Antisocial Media

Goodbye digital. Hello analog, my old friend.

There’s a saying:

“Social media isn’t an airport — you don’t need to announce arrivals and departures”. If you’re taking a break, or leaving… just do it, dude. Nobody cares.

Nonetheless I’m going to say this: I just deleted my Twitter account.

Those who know me in that dusty thing we called “real life” will know I was half-man, half-Twitter for years. The final straw today was coming across a truly vile tweet from one of the incel-friendly right-wing pundits who figured out they can drive engagement (and income) on X by posturing as even more hateful than they (maybe?) really are. Feeling a familiar twist of disgust and fury at a scabrous tweet from Matt Walsh was enough to make me realize I don’t need this shit in my life any more, however distantly. I hadn’t posted in well over a year. I’d set my account to private, put up the shutters. I didn’t want to spend time there or validate its owner, but out of nostalgia for the thousands of positive interactions I had on Twitter over the years (and a very genuine and much-valued friendship I made there), I hadn’t taken the step of leaving, completely, for good. Now I realize I’m never going back, so I have.

Despite everything it feels sad. I liked Twitter. I really enjoyed it. As a writer I relished the discipline of boiling observations or quips down to 280 characters (or the even more challenging 140 of the old days). I liked the rough and tumble and cut and thrust and could give as good as I got — protected by the fact I’m not female or Jewish or gay and thus didn’t encounter the epic depths of unpleasantness constantly dished out to others. I landed a few decent tweets. I spent a night fielding (literally) hundreds of threatening messages after I got into it with the NRA spokeswoman and she set her fanboy hounds on me. My wife and I relied upon Twitter during a horrible couple of hours when there was feared to be an active shooter at our son’s school and updates were emerging more quickly on the platform than anywhere else. It was my place.

I’ve seen tweets you people wouldn’t believe. Viral posts on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched twenty-part threads glitter with likes near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to leave.

I joined in 2008, and spent a good amount of (or, seriously far too much) time on it every day from 2014 until after the election in 2024. I had a great network of people I’d interacted with for years about writing and art, plus a ton of political and journalist contacts on both sides of the political aisle. I learned a lot from smart conservatives. I was in a private messaging group with other liberals including several Senators and a bunch of Congresspeople, along with journos you will have heard of. It was energizing. It was a great way of keeping informed, of watching news break before the mainstream media had it, of gaining intel and seeing narratives form. It was kinda cool.

And then it wasn’t. Musk ruined it. Finally, after the 2024 election came the blindingly obvious and yet still strangely heart-breaking and embarrassing realization that the whole circus had been futile all along — and the political activism I’d quietly prided myself on had never been more than ranting into an echo chamber. So I left.

I tried Bluesky for a while, but let’s face it — it’s really boring there, the Good Kids in school showing how jolly grown-up they can be (though you don’t have to look hard to find total wankers too). I used to enjoy Instagram way back when it was the preserve of nice people posting nice pictures and nice people being nice about them, before it became an enshitified pit of influencers and attention-seeking knobs and an avalanche of randos sharing dumb videos of people doing dumb things.

I now frequent Reddits on a few fields of interest but it’s not long before someone will be an utter dick there too. Why are we like this? And it’s not only the dickishness or the pompous-but-insecure I-know-everything smugness or the narrow-minded churlishness — it’s the ignorance and/or lies. I occasionally glance at a couple of sub-Reddits dedicated to subjects I happen to know about on an insider basis. I am frequently baffled and depressed to see their angry and entitled denizens confidently posting suggestions or assertions which I know, for a fact, to be simply and absolutely incorrect. Others immediately start constructing castles of nonsense upon what was at best simply ill-informed but sometimes more likely a straight-up fabrication, and quickly you’re submerged in a self-reinforcing fog of speculative untruth.

At least in those subs I’m able to tell the truth between fact and fiction on the basis of my own experience. But the same thing presumably goes on in ones where I don’t have that advantage. And the Internet as a whole?

It’s full of bullshit.

It’s also full of assholes. I am stunned by how awful people are on social media. Dismissive, mean, sneering, ignorant. The worst of how we can be. Pouncing on the opportunity to show how superior they think they are and in the process making me want to leave the species and become a frog instead.

These are the kind of people we go to a lot of trouble to avoid in real life. On social media they’re unavoidable. They are legion and they come with the territory. I don’t want to inhabit that territory any more.

I would never have imagined it but the one social medium I’ll stick with for now — despite the fact it’s run by an amoral android and keeps insistently serving me up reels that squat on an uneasy boundary between softcore porn and near-pedophilia — is staid, old-person’s Facebook. It’s rampantly uncool and also full of assholes but at least I know some of these assholes in real life. Family, actual friends, folks whose existences it’s nice to keep up with when you’ve moved five thousand miles to another country. Although the curious and frustrating thing is that amongst them are people I know in reality to be warm, kind, intelligent human beings — and yet on social media they’ll post the kind of stuff that makes my brain explode. Years and years ago, in an essay for something or other, I urged the formation of a League of Empathetic Sane People. That seems even more of a fantasy than it did then, but perhaps that’s because social media shows us too much of what people say, and not enough of who they are.

I wonder if we’re simply not designed to know this much about what goes on in other people’s heads. Maybe we should stick to only saying Hello and Goodbye, or waving to each other from across the street. Or, better, focus harder on evaluating how people feel when in the same room rather than what they shout from afar. We’re designed for the real. We don’t have to live in the unreal just because tech bros monetize us to. As my father — a geographer and ethical philosopher — often pointed out, humans struggle at caring for distant others but it’s becoming an essential need. Techno-capitalism profits from internationalizing human relations on the day-to-day. It’ll be down to us to figure out how to make that work for the good of all.

Okay, I’m not making this up. Right this second, as I’m bashing this out, my phone just pinged. A young Chinese lady with whom I’m unacquainted wishes to get to know me much better. Hey, probably-AI lady? FUCK OFF. And FUCK OFF also with the “We’ve reviewed your credentials and may have a position of interest to you” text that came in just before it. And FUCK OFF too with the earlier and freakin’ endless “We’re asking one more time, will you throw in just a dollar to help us beat Donald Trump”. Stop barging into my life and wasting my time with this incessant CRAP.

I’ve decided my 2026 is going to be much more analog. The picture at the top of this piece is the watch I’m wearing right now, a Waltham from 1926 that I serviced and got running when I taught myself (very amateurish) watchmaking during the pandemic. A century old, and thus from an era when none of this soul-curdling time-suck faux-social digital bullshit existed. I have, since New Year, taken the unusual — for me, as someone who loves his tech — step of not using my Apple Watch except when exercising, instead wearing one patched-together ancient mechanical or other to avoid the constant avalanche of pings and updates and breaking news.

That shit does not serve me. It probably doesn’t serve you either.

I’m struggling to round off this piece towards a coherent argument — and it probably doesn’t matter. Who gives a damn what I think? Just another guy in late middle age, shouting at clouds, yet more words to be bulldozed into the bottomless landfill of superfluous utterance. But the world is in such a parlous state at the moment — and getting more dreadful and dangerous on a daily basis, as venal politicians gleefully rip off masks that have always chafed — that it feels important to not get sucked along.

As someone who has been politically engaged for a long time I feel I should know and understand what the “other side” thinks, not least so I stop thinking in dualisms. As a writer of fiction I also want to understand people in general, what makes them tick. But we don’t need to be constantly reminded of it all. We don’t have to always be “be part of the conversation”.

Sometimes sitting in silence is the only chance we have of staying sane.

When you want sound again, here’s the song I probably listened to most in 2025. It’s ****ing great, and this live version is a fine addition to the niche genre of “People Being Transparently Delighted At Being On Stage With Their Hero”. There’s good stuff out there. Always.