The beautiful place where all the ugly technology comes from (Photo © Nick Jones)

I was one of the first 20,000 or so people to have Twitter. I remember being at SXSW shortly after its launch. Screens in the convention lobby were showing attendees’ tweets in real-time. Twitter employees were running around replacing dead and dying servers. It seemed like an important thing at the time.

I think we struggle to find a good purpose or higher meaning for anything we’re addicted to. In its time on earth, Twitter patted itself on the back as the enablers of the Arab spring, the #MeToo movement, and more. Any mass media platform could have done those things, but Twitter was the one that was there so they take the credit.

But not long after Twitter became part of our vernacular people started to wonder—the types of people who can usually be counted on to wonder—if it was good for us. What happens when the majority of the world is existing more or less in the public eye? And what does it say that so many people are doing it willingly? If I came to your house and told you that you had to share all the minutiae of our day with the world you would very likely be angry. But not us. We liked it. And then so many other apps came along whose very business models relied solely on our willingness to overshare.

I can look back over the last twelve years or so and tell you that for me it was not healthy. Relying on an external and unseen audience for approval, validation, and purpose is not only terrible for the human brain—but it’s well-known that it is. I’ve wrestled with who I am as a person, and whether or not the things I created were of value if I didn’t talk about them online. Like, this isn’t news to anyone, really. It’s frankly crazy that we put up with it for as long we did.

The issue at hand now is that all the usual suspects—the governments, the oligarchs, the bad-actors on a global scale, the fascists—are taking over the tools, as they always will. Mass media has a history of infiltration by one extreme cause or another, and social media isn’t different. You combine the interests of business with the interests of government and you get fascism. Companies like Twitter always talk like the Beatles until there are lawyers or senators in the rooom; they pitch themselves like wide-eyed, hippy-dippy solutions to all the world’s ills, but are more than happy to sellout at the first opportunity.

So when that makes you mad, and if you feel like you need social media badly enough, you can pack up and leave. But I would urge you to consider for a moment (talking to myself here, too) that you don’t really need social media. Yes, this sentiment is not new. Yes, I sound like someone’s English professor. But it’s also very true.

In a dozen years, I’ve made so few connections that I would not have been able to make in some other way through these platforms. For most people, things like Twitter are not the great enabler they claim to be. (They could be, but the money isn’t in that particular aspect of these businesses.) My favorite people on Threads, for example, live minutes away from me in the huge city I live in.

In 2025 I think I’d like to rely less and less on this stuff (social media), and stop getting caught of in this ridiculous routine of indignantly packing up all my data to move from app to app in a huff when said app’s handlers are revealed to be evil in some new and terrible way. I have enough problems.

— Nick Jones