Three Alternatives to Twitter, And the Point of Life
Nov 8
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Right about now, it’s the question on every Extremely Online Person’s mind: should I stay, or, to paraphrase the words of a mighty band, should I go? I speak of Twitter, of course. And if you had misgivings before, well, the world’s richest man…buying it…just in time…totry and swaythe elections…for the Trumpists…and that was before he came out and saidVote for Trump! MAGA!!…well, right about now those misgivings are probably more like…
Feelings of disgust. It’s not the same anymore, is it? Tweeting, I mean. Now you know that everything you say can and will be used against you, not in a court of law, but by every kind of crackpot, fanatic, and lunatic out there, because it’s property of the Richest Man in the World Who Loves MAGA the Way Normal People Love Their Dogs. That’s….gross. It’d be gross enough to know that your thoughts and confessions and interactions were owned by the world’s richest man, but when the icing on the cake is that he vocally backs the kinds of maniacs who stormed Congress andkilled people? Yeah. Moral repulsion of an acute kind, Acute Gross Out Syndrome, is precisely what a normal person should feel, doubly over.
Go ahead and admit that you feel it. It’s OK. We all do, those of us whose names don’t end with “Trump Junior,” anyways. The good news is that, well, there are alternatives. First I’m going to discuss them, then I’m going to come back to the question of whether you should leave.
There are three kinds of alternatives to Twitter.
One is competing platforms likeMastodon. They’re nice. Friendly. Not cesspools. Even TikTok is a relatively happy and sane place compared to Twitter — hey, look, it’s people dancing. Whew, what a relief, you mean they’re not screaming death threats? Wow, that’s…amazingly normal. By all means join them, they’re fun and cool and nice, and no they’re not perfect, but most of them are a damned sight better than Twitter.
Two are communities proper, like, well,this one here at Medium. I love this place. I really do. We have something incredibly rare here: a community of sane and thoughtful people. You can read the comments and not want to throw up, but actually spend quite some time thinking and reflecting. I do it all the time. Over the years, you’ve gotten to know me, and I’ve gotten to know many of you. That’s excellent, and it’s unusual, because, well, places like this aren’t exactly common on the internet — where people are polite, kind, gentle, and friendly. I treasure and adore our community — we’ve built something special together.
Medium’s an excellent alternative to Twitter, in other words. The most common complaint I hear when I say that is a predictable one: “but it costs…five whole bucks a month!!” Listen, I know times are tough. But. There’s a lesson I learned the hard way: in the music world, it’s called buy nice, or buy twice. Meaning, get the nicest stuff you can afford, because, well, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with it. Let me put that another way: in this life, you don’t always get what you pay for. But you almost always don’t get what you don’t pay for. Rarely has that been truer than in the case of the internet, the Canonical Example being Twitter. It’s free, andit’s sucked for a long time. That’s precisely because there are no barriers to entry, so every crackpot in the world can join, and start yelling at women, Jews, kids, screaming death threats, convulsing in rage. Five bucks on the other hand, andthey’rethe ones running away screaming. Let’s be real, it’s the price of a cup of coffee — this isn’t a sales pitch though, so let me continue my thoughts.
When we say, baffled, “but should I leave Twitter,” what are wereallysaying? Well, we’re saying that we don’t take our media diet very seriously at all. I was there when Twitter began — not in the room with Jack and Ev, but one of its first serious users. And back when it was fresh, I loved it. But it changed. Back then, the internet was coated in the gloss of idealism. Back then, the world’s richest man wasn’t Voldemort on Mars, either. Things changed. The worldwent super far right, and instead of becoming a community protecting itself against that, Twitterlegimitizedit. And for the last few years, even though it made great strides, and a group of noble people worked very hard to make itbetter,the truth is thatit still wasn’t very good.
Good in what way, precisely? Well, good in the simplest and purest and most powerful way. Good foryou. I stopped using Twitter except very, very sparingly over the last couple of years because I noticed that it was becomingreally bad for me. It would put me in a strange state of over-excited hypervigilance, combined with a kind of head-spinning fatalism.Doomscrolling.You know it, we’ve all done it.
But, my friends, we were put here on this earth, and given this one life,for better and nobler reasons than that.
Reasons like what?
The argument for staying on Twitter, at least form reasonable people goes like this: don’t let the fascists win!
I’m not so sure about that. You see, as a survivor and student of social collapse, one thing I know for sure is that fascism feeds on conflict.I mean that in a deep way — we’ve been discussing it here lately. Whatisfascism? Underneath the various forms of hate, it’s an ideology that’s hard to really grasp because in it, conflict is the telos, the endpoint. It’s about perpetual, eveneternalconflict.
That’s a Nietzschean thing. To Nietzsche, God was dead, and now we were beyond good and evil, which meant that all that was left was the “will to power.” Those who could manifest their will and make it raw power were the ubermen, and those who couldn’t, the undermen. The job of a moral person, the point of a society, the purpose of human existence, of all existence — it was therefore conflict. The moral duty of the strong was to dominate and subjugate the weak — in a kind of eternal cycle. Nietzsche really thought this would go on forever — he called it the “eternal recurrence.”
Have you ever wondered why fascists seem to need conflict? Even proto-fascists.Think of the way that, I don’t know, soccer moms turned intodeath-threat-shouting school-board-meeting brownshirts. What on earth? What happened to these folks? They internalized the Nietzschean morality of eternal conflict is what. The strong have to prove that they are by dominating the weak, and that cycle never ends. You can see it on Twitter, because at some point — maybe around 2015 or so, right before Trumpism exploded, this cycle of hate went into hyperdrive.
Suddenly, everyone was getting death threats, intimidation, rape threats, slurs, bigotry. For just…existing. Hey, this…guy on Twitter just said…I should…die? What did you say to him? Me? I didn’t say anything! He just…went crazy! The eternal recurrence. Nietzsche would have been proud.
How do youreallyfight fascism? If you understand the above, then you should begin to get that fascism feeds on conflict. It can’t really live without it.Think about it, let me make it real for you. What happens after the fascists successfully persecute one group? They move on to the next one. And the next, and the next. In Britain, which isn’t even fascist, just ultra-nationalist, that cycle’s gone from…Europeans…to all immigrants…to refugees who try to slash their own wrists before Britain human trafficks them dictatorships in violation of international law. Fascists just keep going. They need to, because otherwise, they’re not proving the strong survive and the weak perish. The entire ideology is about eternal conflict because that’s you prove that you’re the ubermen — you need someone to hate and brutalize and attack, which is why Twitter became ground zero for them, fascism never had a place to make the eternal recurrence real, andthen Twitter came along.
Reallyfighting fascism is much, much harder than just picking fights. That’s what they want. Theywantthe opportunity to call you a “f*g” and a “b*tch” and worse and say you deserve to be r*ped and killed and hung and tortured. And they want you to get wrapped up in that, with them, so you’re part of the eternal recurrence of conflict, too. Otherwise, the air goes out of the whole fascist project.
So whatdon’tthey want? They don’t want you to stop fighting them, and start coming together todo something constructive.I use constructive in the loosest possible sense. You could…go make some art. Go to the bar. Take a friend to a restaurant. Or you could get involved in politics, run for office, take a course and learn how to write a bill — you could get politically active, but that’s not really what I mean.
You know what fascists are really afraid of? I’m going to say it out loud.Love. Do you know what the prime thoughtcrime was in 1984, the point of the whole book? Big Brother’s entire objective was to stop people fromloving. Hence, when Winston fell for Julia, his whole world turned upside down.
But there are many kinds of love, aren’t there. There are so many names of love that each of us has two or three of them asour“names.” My name means “life” and “truth,” two of the names of love. What does yours mean? Have you ever thought about it that way?
Being constructive in this sense is just..enacting love.I know we live in cynical times. That’s cool. I know I’m a lover, and I’m not ashamed of it. Most of us are, and the problem we have is that it’s become uncool to love. We have to pretend that we’re deadass and dead-eyed and oh so cool that nothing affects us. Look at me! Cold as ice!! Ha-ha I’m laughing at the end of life on planet earth for five million years. How cool am I? Actually, that’s not cool at all. They’ve got you right where they want you, which is fighting with them, while you’re too afraid to stick up forwhat you really love.
So…what is it? You see, life has a way of beating it out of us.Love, the things we love, doing them, creating them. Life these days, under the rise of the fasicsts, leaves us playing along with these foolish norms of pretending to be too-cool-to-love-anyting at all.It’s a lie.We all love something more than life itself. Let me give you my own example.
I made a friend recently. That’s weird for a) a guy b) especially like me. Miles goes to my dog park, and one day, I was wearing aPhiladelphia RecordsT-shirt. That’s an old disco label, one of the classics. While Snowy and Lola played, Miles asked me, “Hey…so…do you likedisco?” It turns out that we both love it, we both used to play records, and now we’re starting a disco night.
That’s what I mean.Something as simple as that. Now, you might say, what the hell does that have to do with fascism, and the answer is,well,everything. Disco, you see, was the antithesis of fascism. It began as a way for minorities — gays, Latinos, Black people — to come together and do their own thing. Relate, know each other, dance. That memory’s been lost in mainstream history, but discowas aboutliberation.
Now. Where don’t they like people getting together like that? I can tell you lots of places. Those ruled by religious fanatics, where you can still be stoned for listening to the wrong music, or dancing, or being gay, or any of the above. For having a relationship. I often used to say, when I was in the jaws of real fascism, that the best thing America could do in that part of the world wasn’t bombing it — it was openingbars. Because everybody loves those, except one kind of person.
Bombs can maybe stop fascists, but they can’t stop peoplebecomingfascists. Bars, on the other hand,do. You sit there and you relate and learn and chat and know.Hey, that guy that I thought was so scary and different from me and found so threatening? You know what, he’s a lot like me. Hell, I even kind oflikehim. I wonder what we’ll talk about tomorrow. Now enemies have become friends. That’s how you really fight fascism.
Sadly, we don’t think in this way, which is exactlywhy I want you to. We fight fascism withlove. Not by lovingit. Gross, man, do you think I’m telling you to…what…go date a Trump? Go hug the creepy dude who bought Twitter? LOL,no. I’m telling you to get constructive andput into this world what you love. When you do that, when enough of a society does that, fascism stands no chance.
Let me distill all that.
We all have something that we love. What’s yours?Mine is music. I enact in in a lot of ways. I work on songs with singers, I’m starting my disco night with Miles (you’e all invited, beautiful people that you are.) You? Maybe yours is art. Writing. Reading. Painting. Maybe it’s math. History. Maybe it’s animals.It doesn’t matter at all.
You know what’s a far, far better use of your time thanTwitter? That thing. That oneright there. The thing you love.
You see when we’re wrapped up creating, building, enacting the things we love, whataren’twe doing? We’re not wrapped up in conflict which is what the fascists want, for one. But at a deeper level, we are’t harming anyone or anything, but doing the very opposite.We’re bringing all those names of love to life. Maybe your thing is painting. What names of love are you enacting? Beauty, truth, illumination. Maybe it’s something totally different…let’s say, animals. Which ones are you enacting then? Mercy, gentleness, nurturance. Love goes on, and it has infinite names. Love is eternal. But we have to bring it to life.
And when we do, that’s when societiesreally change. They don’t change just by bickering with the bad guys. Or even going to war with them, really. They change when people’s minds, souls, and hearts are expanded, elevated, transformed, by all those names of love. When so much love, in all those forms, surrounds them, that it’s opposite — hate —doesn’t stand a chance.
I know you feel me, but you might not still get me. That’s OK. Think it over. Take your time with it. You have one life. One breath. One heartbeat. What do you want to do with it? Spend it on Twitter? Or do you want to bring the names of love to life? Which one do you think is nobler, truer, more beautiful, fuller of grace? Which one do you think will make you happier and deeper and bigger and better? Which one do you think can actuallychange things that need changing, like this world?
Nietzsche was wrong. He died penniless and alone for a reason. His ideas were crazy and foolish. Hate isn’t eternal. The point of existence isn’t the strong proving they’re strong by dominating the weak. The purpose of life isn’t conflict.We know that. We know it because the Nazis tried, and look where they took the world, and themselves. But we also know it by just looking at the world around us. My little dog Snowy will come up and boop you on the ankle. You’ll grin, even if you’re a terrible bigot and awful racist. Nietzsche waswrong.
What’s eternal? Not hate. Love. Love is all there is, my friends. It is the beginning and the end, the truth and the flame. But it’s up to us to bring it to life.That is our test in this life. Camus put it precisely correctly when he said “every day is the last judgment.” Every day, every moment, we choose. Do we bring love to life? Or do we choose something else, something less, something easier? When we do, you know what happens? Love isn’t born in that instant. And in it’s place can rise hate, and all its poisons, from violence to brutality to ignorance to spite. Every moment is the last judgment.
I said there were three alternatives to Twitter, and I only told you two. The third one? It’sreal life. Living it, seriously, the way it was meant to be lived.No, that doesn’t mean dumb super yachts and notches on a bedpost. It means doing what you were put here, by the fates and old (wo)man time and the beating giant crystal heart of the universe, to do. You know it, and you’ve always known it, because the second you stop doing it, you feel small, alone, empty, afraid, or at least a little more so. You were put here to love, my friend. You are an expression and embodiment of the eternal. And your test is to give love back to itself. When you do that, you receive a little thing in return called happiness, grace, fulfillment. Life is aboutthat.
So I guess it’s up to you. Should you leave Twitter, or not? You know how the song goes. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. You shouldtake a lesson from Twitter, what it turned into. Hate is a black hole, that leaves nothing in the end, and whirls with all the names of that very sordid thing. Dip a toe in, and you might get sucked in, screaming back the whole time. You aren’t here to become a black hole, a void, a nothing, chasing the phantom of Zarathustra all the way down into Nietzsche’s own descent into being a crazy, embittered old man. You were put here by existence to love. That is whatyou are. Every aching inner fiber of you knows it, except the rational part of your mind that the world has conditioned to think the whole Nietzschean game is somehow true.
Love is when you touch the eternal, and it embraces youback, my friend.You know that, because each and everyone has had moment, glimmers, instants of it, and they sear us with the fire of the deepest truth there is. You looked into your child’s eyes. You understood your little pet was really a person. Sat on a beach and the sea murmured to you. And then youknewthat you, suddenly, immovably, that you had to give love, in some way, back to existence, the same way it createdyou,because that desperate ache you always felt…now you understood, at last, that this is what being trapped in mortal form…and touching eternity….is.
It’s all we have, and the rest?It never mattered at all.
Get real. You really want to spend your life pretending that you don’t know the point of itisn’tall that? Cool. Go right ahead. I’ll be here with the lovers, and we’ll be face to face with each other, while the night falls, and the stars burn, touching eternity.
UmairNovember 2022
