I bailed out of Twitter not long after I put this up. I tried to follow Anil’s lead going to lists and zero followers for a bit, but after some time reflecting on that last blown-up tweet I couldn’t stomach it. If I believed Twitter was that bad, and had to invest that much effort into twisting it away from its owners intentions into something I could use, what was I doing there at all? I look at that tweet now and all I feel is complicit; I might have given somebody a reason to try Twitter, or stay on Twitter, and I’m ashamed of it. Recently I’ve been using it just to put links to these blogposts up, but I’m trying to decide if I’m going to keep doing even that. It’s embarrassing.
Even at first, finding time and space free of that relentless immediacy was a relief. That sense of miserable complicity was reason enough to leave, but after some distance, reflection and feeling (and being) a lot better about basically everything, playing around in the fediverse a bit and getting eight hours sleep for the first time in a long while, I had a sense of being on the verge of different. In that rediscovered space for longer consideration I started to recognize a rare but familiar feeling, the lightness of putting some part of my life I didn’t care for much behind me.
Obvious from a distance, I guess; McLuhan is old news. Companies create their customers, and the perfect audience for any ad-driven company is a person who’s impulsive, angry, frightened and tired. The cyclic relationships between what you see and how you think, feel and react makes that the implicit victory condition for any attention-economy machine learning, the process of optimizing the creation of an audience too anxious and angry to do anything but keep clicking on reasons to be anxious and angry.
Whatever else you get out of it, the company selling your attention is trying to take your control of your attention away from you. That’s their job; what incentives point to anything else? It’s a machine that’s purpose-built for turning you into someone you don’t want to be.