unfuckwithable.
(I'm writing this with full awareness that a person who publicly quits a site commits Flameout, a Class A misdemeanor.)
The Internet long ago replaced TV as the primary place where reason and decency go to die. It's fucking poison, and Twitter is its concentrated form. No other web site has managed to distill the Internet into such vile tedium and hostility.
There are essentially three types of tweets:
Only LOL tweets have potential for value, but this potential is destroyed by their profusion. The Internet is teeming with a frustrating and cowardly unwillingness to take anything seriously, and the resulting abundance of humor is mind-numbing and wearisome. I'd be lying if I claimed not to like lolcats, but I'd be a mouth-breathing moron if that were the extent of my reading.
This reluctance to take ownership of ideas is almost certainly related to one of the Internet's other defining characteristics: ferocious cruelty. Twitter is no exception here, and probably makes it easier to be mean; the 140-character limit makes it impossible to speak precisely, and the immediacy tempts the impatient and short-tempered. If a tweet allows any ambiguity whatsoever, the concept of "benefit of the doubt" is discarded, and the gaps are filled with whatever presumptions allow the reader to assume that the writer is an idiot and an asshole.
If Twitter is so awful, why did it appeal to me at all? For starters, it's just a lovely web site: aside from the instability, the concept is well-executed, the site's design is pleasing and usable, and the mobile device integration is really, really clever. However, I'm forced to admit that my attraction to Twitter only deepened because I'm a sarcastic, hateful, unoriginal coward. I used to be warmhearted, sincere and passionate. The Internet has slowly brought out the worst in me, and Twitter is the climax of this process: the bloated, rotting corpse of my disfigured personality.
I have a couple more reasons for quitting Twitter that aren't more generally relatable to the Internet as a whole.
I've noticed a decline in the quality of my relationships with my Twitter friends. (I only have one Twitter friend that I didn't previously know in "real life.") The persistent social connection has an effect similar to cohabitating: when I'm constantly exposed to someone's idiosyncrasies, it can make me hate them. It takes a little extra effort to manage an always-on relationship, which is fine until I multiply that effort by the number of Twitter friends I have (26, which is evidently low). I've also found that the constant updates make it extremely unlikely that I'll want to catch up with someone or have a conversation of any real length. I already know what you've been up to, so at no point during the week do I say to myself, "I wonder what Megan is up to? I should email her/call her/have dinner with her."
Finally (and perhaps most intangibly), using Twitter is a bit like being assimilated into a hive mind. My thoughts have taken on a different character. My brain is being trained to produce tiny musings that not only fit into the 140-character limit, but are things I'm willing to say in front of nearly everyone I know. My private thoughts and personal reflections are becoming rare.
So, ironically, here are my tweet-sized conclusions:
We saw our friend Andrea tonight for the first time since she got home from a month in Greece. And I now understand why Greek myths are so fucked up. Andrea told us about a group hike she went on to find the cave where iambic pentameter was invented—so right from the get-go we're wandering around Greece looking for a legendary cave. Apparently she wasn't "well-equipped" (her words) for this hike, being clothed in nothing more than a swimsuit and swim shoes, because the path was overgrown with "plants with spikes" and "minotaurs." So she turned back. And based on reports from the people who continued, five minutes after Andrea turned back, the bees came.
But the group evaded the bees and marched on. Eventually they came to a 40-foot cliff, covered in the same spiky plants that had overgrown the path, which they had to climb by grabbing onto the spiky plants. Stung by bees, hands impaled, they found the cave shortly thereafter.
When Andrea asked her friend from the group to tell her about this amazing find, she reported, "it was covered in bat shit and I hated it."
(Courtesy of CZ.)
There once was an old man who was observing a particular pot. His student approached and said "master, why do you stare at the pot?" The old man responded:
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I couldn't afford an iPhone when they first came out, but all of my coworkers could. I hated them all, and I'm not using the word "hate" lightly. I was so furiously jealous that I literally lost sleep, self-esteem, hope for the future—my lack of iPhone was a deep, painful void in my life.
I took a new job with better pay, and this past October, I bought an iPhone. It was amazing. People would ask me if it was really that cool, and I would quite honestly tell them that I didn't know how I had lived without it. I ensured that all of my sites worked properly in Mobile Safari, even going so far as to start building a custom iPhone interface for JLex; I began to refer to the act of printing out directions from the Internet as "the old-fashioned way;" and perhaps worst of all, I settled arguments at bars by finding the answer on Wikipedia.
I was complete.
But after just a few blissful months, disaster struck. My purse, with my iPhone in it, was stolen. I was crushed. I spent the next several days holed up in my apartment with the lights off. I played violent video games and wrote bad poetry. And I tweeted: "All of our social systems depend on people being essentially good. But they're not."
A few days later, my ransacked purse was found and returned to me. I dug through it frantically looking for my iPhone—nay, for my very soul—but it was gone. I was crushed all over again. It was like it had been stolen twice. Never mind that I got back my notebook, IDs, and pretty much all of my other valuables. My fucking iPhone was gone.
I still had the RAZR I'd been using before I bought my iPhone, so I had it reactivated. I described it as "steam-powered." And I felt like such a dork when I used it. I was convinced people were looking at me, thinking, "Oh my god, is she actually using a RAZR? What a loser." I wanted a new iPhone immediately but I decided to hold off in case the then-still-rumored iPhone 3G was announced soon. I didn't want to relieve my trauma only to be devastated a week later by obsolescence.
As time passed I began to get used to my RAZR again. I no longer swore violent retribution every time I had to make a phone call. As more time went by, I grew accustomed to the lower phone bill. An extra $30 a month isn't much, sure, but when I go out for dinner or drinks or dancing, I silently thank my RAZR for buying the first round. I realized that the iPhone is perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to conversation. ("So I was reading Christopher Hitchens' column the other day, and...hey, are you listening to me?" "Huh? Oh, sorry, I was just reading this email from my aunt Trudy. Don't you just love lolcats?")
It's been three months since my iPhone was stolen. A week from Friday, the iPhone 3G will ship: the day I've been waiting for! But I'm not going to buy one. I've recovered.
They say people don't really appreciate love until it's gone. And although my iPhone and I weren't even together long enough for the honeymoon phase to wear off, I realize now that I was in an abusive relationship. I was emotionally involved with my iPhone. It left me for another woman, and now it wants me back.
Well you know what? Go fuck yourself, iPhone. You're an asshole.
Target Women: Botox
Target Women: Suffrage
Target Women: Wedding Shows
Target Women: Yogurt Edition