Beyond Twitter Dome
An Outsider's Perspective On The Right's Twitter Addiction
Towards the end of last year, I rejoined Twitter once again for the first time in two years, only to be promptly banned once more. I don't know why this happened (I wasn't informed), but it was probably for ban evasion. Everybody seems to be getting unbanned, but I have no access to the old login details of dead accounts and so it looks like I'll remain off the platform, forever.
I can't say that I'm particularly bothered, I despise everything about the thing, but as a content creator, Twitter has value in so far that you can promote your material. I certainly don't miss the pointless petty squabbles or the annihilation of my attention span. There's a permanent atmosphere of expectation that something is about to happen, that the next Latest Thing is about to drop, which leaves people constantly on tenterhooks. Twitter reminds me of what Scott of the Antarctic said when he was reaching the end of his tether, ''Great God! This is an awful place!''.
The sad fact is, grumble as I might, the bulk of political discourse takes place on that Godforsaken app and I, like I suspect many of my readers, am not a part of it. I can browse it from outside, from behind a barrier, but I'm not actually in The Pit itself.
There exists a natural ebb and flow to the conversation and the exchange of ideas and information which takes place everywhere, whether in a pub or a football match or the canteen at work. Usually, the various ‘‘memes’’ and touchstones used in social interactions shift gradually in an emergent manner or are influenced to some degree by those with a gift of the gab. My own conversational style is of the pub and factory, not academia and media. If you were to look at my social network in my younger, pre-internet years, it would reveal perhaps between 30–50 nodes representing people I regularly engaged with. This is not me waxing nostalgic again, but rather to illustrate that in my own lifetime, I've witnessed an increase in the flow of ideas and information that is mind-boggling. And I'm not even on Twitter.
On Twitter, that network looks like this:
Within the maelstrom of the Twitter algorithm and incentive structure, cliques form and then break off from the main mass, then those newly formed groupings themselves splinter and converge, creating new in-groups. It's not dissimilar to watching mold or fungi growing and dying inside a petri dish.
The result is a giant amorphous blob of political identities, hot takes, and infinite fractionalization and severance from wholes into parts. And each part thinks it is beholden to wisdom not properly understood or acknowledged by others. As an outsider, to try to get a grip on what exactly is going on is to be met with a bewildering barrage of terminology and labels hastily slapped on the backside of this week’s trendy new identity. It is to wade knee-deep in Theorycels, Femcels, Trads, Gay-Nazis (I’m told) Cat-Boys, Terfs, Ortho-bros, Apollonians, Postmodern Trads, and E-Girls.
And all of it is a complete and utter waste of time, none of it matters, and few people care.
In an earlier, happier, and more innocent age, I was the proud owner of a rather large aquarium. There’s something to be said for those halcyon days in which one’s energy and brainpower could be deployed to reading and researching exactly how to create a perfect tropical environment indoors - perhaps for another time. Suffice it to say, the colours were gorgeous, the water clean, and the fish content. I spent endless hours watching my tetras, clownfish, and cichlids. Cichlids of course are territorial and would chase other fish away from the rock cave I constructed for them. Clownfish are hyperactive and whizzed around their side of the tank in a blur. It occurred to me, one day, that while I view these displays for pleasure and amusement, for the fish within it would have been high drama, a matter of the utmost seriousness. There was a purposefulness to their activity. Yet, for all their energy and verve, nobody outside their little hermetically-sealed environment could care less.
It is becoming increasingly the case that to consume Dissident Right content is simply to consume the latest spats and internecine squabbling that happens on Twitter. What’s more, an entire lexicon is emerging which, if you’re not on Twitter, may as well be Chinese.
I will here pre-empt a criticism I can foresee, namely that I’m ‘‘cope posting’’ or in some way annoyed that I’m blocked from the fun and games of Twitter. I have no doubt that my reach is reduced through not being on Twitter, but the fact that I skipped the Great Femcel vs Trad-Bro war or the Ortho vs Pagangang smackdown doesn’t keep me awake at night. It doesn’t keep anybody awake because nobody cares except people on Twitter.
The risk here, of swamping Dissident Right discourse with Twitter mumbo-jumbo, is that the same breaks can happen within a scene more generally that seem to happen daily on the Bird App itself. I find myself becoming increasingly bored and irritated with the endless roll-call of micro-groupings and cliques which spawn on Twitter, and if I am, then I assume many others are too.
Entire character arcs and narratives have been and gone within Twitter, and they haven’t made the faintest scratch on the wider discourse, nothing remains except forgotten threads (another curse of Twitter) and another gaggle of micro-groups clinging to a dead cycle.
I could be wrong, but I foresee a schism created by Elon Musk’s somewhat erratic Twitter amnesty. There will be those who go willingly into the dome, formulating and processing their interactions within the Twittersphere, and those of us who remain outside of it — in a sort of weird cyberspace version of the rural vs city schism. It will be expected of those outside of the Twitter Dome that we ‘‘keep up’’ with the latest lingo and personalities, cliques, and hot-takes, which will be met with increasing irritation.
It could well be that my prediction of the future of online discourse is wrong. It would not be the first time. But if it does in fact come to pass, I’ll be able to say:
‘‘I don’t want to say I saw it coming, but I saw it coming’’
Twitter squeezes the fame bell-curve. The genuine celebrity becomes more accessible and so loses some of his lustre. The day he fires back 5 or 6 ill-tempered words, to the lad on the dole from Walsall, is when he loses the ability to become famous in the way that Michael Jackson, JD Salinger, or Howard Hughes did.
The ordinary man in the street is robbed of his down-to-earth (and perhaps slightly gullible) good nature, plus his enthusiast's curiosity. He quickly becomes a foot-soldier, however minor, and so has a role to play in the big fight. He's now regularly bending the truth, ever so slightly, to help his side win arguments - something he never used to do with people in the real world. He'll cherry-pick statistics that seem to back him up, while pretending to himself that those other more-inconvenient bits of data don't really exist.
So the shooting star as well as the noble underdog become people you don't really need in your life. The raison d'etre of both men becomes a little less clear and, to some extent, they're now just two hairs in a gin.
I've recently posted an article on my own Substack channel, in which I discuss the need to turn our backs on the tittle-tattle and return to our old way of life. Any feedback appreciated.
Morgoth, I agree the twitter identity/spat of the moment cycle is tedious.
I'm still on twitter, and my engagement is so minimal I've always felt like an outsider on the inside. Most of my tweets barely even land, with consistently 0% engagement in most cases.
The occasional, pithy reply I put on someone else's post might get a like or two, but I generally consider myself out of the conversation and not very good at "the twitter game".
Twitter is a pretty cursed format, I only engaged with it initially to try & unsuccessfully promote a now long defunct conspiracy blog I poured a lot of energy into many years ago.
I've always preferred long form content, particularly the essay/article (as reflected in this rambling comment...) I'm so relieved that the blogging format is making a resurgence, your posts on substack are a particular highlight.