Content Nausea No. 95: The Boys Are Leaving Town
Will we find our way back home? / (I don't know)
Welcome to the 95th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 94 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
I’ve been trying to workshop the most glib kiss-off I can think of for the past 18 hours or so, ever since the histrionics about the downfall of Twitter reached a fever pitch last night.
The requisite disclaimer: I understand that the service provided platforms, access and audiences to many who wouldn’t normally find those things through traditional means. I understand that something will be lost when/if Twitter (eventually) disappears. I understand it’ll probably fundamentally change my industry.
Anyway, don’t think about it too much.
On Thursday night, my colleagues were getting their jokes off and posting links to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr (I see you, Maya), Mastodon, Substack, Goodreads, etc. accounts. (Potential kiss-off tweet idea: “Hey everybody, if the worst occurs, please track me down at Yo, Peach and Ello”). I understand the impulse. I’ll probably do it at some point Friday once the seas are a bit calmer and people will actually see it. Wait, I forgot I sort of did it:
Anyway, things will be different, but that’s just the way that things work out. Twitter in 2009 is much different than Twitter in 2022, and not all of it is good, and if Twitter is still around in 2035 — there was no guarantee in 2009 that it would be around in 2022 — it’ll be much different, and not all of it will be good. It’s fine, things change.
Maya did a good job running through what it’s been like to be a professional on Twitter for the past decade-plus, including a harrowing account of having to use Klout for a college class. I think we had to use Klout for at least one class in college, but I’m not sure we were graded on it. I do remember using some tool called “Trove” that was for bookmarking and organizing stories into “troves,” or something along those lines, in a class, and it was annoying.
The first time I ever got called out by someone who was namesearching was in November 2010 after a Ra Ra Riot show at 9:30 Club. The opener, Givers, could fit into Dirt’s tidy “stomp, clap, hey” genre designation, if I remember correctly, and that was never my thing. I fired off a tweet to 40404 from my Samsung U740 Alias that Givers wasn’t my cup of tea. I don’t think I was overly snarky (unfortunately, I can’t go to the tape because I deleted that account a couple months later) because I was still trying to craft an “authoritative voice” as an 18-year-old on the internet. Anyway, I got a 40404 text a couple hours later:
Honestly, well played. That was my first encounter with namesearching. The most recent notable example came in September 2020 when the mother of a prominent NFL player put me on blast at like 6 a.m. one day because she said I misrepresented something that happened, even though all I did was directly quote her son’s boss. She had more than 10,000 followers, and I felt lucky nothing more came of that.
In retrospect, I’m glad my run-in Givers never completely dissuaded me from hating online. It just made me a little more discerning. Always go for the easy targets. Also, always play the hits. I’ve been doing this bit (which is true, by the way) for 10-and-a-half years at this point, and it works every single time:
Someone said this was an “odd hill to die on.” I think there’s a not insignificant amount of people who will be better off without Twitter.
I have a folder in my gmail titled “cool internet” which is essentially old emails I got from Twitter when people followed me or liked my tweets between 2010-13. I made it when I was cleaning out my gmail at some point in 2014 or 2015 and wanted to preserve some of the dumb things I tweeted because I didn’t download my archives before deleting my old accounts (RIP @inafternoonair; RIP @doctorxcool/@danieljtg; for better or worse, @danielsjorts still exists).
Some selections:
That folder also has the time that someone tried to extort me on Easter Sunday during the pandemic and also access to some truly unhinged posts. Fall 2012 was just a little rough?
Other greatest hits from my time on Twitter:
» Really going all in on the “#TurnLoveToLubeSongs” hashtag at some point in winter 2011. Personal favorite that I come back to every once in a while and chuckle at was “I’m The Man Who Lubes You” by Wilco.
» All of my Grammys tweets in 2011 and 2012 when Arcade Fire and Bon Iver won. Play the hits, man.
» Misadventures from tweeting lyrics to “Even If It Worked Out” by Cloud Nothings in summer 2010. Sorry!
» Flava Flav liked one of my tweets a couple weeks ago. He was namesearching, too.
» Tweeting, “It’s too early to have more than a feeling” when “More Than A Feeling” by Boston was playing in the North Campus Dining Hall in fall 2010. This is the only tweet from @danieljtg that I have really gone through a lot of effort to try to find. That account has some skeletons littered in my friends’ mentions.
» Finding out that I was living rent-free in my nemesis’ head in summer 2013.
» Consistently posting things that are relevant only to the smallest possible audience.
» Getting every tweet from ProFootballTalk pushed to my phone during NFL free agency in 2009, which was a dark precursor to my current existence.
In the past, I’ve scrolled back to the beginning of my “Following” list to see all the dormant accounts of people I went to high school and college with who were better people than me and simply left Twitter behind. Even though my following-follower ratio occupies an unhealthy amount of space in my brain (I wish I was following fewer than 1,000 people, but I don’t want to be one of those people who keeps it at 999 or something performative like that), I’m not going to unfollow those accounts. It feels like a nice little time capsule.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot this morning stems from this Delia Cai piece in Vanity Fair that sort of wrestles with the “what’s next?” question is that I feel like the community aspect of Twitter has become overrated. I already laid out the disclaimer above, and I’ve made plenty of friends and connections and professional acquaintances on the app, but I don’t feel like those “communities” are quite the replacement for communities that many people think they are.
Given the unhealthy amount of time I’ve spent on the computer since 2006 (props to my high school’s laptop program), I’ve built a robust network of “friends” or whatever you want to call them. I’ve met a lot of them in real life. Things like JQBX (RIP [I think?]) definitely helped in 2020 during the pandemic. But as 2020 dragged on and then I moved three-and-a-half hours away from any friends or family the next year, those URL communities were no replacement for the IRL. It’s fun and enjoyable to communally enjoy an event online and to want to see what everyone online is saying about something. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s not the same.
That’s something that I’ve been coming back to and was going to write about with regards to the Phillies’ World Series run. There was no replacement for being in Citizens Bank Park for Game 3 of the NLCS or being in a living room in South Philly during Game 5 or being out at Broad & Tasker immediately after that.
I’ve never been a “go outside” type, and the internet has been an overall net positive for me. And I completely expect that Twitter will hang on for a long, long time, given how prone we are for dramatics on the app. But I think the conclusion we can draw from reading Cai in Vanity Fair isn’t that we necessarily should try to do the same thing somewhere else. Maybe we should just do something different.
For the record, if I start being more consistent with this newsletter, it’s not because Twitter is dead. It’s because I realized that I actually enjoy doing this, I think.
Thank you for reading the 95th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
The boys are leaving town
The boys are leaving town
The boys are leaving town
Now
—D.G.