teacher has favourites, and some of us are getting detention for the same thing that nets others gold stars. 

Any teacher will tell you what eventually happens in that kind of classroom, and it never works out well for Teacher (indeed, Malcolm McDowell gives a pretty thorough demonstration in Lindsay Anderson's If....). It's risky, and potentially pompous, to scry trends in a way that justifies your own behaviour, but I see more and more people talking about leaving Twitter, whether through taking an active decision to quit or simply, like me, not being arsed to appeal a suspension. And why wouldn't we? Even the most immature of us (with the exception of most journalists, whose immaturity is indulged ad nauseam as long as it accords with the demands of the rentier class that pays their wages) eventually tire of playground arguments and tattle. Is my life in any way enriched by knowing about Bean Dad? Or Peach Mom? I'll miss the Midnight Society's tweets: they were funny, and skewered people who badly need skewering, which is exactly the reason the likes of the Mail hate them so much (you can please yourself as to how metaphorically you interpret my use of the word 'skewering' in the preceding sentence). But I trust my friends who still use the platform to send me links to anything on there that's worth seeing. And sure, I'll have to monitor the websites I habitually read a little more actively and not simply trust that Eruditorum Press or Tribune will tweet the links into my feed...but it's not like that isn't a way of using the Internet I got used to in the twelve or so years I was logging on before Twitter ever existed. 

No, the biggest problem I am going to face, and apologies in advance for doing the Hard Sell on those of you who've read this far (especially if you used to come here via Twitter and have instead had to find it via Google or your browser history), is actually in terms of promoting my work. Not having a vast right-wing media operation behind me, I rarely caused a massive stir on Twitter (excepting the occasions when I opted to use some melt or other as a demonstration of my world-class needling skills, which may, come to think of it, have something to do with me getting suspended), but it does seem that sharing posts on Twitter did usually help boost a post's numbers. This was most pronounced when, as with the post about Sapphire & Steel and Eric Idle's dead dad, they intersected with The Discourse in some way, but even posts like the one in which I wrote about going to Barter Books and being freaked out by the original KCACO poster would receive a numbers boost after I shared them on Twitter. Obviously, that path is no longer open to me, so I am going to have to ask those of you who are still reading these to share my posts for me. And don't think you just have to restrict yourself to Twitter! Feel free to share the goodness on Reddit or Instagram or Tumblr or whatever the cool kids are using these days, which obviously wouldn't be anything I'd know about because I still mentioned Tumblr in the first clause of this sentence. Heck, if you feel particularly strongly, don't let me stop you tacking up flyers on lampposts about this blog, or sneaking into your office on a weekend and logging into the site from every one of your work's computers. Or, I don't know, skywriting. The point is I Need You to help me wage my war on nostalgia by spreading the word about it (and while I'm putting myself over I should probably mention my Patreon and tip jar too). So if you could, that would be grand. 

Also: if you would usually have came here from Twitter and instead had to search for this blog manually, let me know in the comments!