Go Ahead and Quit Twitter: You’ll Live Without Your Addiction — And Maybe Be Happier
Why subscriptions and not ads are a better way to live your life
Dear Journalists,
Allow me to be the first to tell you that no one cares about Twitter nearly as much as you do.
You have an addiction and this is an intervention if you want it to be. I love you and I want you to cover the real news.
If you need help, I can assign you something. Like say, the coming cobalt war in the Democratic Republic of Congo — a war that seems inevitable now we’ve banned Musk and his Chinese allies from buying cobalt from miners who use child labor?
You won’t do that, of course. No, you want to talk about Twitter. OK then.
Many of you have reached out to me about Twitter now that Elon Musk and his foreign backers have purchased it. You’ve texted me. You’ve called me. You hope that I’ll complain about Musk and how I’m still banned or something. I’m disappointing to you because I don’t seem to care. Well… what if I told you that I really don’t?
I get it. I make good copy. It’s why you used the text messages I leaked between myself and that weird aide-de-camp Jared Birchall. (Shades of Howard Hughes, eh? What’s with the Mormon connection? “Choose the right” Jared!)
Who do you think leaked those texts to the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal? Hmmm? Could it have been Charles Johnson that helped the FBI on the whole Musk giving the shady Russian poker player $5.7B with no strings attached? I don’t know. Seems like a mystery…
Just doing my part! No need to thank me for posting up against the tech people tied into foreign intelligence and the Chinese mob.
Did you know that there are foreign spies at Twitter? And that those foreign spies are probably — right now in fact — reading your direct messages?
Do you feel safer knowing that Twitter is purportedly relying on coders from the very Chinese-backed Tesla — a company under investigation for killing people with its fake self-driving?
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But hey, you’ve reached out and so here I am. You’ve got what you always sought — my attention. Better grab a hold of it while you still have it! It’s fleeting, as seemingly everyone’s attention these days is.
Say, you guys deified Steve Jobs at one point too. Didn’t he have that whole saying about how you should try to shave time off the booting up times for the Apple product? He reasoned (supposedly) that, at scale, when you make it easier for people to boot up their computers, you collectively give everyone more time on this lovely planet. Now what should we think of people who systematically waste everyone’s time? Are they killing people? Hmm…
As you know I was the first person banned for life from Twitter. I even sued over it — and I lost (sadly).
Of course it was wrong that they banned me, but honestly, but I’m very happy that they did. What’s that old saw from Churchill? About a blessing in disguise being very well disguised? Well, thank God for working in mysterious ways.
Being banned from Twitter is the best thing that ever happened to me. In fact my cancellation, such as it was, gave me much needed time to reflect, to think, and to build the sort of empathy that so many in our society, especially our faux tech elite, seem to lack.
I’m a work in progress — we all are — but the first step to fixing the problem is admitting you have a problem. So let’s admit it together.
Many of you are addicts. You know it and I know it.
You make excuses for why you spend so much time on the platform. “It’s helping my career!” you say. “I only use it for news!” you promise. All addicts lie to themselves and you are no different.
You are wasting your life on Twitter. You are giving up your focus. You are giving up your happiness. You are allowing yourself to be programmed by someone else. Musk, being stupid, even tells you what he’s going to do to you.
Elon Musk clearly didn’t want to pay the full $44 billion his consortium spent on Twitter so there’s a case to be made that his Twitter addiction wound up costing him billions of dollars. What has it cost you? Precious time with your family? Blowing a deadline for work? Your piece of mind? The loss of a friendship? Wasting your elite private school education so that you can tweet about what teenagers are doing on TikTok?
Maybe you are better off without it!
Allowing others to affect you emotionally is, I suppose, what the great American experiment is all about.
In a way, the huckster and the hustler are as embedded in this country as the con man. I wouldn’t have it any other way but there are many, especially in Musk’s (and my) adopted Texas, that are all hat and no cattle. Yes, yes, he’s gotten us into space. So what? This is America. We sell the dream, baby.
Of course that’s really what advertising is all about — selling the scheme dream. It’s my contention that clickbait is ruining America and it’s why I sued the Huffington Post (now owned by BuzzFeed). My case is pending before the Supreme Court. If it works, it’ll make it way easier to sue fake media properties. It may just change the economics of online advertising. No need to thank me. Just doing my part. Some of us helped bankrupt Gawker and we were just getting started!
Anyway, journalist Jacob Silverman makes a very compelling point about Twitter on the podcast “Tech Won’t Save Us.” I highly recommend Paris Marx’s work, for what it’s worth. It’s pretty compelling stuff and I dare not ignore it.
Silverman argues that Twitter has helped Saudi intelligence hunt down and disappear Saudi dissidents. Saudi Arabia remains a major investor in Twitter.
A Saudi spy told me that Musk talked to him about taking Tesla private. I reported it, of course.
Being anti-Musk has probably cost me millions of dollars but hey, millions for defense but not one cent for tribute. I was told by an investor that he loved my work but that he couldn’t back me for being anti-Elon. (But I’m not anti-Elon; I’m pro-American.)
I don’t really think that the world should work the way that Twitter advertises. Advertising leads to addiction.
And ultimately to exploitation.
Not everyone should be accessible all the time, not every thought should be aired, not every billionaire wish should be fulfilled…
Twitter is a battlefield, not a business. And maybe, just maybe, you’re not a journalist but a narcissist.
Look at yourselves deep in the mirror and see what they do on Twitter.
Watch how your peers behave on Tuesday and think back to how journalists behaved before 2008 on Election Day.
We deserve better than your instant takes. You deserve better than our criticisms of your work. We both deserve a better public conversation.