How Twitter Is Bad For You

of course it's fun and great, it's also horrible, let's not kid ourselves

It Monocultures Your Thoughts

Twitter is a meme generation machine. It trains everyone on it to produce the catchiest sentiments possible, to compete with each other to produce the most captivating nuggets. And the timeline shows you the thoughts that have won this competition—the most attention-grabbing takes from people who have become extremely good at this game. 

Whenever you look at the timeline, your normal thoughts are exposed to competition, in the form of these super-thoughts. And many of your normal thoughts will not survive this competition—they will be replaced by thoughts from Twitter. It’s like introducing your delicate inner ecosystem to an invasive species.

Here are examples of some of the species of thought in your mind that are likely to be extinguished:

1. Nascent, half-formed insights that could grow into something more complex

2. Micro-observations about your particular context

3. Fragments of dreams, idle fancies

4. A sense of what you are feeling in your body, right now

5. The ongoing plot of your life

Your interiority will be replaced by, essentially, the products of people advertising their wit. The development of your inner landscape will be temporarily halted. This is perhaps why, when I spend more time on Twitter, I find it more difficult to write interesting things. I become better at communicating in fragments, but my imagination gets fucked up by the barrage of mental pollution. I am not thrilled about this tradeoff.

This might also be one reason why popular creativity influencers on Twitter—people who post about writing and creativity a lot—generally do not actually produce interesting work themselves. Tweeting about creativity makes you less creative.

Remember that the catchy thoughts of the world’s best meme suppliers are also not necessarily true, or helpful. They will often try to convince you that some particular conflict is ripping apart civilization, or that there is something you’re missing out on, or that they are part of a superior tribe, whose ways you have to mimic. Those are the narratives that possess the most immediate emotional value—those that convince you that you are under attack, or that you should be insecure.

Sometimes, they are actively menacing, like this tweet, for example, which is so cleverly sadistic that I almost have to love it. (It is notable that when this was posted, this account’s profile picture was the face of a beautiful woman, which has since been changed.)

Lukas (computer) @SCHIZO_FREQ

Every man who's masturbated within the last week has a distinct smell to girls, and none of them realize we can all tell

It so cleverly plays on existing male anxieties. It sends this message, to a man reading it: “you are undesirable and disgusting and we all secretly know it”—assuming that he masturbates at a fairly normal frequency. Even if the sentence itself is obviously not true, even if it’s just a joke—and part of the genius of this tweet is that the reader is not 100% sure—the underlying sentiment lodges somewhere in your mind.

This could only be produced by someone who has been carefully trained by psychological reinforcement. Twitter teaches people to entertainingly fuck with your mind, and trains you to want that to happen.

It Separates You From Reality

The beauty of self-consciousness is that we can understand how we might appear in other minds, and thus direct our behavior such that we have the desired effect on others. The curse of self-consciousness is that this makes us worry how we look. When we are trying out a new skill, we might worry about looking like a fuck-up, and thus become inhibited and learn ineffectively. When we dance, we can get caught in trying not to look stupid, rather than trying to respond to the music.

Twitter is a great medium for communicating almost anything that’s going on with you. And it’s a party that’s going on all the time—there is always the opportunity to communicate. But, as a result, if you’re on Twitter a lot, you are always, even if subconsciously, looking for the Tweet in anything you are doing—looking for how your current opinions could be spun in a pithy way, or looking for how your current experience could become a cute anecdote.

This is not dissimilar from, say, being a writer who writes about their own experience. But the medium is important. Twitter-brain looks for tiny shards of experience. Twitter-brain is constantly skimming the surface, looking for the most sweeping abstractions, the most simplistic takes.

Thus, you learn to look at your own experience through simplistic representations. You’re constantly zooming out from the substance of your life to examine its appearance. You look down at the moment from a Tweet-shaped box, rather than being inside its suchness. This is resistible, but it’s where the medium wants you to go. There is a cognitive cost to not doing this, that Twitter imposes constantly.

It Gives You More People to Hate

Almost everyone I’ve talked to who spends a lot of time on Twitter has done some shit-talking about someone else on Twitter. This includes me. This includes generally benevolent meditators and dignified people who usually don’t gossip. Even if you only follow people you like, and you try to avoid topics that make you mad, at some point, you’ll see someone saying something dumb—that’s just how the medium works, it delivers what aggravates your peer group directly to your mind. How often do you use Twitter and leave agitated by the apparent stupidity of someone else on Twitter? Probably more than is good for you, if you’re on there often.

It Wants You to Be a Shtick

It’s funny to watch people get extremely popular on Twitter. If they are not famous for something else, almost always, what happens is this. They find some particular drum they can beat that arouses some praise and some criticism—the right blend for algorithmic traction. Then, they beat that drum again and again, presenting a simplistic facade. There will be clever variations in their quips—and this takes praiseworthy skill—but the general outline will be similar.

If I wanted to be popular, here’s what I would tweet, in a rotating fashion:

—Pithy/funny stuff about drugs

—Vaguely controversial stuff about masculinity

—Uplifting tweets about accepting yourself

But I don’t want to do that: I don’t want to flatten myself in that way, because I know that expression can’t help but shape you inside. I hold it as self-evident you become one-dimensional in the positions you express, you tend to become more one-dimensional in the thoughts you think, and thus more one-dimensional as a person.

And I am lucky: what I’m rewarded for isn’t meanness, cynicism, or fearmongering. If that’s what you’re rewarded for, the platform actively pushes you into being evil. This is something I have also seen—people becoming palpably meaner/angrier/crueler because that’s what gets play.

I’m aware that I’ve spent lots of time on Twitter, and that it got me an incredible fiancee, and some great friends, and exposed me to some wonderful ideas. This does not at all contradict anything I’ve said here. I think the accurate way to view Twitter is that it’s an incredible resource, filled with great people and ideas, that is also situated on a toxic waste dump that poisons you.

I’d suggest looking at it, maybe, like smoking in order to socialize with smokers: you want to at least be conscious that you’re making a tradeoff, doing something unhealthy in order to get something else in return. Make your exposure as worthwhile as you can, and if you’re not getting something quite obvious in return, leave.

There are people who can use Twitter strictly as an informational resource: a thing to search that does not influence your brain profoundly. But I am not that strong. And, most probably, neither are you.