Wat is happening on the web?
/As Twitter seems to be slowly 4chan-ing itself out of existence, I find myself wondering: why am I still here doomscrolling this godforsaken site? Does witnessing the death of a community provide pleasure or something? When did I even get here and what brought me here in the first place?
Whenever I lurked (a lot), I always felt like, well, a lurker. An outsider not clever enough to play the game of 280 chars (or 140 before then) — too slow to clap-back, but always eager to watch tweeps attempt to command compelling ideas with the limited real estate they had. Usually it was meh, but sometimes it was gold.
Another reason I felt out of place in the Twittersphere is that, unlike the gladiators who I watched, for as long as I can remember I’ve felt a strong personal reluctance (maybe even a cowardice) to discussing anything political online. Like, I do consider myself quite politically passionate and active, but the idea of doing it on the web felt out of my comfort zone.
But maybe one reason I’m so glued to this most recent turn of events in the world of internet culture is that it is the story of a cultural practice (making edge-lord proclamations at <280 chars at a time that I saw value in but hardly participated in) finally falling out of fashion.
And while this destruction of culture is genuinely sad (given how many real communities / careers / movements etc were forged in it), somehow this whole saga feels like a release for me. Like, Twitter felt like the last monolithic internet cultural hub, and it’s finally dismantling, and now the internet feels completely unfederated and wild-west again… at least for me it does because I’m not caught up in the newer forms of social media, and am good to stay away from it for a while.
I guess all of this is to say: this post is meant to just document where it feels like my compass is pointing: the internet feels weird again (in a good way), and somehow it feels like there’s breathing room for me to blog again, even if only for myself.
