Twitter Bad

For those of us who use Twitter frequently (a decidedly terrible fate), a common observation is that Twitter always thinks we're approaching The End of the World™.

This is true even in times of extreme normalcy. A new, particularly insipid New York Times Opinion Column? End of the World. Donald Trump golfing? End of the World. A beloved bar closes down in Brooklyn? End of the World. Neera Tanden tweets something in bad faith? End of the World. Now that things are approaching something that could reasonably be considered the End of the World (a dual pandemic/climate change smackdown), Twitter is, of course, responding as Twitter does: an endlessly scrollable, bizarre mixture of grandstanding and panic.


Unfortunately, I, like many terminally online people, receive most of my news from Twitter. Now that I have cut myself off from Twitter (with the exceptions of little slippages during times of overwhelming curiosity and/or boredom) I have no idea what's happening. I get my news from my offline husband who reads it from the New York Times app. I still get the gist of what's going on (exponential coronavirus cases and total systemic incompetence in response to said cases) but without all of the, well, panicked grandstanding. My life has been mostly free of tweets like: "Here is the number for the CDC. Call them to demand better. Call your congresspeople. This is Very Serious. You, personally, should do something;" or, "I have the coronavirus. I am okay but everything is going to shit right now. Thread."

Some more tweets I am not seeing because I am trying to abstain:

- "Here's what Italy/China/etc did to contain the coronavirus. I, a random person with or without a blue checkmark am demanding that America must do something."

- Recurring gags about millennials surviving 2008 and now this, and, like the humble field mouse scurrying from filthy apartment to filthy apartment, we spend this time hurrying to find Sustenance, a single crumb on which to latch our crooked, grotesquely mistreated, generational teeth; meanwhile our boomer parents are all going to Chili's right. now.

- My favorite genre of Tweet (commonly retweeted by Me Personally) Restating over and over in various tones of righteous horror the fact that we can definitely afford to make the world better through universal healthcare or a Green New Deal and are in fact Not Doing That and are putting that money into the stock market (stonks.png), something that has fleeting relevance to me, someone who will never retire yet futilely puts a couple hundred dollars a month into a Roth IRA (which I now refuse to check.)

I never had any doubt that during the End Times we would be Tweeting Through It, however, I hoped that the tweets in question would be better somehow. Like, they would have a literary or poetic quality instead of the usual "This is an Emergency. I am very smart and feel better by saying that Things Are Bad and it's People's Fault."

My husband and I recently watched the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, which is about a knight who returns home from the Crusades only to be greeted by the spectacle of the bubonic plague. I am not pretending to be a film scholar here, but a lot happens in this film, including a chess game with Death, medieval Catholics being On One (burning a witch), and traveling through the woods with a troupe of ragtag actors. However, faced with the end of the world, there is a scene where the knight is eating strawberries and fresh cream with his actor friends and takes time to be thankful for such a happy, simple memory. Despite all of the deep, hard-hitting questions about God and Heaven and whether or not there is an afterlife, the film has a very simple and strangely uplifting point: the necessity of human kindness and friendship in the face of Death, the plague, a failed Crusade, everything going to hell in general.

Such things cannot be seen on Twitter, for even statements of solidarity and kindness are made with an air of self-superiority. I am doing the thing. I am being kind. I am helping the elderly. I am social distancing because we're all in this together, amirite? As fun as it is to pretend that we are in charge and we are superior because we tweet to our followers such things, in the end we are people at a computer with relatively little power, especially now that voting is all fucked up and social gatherings (such as protests) are prohibited. We realize that all we can do is yell into the void. It's almost as futile as playing a game of chess with Death, that great strategist, though much louder and significantly less poetic.