I Have Completely Stopped Using Twitter/X. You should too.

And not because of Elon or something someone said about me.

Yesterday, people started asking me about Hasan Piker “shocking his dog.” The people in my Discord generally hear about this stuff and express that it’s stupid that people care, and think they can even have a complete answer to what they’re speculating (which 100%, correct answer lol).

Other people have contacted me asking me to say something about how bad it is that someone would do such a thing(!), and I just don’t answer them. I can’t.

I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m sorry. I have criticism for Hasan Piker's approach to palliative care for would-be revolutionaries, bumper rails that prevent critical thinking by offering a binary line to agree or disagree with, preparing them for the Engagement Battle.

For a long time, I have been on social media. I was on Twitter when it began. I have always believed that participating is important, given my role as a media personality. I don’t have a publicist or a marketing department, so this was one of my few opportunities to publicize my work.

And it just isn’t true.

In a perfect world, social media would be media “powered by the people.” But we do not live in a perfect world.

One of the mistakes I continually made with social media is assuming you can be genuine and say what you mean, and through conversation you will either learn something or people will understand what you meant. This is just not the case when engagement is so heavily tied to incentives. I have written a lot about that, so I don’t care to get into it.

Social media exists to hurt you.

To take something from you.

It exists to transform your need for social interaction and connection into metrics and money.

Get off of social media.

I have no judgment for people who stay on it. And I am not deleting my accounts. I don’t want people impersonating me, as this has been a significant issue in the past.

But it is designed to make you a repeat customer as much as it is designed to make you a product. And it does this by stripping elements of humanity from you.

I have been off for a while now. I have to credit an important person in my life for leading by example, too. I probably would have maintained the idea that if I am not speaking for myself, then people are putting words into my mouth as an obligation. But people do that anyway. They got off social media last year and have not gone back. They are blissfully unaware of stupid shit like “Hasan Piker possibly shocking his dog.”

I am experiencing what I have to imagine they experience whenever I say something like that to them: “thank fuck I don’t have to know what this is.”

Because if you are taking part, you do have to know. That’s the point. You “keep up” with everything so you’re able to comment, either proactively or because you’re asked. Even if you don’t think that is what you’re doing! I didn’t.

If you make articles or videos, post them. That’s you expressing yourself. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing we have the ability to do any of this. Delete the apps with the timelines.

If someday I have the extra money to hire a social media manager to manage accounts for individual projects, like Very Important Documentaries or That Darn Racket, maybe I will. But as a means to directly address the public… social media isn’t that.

Because of the socioeconomic context in which it exists, social media is an act of enclosure on our humanity.

Enclosure or inclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of “waste” or “common land“, enclosing it, and by doing so depriving commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. [WikiPedia]

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