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Those aren't "Tweets", Those Are Your Thoughts (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-18 17:53:27
Edited:
2024-02-16 02:27:07
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The first in a series of written essays.

It's been a year and a half since I released Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos. I had important realizations about the internet and I like to imagine moved the needle forward slightly in our ability to think about it coherently. Since then I have been calcifying those thoughts into tangible arguments and clear convictions.

The video I am making currently expresses some of these convictions, but I'm also feeling slightly limited in the video medium. Some thoughts are ceasing to fit it. So I'm going to be using writing too.

I will be putting public written work on cjthex.substack.com 

All of the paywalled posts are also available on Patreon so don't go throwing your money there when u already got the goods.

Special thank you to Haweya who has been my partner in solidifying these thoughts.

Hope this makes sense to you.

x

Files

Those aren't "Tweets", Those Are Your Thoughts

What Twitter does to your mind, body & soul.

Comments

Josh Foreman

Do you mean there's some way to read this here on Patreon? I no see

CJ The X
>>108811590

the link is to a public post, the substack itself has some of the prose pieces that are previously posted on Patreon

Anonymous

Having just deleted twitter a week ago, this really resonated with me and how I’m feeling. ESPECIALLY with being black and trans! Twitter makes me so guarded around strangers, as if I’m projecting the hatred and ignorance I’ve seen into the minds of those around me. But since stepping away from it my outlook has improved and I’ve actually had the chance to notice how kind most people are, or at least try to be! Something I find very important to understand about social media is that so few people can take up SO much space. I remember some number that was like, 10% of twitter users make up 80% of the sites tweets. So when you go online you arent seeing thoughts equally contributed by all the range and variety of humanity, you are mostly seeing some very loud people who are probably spending more time on twitter than in reality. Its really two different worlds with some loose bridges between them.

Jack

It's such a surreal experience reading that essay on my phone while I'm still lying in bed at noon

Anonymous

I agree with everything CJ writes. I don't use Twitter, but I know Instagram negatively effects my perceptions of our world, specifically my relationship to art. I don't use social media necessarily to promote my work or seek engagement, but it's helped me make connections and lead me to real world artistic opportunities. I want to know how to keep making these connecting and sharing my work while offline, but the task (although I'm sure possible with hard work) seems impossible with my schedule. It seems that the answer is to step away from social media while fostering and growing my relationship to art and to trust and see what happens. Still, the decision to leave remains difficult.

margaret (formerly Samson)

Allow me to give you some instant gratification Initial Thoughts (as anyone who posts anything might crave as soon as they release their work into the world, and as I am having late lunch now and had time to read and now to think.) I didn't realize you still had Twitter. I am still not convinced you do, and even if you do, I'm not touching it, there is a limit to where I would follow you and apparently it's Twitter. But, you speak as though it's a part of your life. So that's interesting. Are you speaking of your own experience, or of what you see in others? Perhaps you are using Twitter as shorthand for "the social Internet" - TikTok is arguably worse than Twitter as far as addiction, and all the other sites do the same thing in different formats, so maybe that's just a simplification thing. This reminds me of, I think it was Nietzsche, who was going blind and couldn't write without making the problem worse. And someone gave him a typewriter so he could still write, and he went to town on it. But then he (or someone else- I'm remembering the story from some other video essay, but this is the gist) noticed that his writing style was different in print vs handwriting, and Nietzsche was so unnerved by this that he threw the typewriter away, not wanting the core of his expression to be so changed by the writing instrument he used. There is something different about when I write here vs when I used to write on Reddit vs when I comment on Instagram or YouTube vs when I send an email vs when I write in my journals. Here, I'm in conversation with mostly anonymized others and it's longer form, timeless, philosophically seasoned, Big Brain Shit. On Reddit, maybe it's long form, but there's no conversation over time - you're either in the thread or it's no longer Hot, no longer interesting. You aren't thinking alongside other people like I get to do here. It doesn't encourage that posture towards your own ideas or towards others. No chance for that on Instagram. I am not in a life stage conducive to rigorous academic reading and studying, nor do I have the brain for it, nor am I convinced it's the thing I need to do. And yet, since March, I've found myself lingering here, teacher's petting the comment sections and refining replies in google keep over days until I feel the point is worth sharing. (And I really appreciate that you've built and continued to sustain a space like this, that rewards longer form, thoughtful Cold Takes.) There's a bit of refuge, a bit of monastery, a bit of commune, a bit of Truth here, and I don't have anything quite like it anywhere else in my life. There is good, to be sure, but this space is valuable to me. Does this space count as Twitter-like? Or is it just the for-profit-ness that we avoid? Beck's Communion (which is no doubt connected here) and 3-\2 have an undercurrent that it's not just about the attention economy of it all, but also about the virtual vs physical space side, or something about making our experiences more real than just letters and numbers on a screen. I'm interested in where you think we _should_ go, if not just crawling back to Twitter/social platforms. Obv there's the "go touch grass/start local" thing, and yes, let's all do that. But at the same time, I don't want to lose the good here, I don't want to turn my back on the kinds of thoughts and conversations we get to have in this space, this weird Internet setting where we're scattered around the world and cyborging to be together. (It reminds me of what @AliceMae said in the latest book club post, grieving the loss of a manmade ecosystem that is being undone in favor of an older Earthmade ecosystem.) I don't want to go local, or at least I don't want Local to be the extent of what I do, or at least I don't want to never be Here Too. Maybe that's some black and white thinking, too much duality, idk, but it sort of feels like the trajectory of your argument eventually lands us in the territory of "only use technology as a means to doing more in the Physical world", at least if I take you seriously and really fully live out the spirit I see in your words. Maybe I'm just wishing that this community existed within walking distance of my door. ("So go make that community" I hear my nagging personal demon say. I'm not gifted in that. Building community requires strengths and energies and consistency that I don't have. The opportunity cost of my ADHD is the good I know that could be done, but that I'm not able to force myself to do. And that nagging voice in my head telling me that I'm just being lazy and selfish if I don't force myself to do it anyway sounds remarkably like my mom, telling me that I'm not enough.) And, the technology is here to stay. Maybe not all its ills (perhaps we'll get away from ad-funded spaces?) but people are going to be collaborating across the planet more than ever. Do we Luddite, or do we dig in and try to find better ways of being? These questions are nothing new, but I do feel the field of This Question has been advanced a quarter step, at least in my mind. Thank you CJ and Haweya for these words and the thoughts that they stirred in me in response. I'll probably come back and reread this a few times this week. :)

F.D Signifire

CJ I need to chat to get that footage

joel beebe

beautifully said, Mr. X I just deleted my twitter like a week ago because I had so many tweet-thoughts, and you articulated a lot of what I was feeling <3

mango

what you said about your thoughts being shaped by what you’re interacting with really stood out to me because I know after I spend a couple hours talking with friends, the voice in my head starts to sound like that friend and same if I’ve been watching a tv/show my thought become the character’s voices and if I’ve been texting with gifs a lot my thoughts turn into gifs etc. etc. I’ve never heard someone put this experience into words before but I’m so glad you did

Beck
>>108816211

While I would maintain that there is something unique and sacred about the connection that comes with being physically close to people, I don't think that the through-line here is necessarily anti-technology Ludditism. Obv CJ makes a living on the internet, we have community over the internet, this Patreon (as you point out) is a very positive internet space. This article is about Twitter, specifically. If it was about TikTok or social media more generally, there would be different critiques. There is something unique and worth directly addressing about the 280-character facemash of Twitter. The internet is not a monolith. Some places are better than others. I think Patreon is great because it self-selects for people who have passion for the same ideas and it doesn't rely on an ad model. You pay for Patreon—you are not the product. So it's useful to think critically about the technologies we're using. What do they incentivize, what effect do they have on us? What's the actual experience of being here? It's good to be honest about it and to drop certain technologies when they stop doing work for us. When they get more value from us than we get from it. Of course there's value to internet communities; personally I wouldn't have met most of my best friends without the internet. I don't think anybody can deny that these days. The internet allows us to find people who care about the same things that we do without being constrained by physical location. And to dive deeply into things. And to be curious and explore. Etc. But if what you care about is, for example, philosophy about art and goodness and what it means to have a good life (which does not necessarily have to be academic, it can literally just be the act of Doing philosophy), hopefully talking about that philosophy on the internet will naturally, inevitably, spill out into the communities of your real life. Otherwise, what's the point? Is the end goal to have internet friends just for the sake of having internet friends or is the end goal to pursue beauty/truth/goodness? Because even on the internet, those things exist most profoundly in the context of community, in texts or DMs or conversation between a couple of people, not in mass-posting for a mass-audience (I think). So, yes, the goal is to find better ways of living, and that goal might entail cutting out technologies that do not give us a better way of living, it might entail using certain technologies more consciously and carefully, it might entail disconnecting from technology entirely when existing primarily in physical "real-life" space is the most useful thing to do. All of these things are pieces of the puzzle, I think.

Ariane Barnes

I'm still getting through "Games: Agency as Art" by C. Thi Nguyen, (thank you for the recommendation), but in a lecture available on You Tube, Dr. Nguyen called Twitter and the rest of social media "moral outrage porn". Obviously not everything on Twitter is moral outrage porn, but it is what the most popular and shared tweets usually have in common. It is what you post in order to win the "game" of Twitter. The lecture is at https://youtu.be/1LpbGW3qLVg

Eli

great piece! I'm a big fan of assemblage theory and I love how you interwove it with your thoughts. You've been putting out so much content I haven't caught up with but I'm very glad I took the time to read this. Maybe I'll actually get rid of twitter this time.

Matthew B

I skipped over this at first but now that I've read it this bit is rattling my brain and reinforcing some stuff I've been thinking about lately. "When you turn your thoughts into Tweets, you’re doing free labour for a corporation that is working overtime to gamify your attention and social life. But when you turn your thoughts into texts to friends and family, you are building relationships." This gives me an ego crisis. Fuck capitalism, but in some ways, when I tweet I'm intentionally sending that thought into the void. The only people who will be disturbed by it are people who have done something to draw it to them. If I send it t my friends I'm putting my concerns on their plate. I'm not afraid to do that sometimes but I don't want to intrude on them too much. I don't like how much time I spend thinking about The Algorithm. The Algorithm served me a song that I like but it's got a Jesus reference in it, so if I actually click like is The Algorithm going to start flooding me with contemporary Christian music? I know they're tracking how long I listen to it - is a replay stronger or weaker than a like? Etc.

margaret (formerly Samson)
>>108816211

@Beck Thank you for derailing the runaway train of Luddite thought that happened in my brain yesterday* (*nope now it's 27 may) ! I'm a little starstruck, I really loved Communion, and yet I'm sensing that I missed something, or overlaid a bias or assumption that I shouldn't have. Or maybe the two aren't as connected as my mind may have imagined. I've had a little satellite dish poking out of the side of my brain, collecting anything about social media and what to do with it that I've read or watched since like 2016 / 2018. Over time, the pattern is very strong - "real life is not online" and "social media is not friendship" - to the point where I'm surprised (and almost suspicious) when I find anyone who ends their assessment of any platform without saying "get rid of all of it". Perhaps I've been overexposed to the arguments against Internet mediums and they have become over powered in my brain. And likely there, as here, I'm so used to mediums and spaces being named individually but just as examples of things more broadly applied, and I read the criticisms of others as applying outward to similar (but not the same) platforms and tools. Instagram shares many of the negative downfalls of Twitter, bringing it's own to the party. Reddit and 4chan and Tumblr have different vibes but similar behaviors. Everyone criticizes TikTok, but it's basically just video Twitter, with more richness, but also easier lying and manipulation. So when it comes to the question of "should we use the Internet", the Internet... If it's those things... Is kind of overall a fuzzy Bad, with only a few Happy Anecdotes of positivity here and there. And when we ask "so what do I do now" we land roughly around "we should stop using it, the benefits do not outweigh the costs, the consequences are too great." Juxtapose that with the glory of friendship and community physically experienced, and it's easy to imagine that the Real World is better than the Online Space, that the Happy Anecdotes are not worth the degradation of our physical communities. But you in this comment have started to point the conversation to the next space, approaching the problem in a more precise way. When we add the layer of complexity and precision, shifting away from "is the Internet good or bad" and towards "what can make the Internet good or bad", then those happy anecdotes hovering on the outskirts of the web can start to provide us with a counterexample, and something that we might even want to aim to build. I'm not sure if I'm totally past the step of acknowledging that the Internet is not actually Bad, and that the more pressing question is of what we should do to/with/in it. It's not yet clear to me that the Happy Anecdotes turn into Data when they are pluralized, I'm not yet settled on the idea that we should stay in the Internet, not just because it's here and not going away, but because it's actually not a bad way to be human. But I guess encountering you, with your refusal to bend the knee to hard line Luddism, kind of validates the value of the Internet. Perhaps that validation that the case isn't already closed is helpful in itself. Thank you for that, and for the prompt to have these additional thoughts. I must mull over them over time :)

Stef

There was an incredible short book I read this year called No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood that really captures that affect twitter has on your brain and way of seeing life. Highly recommend it! Unfortunately I have to stay on Twitter for now as the disability community's mutual aid that helped me survive needs me to boost it and help as many people who need it as possible. There's an amazing woman called Tinu Abayomi Paul who currently is on doctor mandated rest but is a leader in the disability community and she used to work in tech. She is working on a way to make a system that helps everyone and doesn't rely on twitter. She has cancer so needs to focus on recovery but she shares her thoughts on patreon as she is able. It's real food for thought and if she succeeds with it it'll help a lot of people. Another reason I'm staying on twitter is being able to see the direct thoughts and research of tonnes of covid scientists in one place. The news isn't reporting it so it's my only easy place to get such important info. I want to take my mind elsewhere as much as the next guy but for now it's not possible.