I’ve been thinking a fair bit about McLuhan’s famous aphorism lately, and I’ve decided it explains why I am, in a very literal sense, sick of Twitter.

The point of McLuhan’s riff as I understand it isn’t that the content delivered by any given medium is irrelevant, but that the way in which any given chunk of content impacts on your sensorium is inevitably shaped by the form in which it is constrained. The form of Twitter is hypercompressed, caught up in a 140 character limit that even the SMS message from which it was inherited has largely transcended at this point; it is also, by default, a one-to-many broadcast format, a bullhorn in the town square. To be clear, that compression is a huge part of Twitter’s appeal and effectiveness, as is the bullhorn thing. The problem is the way in which the individual elements of massive ecosystems are obliged to evolve behaviours optimised to survival in said ecosystem. In the context of Twitter, or at least Twitter’s default public one-to-many mode, the optimal behaviour is the grabbing of attention, but that’s arguably true of any peer-to-peer medium; it was certainly just as true of the blogging era I pine for, and of newspapers, broadsides, and the popular ballad.

But the medium shapes the message: the innate terseness of Twitter inevitably requires the stripping away of nuance, the boiling-down and concentration of a single sharp point; meanwhile, the ephemerality of Twitter means not only does one have to grab attention, but one has to grab it RIGHTFUCKINGNOW, before someone else comes along with something equally grabby. As such, I think the polarisation of Twitter — which is not necessarily a monolithic Left/Right thing that covers the entire userbase, so much as a polarisation specific to each and every topic or event — is an inevitable consequence of the medium’s form, per McLuhan.

That said, I think this has been exacerbated by slower mediums deciding to plug themselves into Twitter in order to garner more eyeballs for their “proper” content. In the majority of cases, most major media brands have an established political polarity already, and had become very adept at grabby compression long before Twitter; this is the art of the headline, of the sound-bite. What Twitter brought to that party was the ephemerality mentioned above; it’s not just about grabbing attention, it’s about grabbing attention RIGHTFUCKINGNOW. Having money and metrics to throw at the problem, this behaviour has been optimised very quickly indeed — and individual users have absorbed many of the techniques involved by osmosis, much as one learns a local vernacular in order to remain part of the discourse. Level up, or get drowned out.

(Ironically, the corporate brand has never found Twitter as congenial a medium as the personal brand which — or so I’d suggest — is exactly why corporate brands are trying so hard, and often so laughably or grotesquely, to act more like personal brands, even as personal brands ape the corporate. The medium is the message; a crowded niche supports a limited range of physiological and behavioural adaptations. Evolve or die.)

This probably sounds more than a little bit “things ain’t what they used to be”, but y’know what? Things *aren’t* what they used to be. That’s how temporality works — and if noticing that difference and expressing a preference for the previous state of affairs is nostalgia, then fuck you, I’m nostalgic. However, I recognise that time’s arrow only points one way, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Twitter used to be a rhizome of watercooler conversations, and it still is — but the big numbers and fierce competition for attention, exacerbated by the monetisation of said attention, means that Metcalf’s Law has kicked in. Winner takes all; either you go big, or you go home.

There are backwaters and oxbow lakes, of course: Black Twitter, for instance, clearly provides a vital space for mobilisation for a demographic which desperately needs more such spaces, and the way in which messages from there can leak out into the global town square is clearly beneficial. But there is no avoiding the fact that those speech-acts are also polarised by definition, and hence attract speech-acts of the opposite polarity with all the inevitability of anions attracting cations. Compressed communications are highly reactive or volatile, to continue the chemistry metaphor, just as boiling down a solution will tend to polarise its pH toward acid or base. One of the great joys of Twitter — because make no mistake, it is a space that has brought me a lot of joy and good friends and interesting information over the years — is the way in which it gives everyone a voice. But as anyone with a marginal opinion will tell you, that is also its great horror; for every SJW, a G*merG*tor.

(And as repulsive as you might find either one of those two tribes, know that for sure that the tribe that revolts you feels an almost identical revulsion to your tribe. The medium is the message; you don’t have the bandwidth to be anything more than the affiliation ^[i]or lack thereof in your biog-blurb, and they don’t have the bandwidth to look any further than it. Black hats versus White hats is the only game in town. You are Other, and that’s that.)

There are also attempts to ameliorate the problem: private and/or alt accounts, curated lists, so on and so forth. But this reminds me a lot of what it was like to live in a compound in a foreign city, as I did for a few years as a child; the compound is quite literally an oasis of comfort and familiarity, but that only serves to enhance the fear of what’s outside. This seems a particularly cruel irony in the case of Twitter, where in order to flee the echo-chamber of the town square, we simply try to build a smaller echo-chamber with a more exclusive guestlist… and the hypothetical end-game of that paradigm, if you think about it, is a return to a non-town square form. In order to “fix” Twitter, we’re trying to make it into not-Twitter. But even as the compound doesn’t feel like the city outside, the compound is still constrained by its being a polder; it is inherently defined by what it is trying to exclude. The compound is a contradiction, and living in a contradiction is exhausting; the walls of the dyke must always be maintained and strengthened, even as that which it holds back is studiously ignored.

But like I say, maybe it’s just me, or just people with whom I share some significant psychological overlap. Lots of folk I know seem to be able to manage that contradiction, or find the town square vibe thrilling and congenial, and I wish them luck — hell, I think I maybe even envy them, in a way. But I’m prone to anxiety and depression; large crowds have always made me nervous, and mob phenomena are terrifying — although it is a function of my white male Anglo privilege that I’m much more likely to be part of a mob rather than its victim, and I fully acknowledge that I have less to lose by giving up on any given medium than those who lack the luck of birth and circumstance I have.

Nonetheless, I’ve had enough. The literature on CNS stimulants such as amphetamines or MDMA talks about the “law of diminishing returns”, whereby as one becomes habituated to a stimulant, one needs ever larger doses to recapture the incredible high of the first few hits; at the same time, the lows of the comedown become ever deeper, and arrive more swiftly. I am sick of Twitter like an addict eventually becomes sick of speed or pills, and I do not have the psychological fortitude to carry on regardless of the increasingly obvious cost to my mental health.

I’m not saying “Twitter = bad” — though that’s exactly how this post will be tweeted if anyone decides to pick it up out there in the Twittersphere. Twitter’s just another extension of the human sensorium, another cybernetic part of us — and like us, it contains both good and bad, contains the potential to enact both good and bad. But I do not believe it to be determinist to suggest that the form of Twitter, per McLuhan, means that it is inevitably a polarised black-and-white space… and I crave the detail and nuance that only comes when there’s at least some bandwidth for a greyscale, if not even full colour.

Nor am I claiming that some mass renunciation of Twitter and a return to the slower, longer conversations of blogging would return us to some idyllic cultural golden age. The lid on Pandora’s box can never be closed; we can never go back, only forward. Perhaps Twitter will evolve into a slower, less brutally competitive ecosystem; perhaps a new ecosystemic niche will emerge; perhaps (and most likely, IMHO) social media will turn out to be yet another of the periodic new-medium fads our civilisation has been prone to, like the letter, the telephone, and so on. Only time will tell.

But I’ll be waiting the time out somewhere else, I think. As Michael Franti once reminded us, hypocrisy is the greatest luxury, and I’ll be keeping my Twitter account for announcing blog posts like this one — in the wider ecosystem of which Twitter is merely a subsystem, I literally cannot afford to disappear entirely, just as many do not have the luxury of even the partial renunciation which this essay announces. But privilege is at its worst when it is wasted, and the Skinner box that is Twitter is a demonstrable waste of whatever it is that I am.

So I’m done with it. Thanks for the memories, and I’ll be here if you need me.