I mean it!.

Someone should be doing this for real...

Last Friday morning, I deleted the twitter app from my phone and closed the browser tab with my twitter feed for good. I still have a small presence over there, mostly to share links, but with the news of Elon Musk now actually having acquired twitter, I decided that my time on this platform is over.

I know, that fundamentally there isn’t a big difference between Elon Musk owning twitter and whoever else owned it before, but just the thought of my main online presence being on a platform owned by *that* dude was just so disgusting for me, that it pushed me over the edge to do something I’ve actually been thinking about doing for quite some time.

I’ve started thinking about moving away from twitter since at least earlier this Summer. However, I was afraid that not having a presence there might make me miss out on chances to promote my work, and that I would lose touch with what’s happening in the world at large.

So what changed? Aside from Elon Musk being involved, the reasons that kept me on twitter just started to seem less convincing to me.

I opened my account in Spring of 2012, and even though I met some nice folks there (though most of these contacts were established outside of twitter at first), and occasionally some of my work reached a larger amount of people, for most of the time the amount of energy that I put into this platform rarely justified the results. And even if something of mine reached a wider audience, it never really yielded anything significant in return.

So, twitter as a promotional platform just didn’t work for me, but what about it being a platform for meaningful political organising?

A few days ago, I saw a quote from someone saying that despite twitter being owned by some billionaire, it should still be used as a tool to fight against the oppression that is being wielded by these people and I just don’t agree here?

Twitter is probably useful as an organising tool in some corners, just as it is useful as a promotional platform for some people. However, considering that most political discussions on that platform sooner or later dissolve into public yelling competitions and that the most effective way to organise people is still out there in your immediate environment, I just don’t see a case where twitter is essential.

How many long threads about climate change have we seen over the last years with tons of data and solid arguments that clearly show that Capitalism is literally killing the planet in order to prolong its existence, and yet nothing has ever come out of them. At this point, I’m actually convinced that using twitter as a platform for political struggle can be counterproductive, because it creates the impression that you did something important, while actually achieving nothing.

The fact of the matter is that twitter, as most social media, is pretty useless. Twitter mostly works on the promise that, if you maintain a presence there and share your work, it can help you better find whatever it is you’re looking for, be it jobs, professional contacts, or just a general audience. And that might be true for some. But as with any kind of platform in this wonderful economic hell we live in, it working for some just means that there are many, many more people for which this promise never comes to be.

However, leaving twitter also means losing out on that promise. So instead you stay on twitter, you endure the ever repeating discourse, the ever repeating yelling about how things are bad and how nobody’s doing anything to prevent the bad things from getting worse, and you just keep posting on the hope that maybe *this* time more people will pay attention. Maybe this time, someone famous in your field will take notice and give you the boost you need to lift you out of your economic misery. You keep posting, you keep getting angry about things that are completely out of your control, you keep hoping that someone pays attention to you and in all that you just keep maintaining and lending legitimacy to a space that is being run by some of the most awful people in existence.

To be honest, twitter never really was a space I felt comfortable in to begin with, but I kept being there, because I was convinced that I needed it to get where I want to be. After over a decade of pointless yelling and unfulfilled promises however, I’m willing to try and see how much I actually need twitter.