Aka fuck you, Elon

We humans have an innate ability to recognise dangerous and mentally unhinged individuals and vote them into positions of power.

Concept

I quit Twitter. Not that it matters, but I had decided to quit way before the 2024 US election and subsequent exodus. I was telling my sisters about it back in August. I said I would make a book out of all my old SNS stuff. My two sisters are also very close friends, and they, unlike nearly all my other close friends, use SNS a fair bit. But not Twitter. None of my close friends were ever on Twitter. You see most of my friends live out in the countryside and they don’t give a fuck about much except their strawberries in the greenhouse. But anyway, my sisters thought it was absurd to do a book of my inane posts and shitposts. Who would want to read that? That’s my blood relatives. Later that night, I actually cried, I shit you not.

[Free audiobook sample there. Yeah, I know… keep the change]

So why am I doing this book, and how the fuck did I manage to get it published? Good questions. Maybe you’ve stumbled across a tweet or two of mine over the past decade and a half. Maybe you thought this book would be funny. And if you read this far and haven’t laughed yet, relax, give it time, you impatient sod. You must have heard of snippet literacy? People blamed Twitter for that, in fact they blamed it for everything. I assume that you never even liked Twitter that much either. You probably have more brain cells than you do retweets. You, I assume, like me, are an intelligent sentient human being with ideas and dreams of your own. And you probably love reading books about people like me, whose ideas and dreams are now lying obliterated on the floor in a pool of digital tears and other bodily pixel fluids, as I delete my Twitter account and try not to choke on my own resentment about the fact that nobody, nobody at all not even closest friends, gave a flying fuck about any of it.

I’m always happy to follow any online trend blindly, as part of the rearguard of course. As I said, I already had the idea of quitting first, but I am one of the last idiots to actually do it. I’ve just quit Twitter, made all my stuff private. Downloaded the archive. No, I don’t think I’ll go on Bluesky or Threads either. I am just utterly and completely over the whole fucking “microblogging” thing. Yeah, that’s what people used to call it.

I joined Twitter way back in the day, on a sleepless night in London, Sep 22, 2009, 2:25 AM. As I said in one tweet marking my 15-year anniversary, “It has been literally the worst 15 years of my life”. Totally not true, obviously. Call it hyperbole, or just a cry for engagement. But would more people have cared if I had been clever and said “It has been literally the most recent 15 years of my life” or something. No. Nobody ever gave a shit about me on Twitter. In those 15 years I amassed a huge following of 73 people, most of them utterly inactive, nearly catatonic accounts like my own, who never liked or retweeted me and I never followed any of them back either. Thanks, we were a great team. But I was the epitome of a sore Twitter loser. In those 15 years I wrote a total of 556 tweets, each one of them just a stupid little blurb I was hoping someone somewhere might notice and think was funny, maybe follow me.

Mind you, I did get Arnie following me once, very early on. Yes, I checked it was VERIFIED Arnie’s account, like actually Arnold Schwarzenegger. You don’t believe me, but idgaf. I even blogged about it back then, calling it a divine sign to keep writing. No, better than that, a sign from Arnie Himself.

But Arnie stopped following me when I foolishly sent Him a direct message, demanding to know why on earth He was following me, and like the better part of all our collective judgements, He’s decided not to engage anymore. So, I can no longer prove it was Arnie. And the blog post I told you about. Gone. Yeah, I had trouble paying rent, let alone domain names. But seriously, why would I make that up? Oh, to make money and cash in on a lie… right. Yeah sorry, I know that’s why we all quit Twitter, but take my word for it, Arnie followed me even though I wasn’t following Him, and I’ll tell you such a compelling tale about how and why and what happened next, you will I’m sure choose to believe me.

Because truth is now about context. And fuck me but Twitter was a bastard for out-of-context essentialised and minimalised shite and we all fell for it even though we must have smelled the fart jokes and the toxic masculinity for miles.

Fact: Men get more retweets than women, even in niche circles like health services research. That’s even when you take account for the fact that Twitter was always a sausage fest at 60.9% male to 39.1% female.

Here is Twitter’s eulogy in <280 characters, you know for old times sakes.

Twitter, you beautiful, broken hellscape. You gave us trends, wars, and covfefe. A digital pub where everyone yelled and nobody left sober. Now you’re gone, and we’re stuck explaining what a “ratio” was to future generations. Thanks for getting pixel stains all over my life. X

Btw, in case you don’t know, A “ratio” on Twitter is when the number of replies to a tweet vastly outnumbers its likes and retweets. It’s basically the internet’s way of wrinkling its nose at a bad smell. It actually is just a simple ratio:

Likes/Retweets > Replies = People agree or/and find it funny AF.
Replies > Likes/Retweets = Noses wrinkled; people pissed.

A spectacular example you may remember was the United Airlines Incident in 2017. We all know airline companies are arseholes, and this was one of the reasons nobody (except billionaire dicks like the Virgin megaboss and NHS-suing mass killer, Richard Branson) had any sympathy when airlines were fucked by COVID.

There was a widely circulated video, equal parts tragicomedy and shocking, of a passenger who refused to get off the plane after it was overbooked. Dr. David Dao was the dude’s name and he got a broken nose, though that’s nothing compared to the sting from the millions of people who saw him being dragged down the aisle of the plane, as he was wrenched from his precious seat and personal dignity. In the aftermath, CEO Oscar Munoz issued a statement (a fancy word for a tweet):

“This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United. I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers.”

That got Munoz a whopping 50,700 replies but only 6,274 likes, a stark 8:1 ratio. Haha. But who the fuck were those six thousand likes from?

The reason I’m telling you is that obviously to make this book worthy of buying, it needs to have more words than what I wrote on Twitter over the past 15 years, so I’m riffing, I’m vibing… I’m spewing facts and shitting stats to keep your attention. It’s the attention economy after all and I’m bored of re-reading my tweets as well. I wanted to fit it into a broader context to make sense of it all and try to find where the last 15 years of my life went. You know after a nasty breakup, you might either a) see a therapist or b) get really drunk or c) do both over an extended period. Like that.

Here is some more interesting shit but, this time its purpose is merely to demonstrate that I actually know stuff and don’t just rip off Wikipedia articles and plagiarize them for money like some fuckers out there do (yes, like you I’m sceptical of every word I read at the moment in case some lazy tosser just got ChatGPT to wite it all. Though it’s a lie to say I don’t use an LLM when I write, as even a basic text is AI powered nowadays. Also, my grammar ability has been affected by reading stuff like “I can has cheeseburger” for way too long.

John Lennon once said, “I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.” I found that quote in Far Out magazine, but I’m pretty sure I also read it in Barry Miles’ biography of Paul McCartney. In true Lennon-esque fashion, you could say I took this ethos to heart with this little book of pixel farts. In fact, Lennon would have probably been huge on Twitter, Imagine. This short story from his first book would have been utterly spot on for Twitter:

“A man went into a shop and bought a pair of shoes. He put them on and walked out of the shop. The shop was on fire.” John Lennon, In His Own Write (1964)

I can even see exactly which .gif he’d put (KC Green’s Question Hound in the burning house saying “This is fine”).

I know this whole book sounds like a bit of a bitterness concept and a ‘I could have been someone’ cry drama puke fest. I know, I did Twitter all wrong. You have to be consistent, play the long game, engage people. All this shite. Who has fucking time for that? Everyone, it seems. The whole world is full of influencers now, everybody has at least 50K followers and any less makes you look pathetic. For 15 years I have had my flies down and my dick hanging out like a prat when I should have been churning out good satire, wry observation and sarcaustic wit with a ceaseless consistency like a machine or human algorithm. Instead, I was working two jobs, raising a family and moving to another country. My life was a pathetic jumble of chaos and my SNS feeds reflected the fact that most of the time I did post anything, it was when I was drunk, drunker, or drunk and bitter. In an odd way, this book is a bit of a mirror for me to hold up to myself and notice what an arsehole I’ve been for the last 15 years. I wanted something, but not enough to actually make it happen. I wanted followers, but I didn’t know why and didn’t care who. I wanted recognition, but for what? I hadn’t done anything.

I’m fucking oversharing here now but that’s a given. There are established links between SNS, addiction and depression. Obviously if I was drunk all the time in the last 15 years that tells you something about me. It tells me something about me too. Something I was clearly too drunk to notice before. I was also pretty bitter about stuff, but not proactive. This is a sign of depression, so yeah, this book is also a kind of therapy for me. If you have just quit Twitter and you are feeling blue (and I don’t mean Bluesky blue, fuck that), then I hope reading these sad but hopefully very fucking funny little pixel farts and void chirps will make you realise it was all a big fucking embarrassing waste of time.

This is a curated book of my best blurt bytes and tweet splats, a Goodbye Twitter present to the world. You are very much welcome.