Reflections on the Twitter Files
Twitter almost drove me insane
Spoiler: this isn’t about the Twitter Files. It’s about my Twitter Files.
Preamble
The internet went down for everyone in my hamlet. Not the regular five minute outage while your box mysteriously reboots itself, which happens often. This was the full Monty, affecting everyone, regardless of ISP. It turned out that a farmer had cut our overhead fibre cable while engaging in his relentless attacks on the trees around here. That added internet access to our recent losses, consisting of around 70 mature oak and beech since the start of the Ukraine war (firewood became more profitable).
This house nestles in a dip, which turns a locally fragile cell network into a dead zone, so there was no option to tether Mac with phone for meaningful activities. Apart from an intermittent sliver of 3G bandwidth near one upstairs window, me and around 20 other houses were offline for 8 days.
Losing the internet is a shock to the system. Apart from the fact that I earn my living online, there’s nothing quite like not being able to do maybe the two dozen things per hour I customarily absolutely must do that require a connection. Look this up, ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini about something, buy that cheap Chinese solution to my latest desire, play a podcast, stream a tune, veg out while grazing YouTube. When you suddenly can’t do these things you realise what dependency means.
Once the repair timescale rose from 24 hours to a theoretical 4 weeks I went straight to my favourite cafe in Cherbourg , hopped onto their WiFi and ordered Starlink over coffee and cake. Having your cable cut once by a passing tractor, then by a neigbour trimming his hedge and now by an exploitative farmer invoked my three-strikes rule. Physically wired infrastructure? Pah!
While I waited for the Starlink kit to arrive I did lots of observing of myself.
What I learned
Everything about life was suddenly ... slower. More ... reflective. I wasn’t expecting this to be the main impact, once the frantic need to access something right this very moment began to pass.
This is very like those moments immediately after a power cut begins and everything you think of doing next involves electricity. Oh well, so it’s dark and the music stopped - I’ll just put the kettle on. You’ve done this too.
This is the point where I’m supposed to be describing how liberated I felt. Released from the servitude of addiction to novel information and the call of the internet as provider of an unbounded bounty of information and distraction.
It’s when you might anticipate a paean to touching grass, being less in my head and more embodied. How I just appreciated my surroundings all the more; the warmth from the newly installed pellet stove, the riches still offered by offline reading matter, playing actual physical artefacts to get music, all that good stuff that has become popular to talk and write about.
It wasn’t like that at all. Life without the internet really sucked. I was bored and restless, watching the clock tick down to bedtime and then waking up to open the Velux onto a cold drizzly morning to wave my phone around outside and latch onto 1 bar of 3G. Out in nature during the day, I was more distracted than usual by my black mirror because there was a constant backlog of things I ‘needed’ to look up.
None of this is to make a moral judgement around how habituated to the digital version of civilisation I’ve become. I think of this as a value-neutral development. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. Once I mostly did x and now I mostly do y. Kind of similar to how once I used to be adept at using a choke for cold morning starts and now cruise around in an exponentially superior vehicle that just goes when you press a button. I haven’t missed the click of a vinyl scratch coming around on side 2 of a favourite album because that was actually quite crap and I’m happier to enjoy frictionless musical pleasure.
I missed so much about instant access to uncountable and immeasurably useful things that the increasingly popular didactic pronouncements around the virtues of separating ourselves from an ocean of instant information, suddenly seemed little more than a fashionably virtuous conceit.
By evening 3 of no internet I was reading back through old journals and other documents on the Mac and that’s when I was suddenly aware of a qualitative difference between the online me of today and that of 10 years ago.
It seems that I just use it all more healthily than I did then.
You know that scene in A Beautiful Mind where Nash’s private space is suddenly revealed and plunges us into the horror of his mental pathology? That’s a bit like my Evernote records around 2016 - 2018.
Except that I wasn’t a mathematical genius. I was just a common or garden punter with a fascination for dodgy social media accounts pretending to be something they weren’t. I was operating in the disinformation research space, publishing a weekly podcast about it and sometimes writing articles for publications that didn’t like the kind of stuff that I was unearthing.
The more I delved through my notes the more obsessive they came to seem, in light of my subsequent thinking around the subject of ‘disinformation’ and its supposed effects on the world. For carefully reasoned perspectives on this, in depth, look up the work of Dan Williams and investigate his stack Conspicuous Cognition. Being smarter than me Dan has better versions of the arguments against ‘misinformation panic’ than anything I’ve published.
What started out as a trip down memory lane took on a darker quality as I gradually remembered how much time and emotional energy I had invested in things that were never more than miniscule online dramas of no consequence to the world. It was a day and night endeavour at the time. This now seems baffling.
Some stories were quite diverting and fun to publish, because everyone lapped them up. There’s one I can’t talk about because it ended up going legal. Others were just fish n chippy and a bit sad, with people styling themselves as “news outlets” with unconvincing names who turned out to be just supporters of UKIP in grim terraced houses somewhere in Britain’s northern urban wastelands.
There was the guy who got labelled on the front page of the The Times as a Russian agent but who was really just some young very conservative bloke on the Isle of Wight. Or the old British guy who parroted the Russian perspective on everything and turned out just to be that - an old British guy parroting the Russian perspective on everything. Me and several others bullied him, I now see. Last time I looked he appears to be no longer living and I’m somewhat regretful for having tormented him. Even if he did spend all his time making things up about himself on Twitter and threatening to unmask me as in the pay of George Soros and the EU. Can’t pretend I didn’t have fun with that, though.
All of this was deeply unhealthy behaviour. That of my targets, weirdly making shit up every day behind fake personas, and me spending so much time chasing them down.
This is because none of it was consequential. I was playing to a crowd of followers who saw me as an authority on such matters and the various terminally online fakers were chasing fever dreams of being at the vanguard of a more gloriously conservative future when a more conservative future was unfolding anyway.
My followers lapped it all up and I lapped up their approval. For me it was all about external validation and a certain bitterness that I’d given up an investigative journalistic career some years before for very bad reasons. The zenith was my keynote at an international conference on digital political organising and the fee for that proved handy in justifying pursuit of this obsessive hobby for about 18 months longer.
Trawling through my own Twitter Files was an eye-opener and instead of feeling entertained by these memories I just felt regretful that I’d been immersed in the toilet of other people’s strong feelings about things in such an all-encompassing way.
I have the scolding and purity policing from my own tribe - the nascent Wokerati - to thank for the ultimate decision to burn all of that nonsense to the ground, by scrapping the podcast and torching my Twitter.
It’s vaguely ironic that it took an extended internet outage to make full contact with the horrors of my onetime digital life and I’m kind of grateful to the local farmer for indirectly causing those hours of introspection.
Today, the feelings of external actors seem to wash over me when once everything needed defending or rebutting. Announcing my installing of Starlink drew some inevitable balking on Facebook from some real-life friends for whom Elon Musk is the antichrist. The impulse to push back by asking them to share their political or cultural due diligence process for every consumer purchase arose and persisted as no more than a fleeting thought before moving on. Incidentally, Starlink works straight out the box and is cheaper than my vulnerable fixed fibre connection ever was, which reduces even further the fucks I give about the obvious dysregulation of Elon’s personality.
You know how glad I am to be back online by the fact of your reading this. Being online is great. Yes, there’s plenty of ‘enshitification’ always under way but no one forces you to endure it. There’s this thing known as personal responsibility and the magical capacity to not constantly blame the moral failings of others or abstract corporate entities for any bad feelings that arise internally, when you see rubbish on your screens.
Back in my disinformation days I sincerely believed that I was doing God’s work in defending democracy and liberal values against something really bad. That was probably the best story of all from that time. The one I was telling myself. But, just like the purveyors of low-quality chatter on the socials, it really was just a story.
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