Why tweet?

Especially now

I’ve been using my vacation to pull back from and reevaluate my relationship to various digital tools and online platforms. That’s a project that will take much longer than two weeks, but in any case, it made it the perfect time to read Max Read’s Bookforum review of The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour. (The book came out in the UK last year and will be published in the US this month.) Rather than examining what makes social media addictive, the book and the review tackle something deeper and potentially more troubling: What is inside us, “waiting to be addicted?” What need do these services and platforms satisfy? Their founders would like you to believe it is connection, friendship, maybe even love. It’s not. More realistically, it’s communication. Twitter in particular is some combination of a bulletin board and a megaphone—or rather, a bulletin board that you wish were a megaphone, or a megaphone you are still pretending is a bulletin board, or a bulletin board that suddenly transforms into a megaphone when you least expect it. It’s communication removed from any context you could possibly intend, imagine, or control.

That goes some way toward explaining why so many tweets are bad. It doesn’t really explain why we keep writing them, though. Here’s Read on Seymour:

So why do we keep participating in an activity that acts against our interests and gives us no particular pleasure? “Is self destruction, in some perverse way, the yield?” Seymour wonders. In other words: get in, loser, we’re going beyond the pleasure principle. What if the urge lurking behind our compulsive participation in the Twittering Machine is not the behavioralist pursuit of maximized pleasure, but the Freudian death drive—our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, “the ratio”? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead?

Personally, my vice isn’t posting, but scrolling. And here comes Read with a description of reading Twitter that punched me in the gut: “What the Twittering Machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion—an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like ‘dead zone’ of indistinguishably urgent stimulus.” This is where my death drive comes in, for sure—not writing my own tweets (which these days are mostly announcements about my new work; when they aren’t I instantly regret them), but reading Twitter. I’m not a Twitter zombie because I am powerless against the dopamine feedback loops (though they don’t help). I’m a Twitter zombie because I want to numb out of the experience of living in my own head. I mean, who doesn’t? But maybe I shouldn’t let it be quite so easy to collapse into the “dead zone” dozens of times a day.

Will this be the realization that leads to me to quit Twitter? Probably not. It’s still somewhat of a professional obligation. But maybe. I did quit Facebook a while ago, after years of thinking it would be impossible, and not only was it completely possible, but my life instantly improved and I haven’t missed it for one single second. At the moment, I’ve been logged out of Instagram for about six weeks and Twitter for two. It’s a start.