context prolapse

(Thank you to my friend jeremy for coming up with the title joke. It's a good one.)

Lately I have often found myself wondering what the fuck anyone is talking about. This is not particularly abnormal for me as a pretty dumb guy all around but recently it seems to be more of an external phenomenon and less of a personal failing. I was reading a blog post by dante douglas yesterday about the death of the mainstream internet, which I generally agree with, but I think it helped solidify some stuff for me about social media and why I feel like everyone suddenly started speaking a different language from me at some point in the last couple of years.

I guess I should preface this by saying I am not, writ large, a "visual" person. I don't much care for visually-oriented social media, and I especially don't like "video content." The pivot to video was one of the worst things that could possibly have happened to me because as a rule I would rather take a hammer to the solar plexus than watch some dipshit with a ring light talk to their front-facing camera. I don't like video essays, I don't like video tutorials, and I don't really use youtube or tiktok of my own volition. This is not a value judgment, there are lots of people doing good work on the apps, it just doesn't do much for me. I think in words. Reading is, for me at least, a whole lot more efficient a way of obtaining information than watching or listening to something. I am not really patient enough to scrub around a video trying to find the parts relevant to whatever I'm doing when I could be using a good old-fashioned Ctrl + F. In my mind video is something for pure entertainment: movies and tv can do things text can't do, like show me a big car crash in 4K, but generally I think text is better for communicating ideas.

All this is to say that twitter was pretty much the ideal form of social media for me. It was a constant stream of easily digestible, text-based ideas. I had a firehose to whatever was happening at any given time and all the appropriate takes to have about it. For a decade and change, about a third of my life, twitter was the lens through which I understood the world. I don't think this was particularly good for me in retrospect. I pretty much outsourced critical thought to my timeline and parroted whatever takes meshed with my worldview. But it did make my life easier, and I always knew what was going on at any cultural moment and how I should feel about it.

During this time I was aware that this was probably not the healthiest way to engage with the world and I took several extended breaks from twitter, but a key feature of Original Twitter was that you didn't have to have an account to see people's tweets, so I could still check the timeline of my favorite posters if I wanted to know how to feel about some particular recent event.

Then elon musk bought twitter and I decided to self-immolate my account and get banned for impersonating him rather than continue to support the worst poster of all time. Twitter's descent into whatever it is now is well-documented elsewhere and I won't spend time on it here, but I have felt its loss keenly ever since.

There is a kind of phantom limb syndrome that comes from no longer having a feed to tell me what is going on and how to feel about it. And nothing has really been able to replace it. Reddit relies on anonymity, mastodon is nice but is more of a shared-interest forum than anything else, and I'm in plenty of discords that I struggle to keep up with but nothing really hits like twitter did. I can check the NYT front page and find out what's happening, but I don't have a single source for the news and memes and takes and bits that are circulating in the collective consciousness of the internet anymore. There is a fair bit of irony in musk's proclaimed desire for twitter to be the "everything app." It was that! You fucking ruined it! I would probably still scroll it without an account but you subscription locked the website and made all the feeds unreadable!

My theory is that video and photo apps are filling in that "everything app" role now. Instagram sucks and isn't where culture happens, but I think for a lot of people tiktok now fills the role that twitter did for me - the constant firehose of jokes, takes, and culture evolving. Because of my aforementioned dislike of video content, I am stuck without a clue of what anyone is talking about anymore. To be fair this may be the punishment I deserve for being the twitter-brained dude referencing dril at the function for so many years but now I'm on the receiving end and I don't like it.

In the long run this is probably a good thing. On the pre-twitter internet I still found interesting stuff. There are still blogs and writers and posters out there to fill in the gaps in my personality. But I don't really remember how to find those things anymore. Being on twitter so long both atrophied whatever muscles I had for seeking out content and hollowed out the places where it used to be found (I certainly can't go back to something awful anymore).

As dante mentions in his blog post, the internet seems to be shrinking. But it's shrinking a lot faster for wordcels like me. I'm sure plenty of this is just me aging out of anyone's idea of a target demo but I don't think it's just that: plenty of aging millennials have terminal cases of tiktok brain and I don't have shared context with them any more than I do with skibidi toilet kids. I hope that maybe this period leads to a beautiful renaissance of personal sites and blogs and webrings and I start using RSS again or whatever, but at least for right now I am swimming in a sea of content with nary a drop of context to wet my beak.

I am not really hoping to accomplish much with this post other than trying to sort out why I feel so out of the goddamn loop all the time, but I hope there are others out there feeling this strange sort of loss. Perhaps together we can come up with a solution that isn't just continuing to parse the world through only the lens of our own minds. God knows this isn't sustainable.