The Whitewater Tyranny: Twitter and the neoliberal workplace

 So. I've been off Twitter now for a month. The longest period in my life of me not using that site since I got my first smartphone in 2009 and started an incredible thirteen year run of chatting absolute shite online. An astonishing achievement, even if I was forced to do it as a result of being banned for being beastly about that nice Mr Putin. So a month later, what are my thoughts?

Tippi Hedren becomes the Main Character

One of the things I've noticed most is how similar being on Twitter was to my last job before I went mad, caught covid and became a crip. As you'll recall, I used to work in a call centre, and it sucked. And it especially sucked when our managers decided to outsource the work of the specialist department I used to work in to a centre in a country ran by a homophobic dictator because of his country's 'looser regulatory environment'. Woooooo! Keep sponsoring those Prides guys! 

The new department I got moved to was busier. Much busier, And suddenly I got the full experience of genuinely being battered by call after call after call. Where once I had had time to do all the admin that I was required to do for each customer without having to take myself off the phones, I now found myself trying to get it taken care of in the course of calls themselves, to minimise my hold time - all while Giving The Customer My Full Attention and Having Real Conversations, obviously. It was stress of a kind I'd never experienced, and I've worked retail over Christmas. But the thing about a physical queue is that it has an end you can see. Even if more and more people keep joining it you can work it down. All you see in a call centre is a number. And that number rarely goes down. And it hardly ever reaches zero. Unless something's gone wrong. 

Oh, how we all used to pray things would go wrong. 

Of course the customer doesn't see this side of the affair. All they hear is the hold music, constantly interrupted by recorded declarations that Your Call Is Important To Us, reminders that You Are 89th In The Queue and constant patronising interjections that this is so much easier to do online. It's no wonder that even the nicest customers were a little tetchy by the time they got through to a human. But let's be honest: this is Britain. Nice customers were rare. More common by far were angry, lazy, judgemental scum who more often than not just wanted someone to shout at to make them feel better about their own mistakes: their own inability to remember that some places are shut on Bank Holidays, that debts generally have to be paid, that it doesn't matter how much money they have in their bank account we could not, in fact, do things for them which were illegal and certainly couldn't agree to do that kind of thing on the phone. If you've worked in one of these places, you know the kind of thing - and the vitriol that results when you tell these entitled creeps no. 

And how did I choose to spend my lunchtimes, and the fifteen minute breaks I was lucky to work enough hours to qualify for? I spent them browsing Twitter. I mean, not the whole time - during lunch I'd usually do a little reading, whether on break or lunch I'd usually have to piss - but like most of us these days I would scroll on the toilet. And there were always notifications coming in: replies, retweets, and likes. I would sit by the canteen window, my lunch on the bar, a book in my hand, my phone laid to one side but within easy reach like an ashtray. And every now and then it would vibrate...

And because I was a trans woman on Twitter the replies I got were often every bit as vicious, as vituperative, as vile as the abuse I would receive from angry customers. 

Sickening monsters from the 80s with genitals on the brain who speak by farting marsh gas. Yep, that's terverts, alright!

I'm not saying getting abused on Twitter is the exclusive purview of us trannies, obviously. You get the same kind of crap if you're black, or brown, or gay, or a woman, or espouse left-wing views...regular readers will be aware I tick three of those boxes too, though it's by no means an exhaustive list. In a society which is systemically racist, cissexist, misogynist and riddled with neoliberalism, it would be a miracle if Twitter didn't replicate those dynamics. What's different is the speed. Just like the queues on the call centre phones, the Twitter queue was neverending. 

But the clever bit was in amongst the tides of shit there would be flecks of gold. A genuinely valuable reply. An incisive quote-tweet. A dis that was, at least, original and well-constructed rather than just some genitally obsessed weirdo yelling PENIS. And always, the steady stream of likes and retweets from good comrades. Appreciation. Interaction. Dopamine. 

Look, odds are you don't need me to tell you how shit Twitter is. There's a good chance you've experienced it yourself. But that dopamine hit is why we keep coming back. My employer's internal propaganda told me I was A Valued Member Of Staff and not just an emotional punchbag for the worst people in the country, but that was transparently fake. They didn't value me, they didn't see me as a person, they just needed me to fill a chair. But on Twitter! Real people, actual humans, were tapping a digital heart and telling me they liked the things I said. They showed things that I said to their friends! They got in touch and said I made them laugh - and I got such feedback almost instantly. My employers could go on about how much they valued me - but Twitter showed me I was loved. 

And that was almost worth the times it showed me how much I was hated.

This man has just seen a trans woman loving life online and hoo boy is he mad about it

Until, one day, it wasn't. Slowly, imperceptibly, Twitter became more like work. Not just in the sense of having to wade through more and more angry dickheads every day, but in the sense of constant, hostile surveillance. All social media is a surveillance operation to some extent, obviously (shout-out here to the poor sod from MI5 who has to read this blog), but just as they rely on us to self-report by logging in and giving updates, and because the Internet will always be shit under capitalism, Twitter decided to outsource the problem of moderating the gargantuan quantity of information passing through its site to its users too. Sure, they had An Algorithm as well but they seem to have relied mainly on reports from users. Which of course allowed terverts and their fascist incel chums to run mass reporting campaigns on anyone from groups they didn't like who was getting too popular. It's not lost on me that the alt I moved to after my main got nuked only started to experience problems when my retweets started getting into the thousands again. Make no mistake, this shit is organised. You might even call it cancellation...

But even before my alt got nuked too there was no escaping the fact that Twitter wasn't what it used to be, because people I liked and followed were dealing with bans too. And sure, they were coming back with alts but you had to faff on finding them...and people who didn't want to do this dance were forced to watch what they said to avoid having accounts - which in some cases they depended on for their livelihood - taken down. 

And meanwhile, of course, the abuse directed at us never stopped. Sometimes we scored victories, getting the penis-botherer Helen Staniland removed or sending Graham Linehan home to cry into his carbonara, but for the most part it seemed much harder to get a transphobe banned for actual abuse than to get a trans woman kicked off the platform for using the word 'prick'. Suddenly logging into Twitter was a lot like going to work in the neoliberal workplace: a zone of surveillance in which you constantly self-monitor, policing your expression, and where you can't help but notice people whose faces fit never face sanctions while you know you're being watched for the slightest deviation from the accepted behavioural norm. By the time they fired me, I wanted to get fired. 

And sure, adjusting has been hard. You do get withdrawal symptoms. How could you not? Your brain misses those constant little dopamine boosts. And even scrapping with terverts has its chemical reward, the adrenalin of conflict - not to mention the dopamine from people retweeting your disses. Suddenly, that's all cut off, and Facebook is shit methadone. You twitch. You pace. You drum your fingers. You start playing Wordle again. You think about buying a burner phone, setting up a protonmail address and starting over - but why? You'll probably just get kicked off again...

There are, however, benefits. I read a lot more now, and when I read I read for longer, because my brain is growing less and less habituated to the need to be constantly checking my phone - which I sometimes leave in the other room when I go for a piss now. Such social media as I remain on has a slower update pace, especially given that I tend to police my friends list elsewhere much more carefully than Twitter. I can watch whole films without interrupting myself now. It's too early, I think, to say what it's done to my writing - there is a discipline you develop as a writer from having to fit your thoughts into as close to 280 characters as possible, especially if you eschew textspeak, but on the other hand I now find it much easier to lay out a longer argument and write from point to point, even in a Facebook status update (and the last two entries on this blog consist of text from Facebook updates which I thought would benefit from being easier to find if I need to refer back to them). I hope that I am staying the right side of prolixity here. I don't know if I'm less angry - sometimes I feel more rage for not having the outlet. But overall, and importantly, although I miss the interaction with some individual tweeters, I don't miss Twitter itself, despite having been on it since 2009 - because Twitter is no longer the site that I joined in 2009, and hasn't been for quite some time.