I Qwit

Yesterday, I deactivated the last two of my four accounts on Twitter – or “Qwitter”, as I now call it. It’s been quite a ride.

This really all began in 1995, when I first got online. In those days there was no Google, and Netscape was the god of the browsers.

I quickly grew to love Usenet, and the newsreader software I used (Turnpike from Demon Internet) allowed posts to be viewed in a tree with unlimited levels, something that is almost entirely absent from modern discussion platforms. I really miss it, because it allowed so much flexibility. You could “kill” a user, which removed all their posts (like blocking), but best of all, you could “kill” an entire subtree. This meant that if the conversation wandered off topic you could simply prune that part of the tree so you’d never have to see it again. It was, in my opinion, a perfect forum for unbounded debate and conversation.

One of my favourite newsgroups was called alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe. It featured a number of in-house running gags, some rather baffling rules about Marmite(™️) and the spelling of the word “quay”, plus a set of virtual fireside pub chairs. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it was one of the first “bubbles” I encountered online. I felt privileged to be a member of it.

Another group I frequented was rec.roller-coaster, and I can still recall the ferocity of the flame wars that were ignited by disagreements about the “free fall time” experienced on Superman: The Escape at Six Flags Magic Mountain, the first coaster to be launched via linear induction. The ride spent three seconds ascending a vertical tower, and three more seconds dropping back down it, which the marketing copy asserted added up to six seconds of free fall. This, of course, was true – provided you equate “free fall” with “ballistic trajectory”… some didn’t, and insisted it was only three seconds and the marketing department was lying. That one raged on for weeks.

What followed consisted mostly of web fora of various kinds, and it was only in the 2000’s that YouTube, Facebook and Qwitter came along. I don’t wish to discuss Facebook here, but suffice to say I will never touch that platform again after what they did to democracy.

I love YouTube, and it’s basically my TV, since I gave up “real” TV in 2004. I like to curate my own content, and this was an excellent way to connect with various science topics. Many videos in those days were 360p or worse, but this was expected, given that consumer video technology was still fairly primitive. These were the days of YouTube videos that had started life on other sites, often as Flash animations. Northern, Alien Song, Weebl and Bob and others remain nostlagic favourites.

I joined Qwitter in 2009. For a long time I regarded it as a source of jokes, occasional news, and a way of being somewhere other than Facebook. My account chugged along nicely, and I eventually added a second one for my creative persona. Ultimately I would add two more accounts. One was a fun identity where I pretended to be the god Zardoz from the film of the same name. The other was called “epnonymous”, and was a place to post jokes and comments that I personally thought were hilarious but knew others mostly wouldn’t. For a very long time I told absolutely no-one that epnonymous was me. I revealed it a few weeks ago on Qwitter when I saw that things were beginning to collapse anyway.

In 2016, everything changed. Politics became a vital part of life, as opposed to a vaguely boring topic that one had to study occasionally in order to put a cross in the right box in the polling booth. And Qwitter grew more and more ugly and toxic. After Brexit and Trump I, like many other people, began swearing quite a lot. We were so angry at what had happened to the world. Of course, in the end, the underlying game began to be uncovered. It was at that point that I fully realised just how horribly dangerous social media was.

Social media is a ready-made weapon for those who wish to sow discord and misinformation for profit or power. It’s a large gun, lying around waiting to be picked up and abused. In many respects it’s like a biological weapon, because it relies on the spread of damage between people – only in this case it is memetic or informational, rather than biological, damage.

I’m not going to repeat the analysis that others have far more professionally done elsewhere, but I will say that once I understood the truth – that we were actually at war, and that the world was crumbling – I began to fear the medium a little. I mostly stopped swearing, though I remained angry of course. I attempted to manage my online experience by setting my own policies regarding blocking individuals and biting my tongue when tempted to respond to bait. But I, like many others, still saw benefits in Qwitter and thought it worth retaining for its utility in organising campaigns as well as its entertainment and connectivity value.

And then the bull entered the china shop and began kicking everything to see if he could break it.

I signed up for a couple of Mastodon accounts immediately. My days of looking up to billionaires were already long gone, and I had a hunch what was about to happen. The final straw was the cancellation of the covid misinformation policy. At this point, a line was crossed and I saw that people would die. I immediately announced my intention to leave the platform at the end of the week… and that’s what I did.

It feels strange. I was on Qwitter for thirteen years, and although that’s less than a quarter of my age, it feels like quite a long thirteen years because so much has happened in that time. I took up time lapse photography and ditched it again; I made a movie with my son; I made a couple of trips to the USA, one to watch an eclipse, again with my son; I went through political awakening, marched for a better world in London and Brighton, and finally had enough and moved 600 miles north, becoming a New Scot. It’s odd, after all that, to be shifting again to a new phase.

But actually… I’m all about new phases. Anyone who knows me would tell you what a butterfly I am, flitting from new hobby to new hobby, always starting things and trying things. So perhaps this will be good for me. It will certainly not hurt my mental health to get away from the toxicity I’ve left behind me.

So I’m looking forward to learning how it all works, this fediverse thing. At the moment I’ve sort of half grasped it. It feels like Mastodon calling to Mastodon like aunts across a primaeval swamp, to mangle Wodehouse for a moment. I’ll settle in soon. I’ve already been spurred into action and revived this blog again, which is a good thing. I’d become rather despondent that I let it drop after a handful of posts, so it’s satisfying to see the wheels spinning once more. Hopefully, they’ll grip the road this time.