TwiXit

I’ve finally surrendered to the inevitable and will stop posting on TwiX. Obviously it’s been a bin fire for a while, and interactions with real humans have reached almost zero but, alongside Facebook and Instagram, it still seemed like somewhere I needed to be to promote my books. The final straw was Space Karen’s support of Trump and the fact that he seems to have parlayed that into political power (he met Iran’s UN ambassador? What the actual fuck?). I’m not an early adopter so the sudden upsurge of people I know moving to Bluesky offered an alternative. As such, you can now find me on Bluesky as iainmaloney.

This week The Guardian newspaper, one of my main sources of news, announced that it will no longer be posting on TwiX either. In response, a friend posted on Facebook that it was akin to stomping off in a huff because you are losing, calling it “mean-sprited and short-sighted.” I’ve been thinking about this all week because it’s something that has worried me and has been partly behind my delay in hitting the eject button.

The argument goes that we are all moving further into our own echo chambers and that echo chambers are bad. Echo chambers are why the Democrats were so blindsided by the recent election results, why Trump could win the electoral college and the popular vote. The Democrats were only talking to people who already agreed with them and not reaching the people who really mattered in this election: the working class. Preaching to the choir, we used to say. Now it’s an echo chamber. I’m not a US political analyst so I don’t know how true this critique is, but it’s one of the main theories doing the rounds and from my limited perspective seems at least plausible.

Something about the echo chamber argument has always bothered me. Sure, completely cutting yourself off from all input can’t be healthy. Never hearing a contrary idea or opinion is dangerous. But does that mean you should engage with absolutely everyone, and join in every conversation? Because that sounds worse to me.

While I was pondering this debate and my own TwiXit, Gaby Hinsliff wrote in The Guardian that the demise of TwiX (she didn’t call it that, I do, to amuse myself) means that “the era of mass social platforms is over.” I think she’s right, and I think that’s why so many of us were hanging on, hoping someone would pull the yoke before we crashed into the mountains. In that article, which echoed so much of my own thinking, she referred to “the final death of the idea that social media could ever be the internet’s town square, a global meeting place for ideas that would broaden all our horizons.”

I hadn’t heard that expression for a while. “The internet’s town square.” For those of us who remember when all this was fields, that was one of the big selling points of the internet and social media back in the day. The world can come together and share ideas. We can talk to each other. People referred to the ancient Greek marketplaces where Socrates and Plato would hang out and argue. So much hope. So much potential. Were we ever so young? Were we really so naive?

My friend’s analysis of The Guardian leaving TwiX and Gaby Hinsliff’s obituary for mass social platforms coalesced and clarified something for me. Yes, we were that naive.

TwiX and the other social media platforms are like a marketplace, like a pub, like a cafe. They are public places where people meet and interact, where people chat and exchange ideas. You meet your friends in a pub (I’m a Scottish man in my 40s, this is the analogy that feels most comfortable for me but insert your own cultural/age appropriate public space). You go on dates to the pub. I’ve had university classes in pub. I’ve joined clubs and groups that meet in the pub. Pretty much every creative writing group I’ve been in has met in the backroom of a pub. TwiX was like that. You talk to your friends. You meet new people there. You arrange to meet there and then go on somewhere else.

Now, when you went to the pub—at least in Scotland—one thing you didn’t do was drop down at a random stranger’s table and join in their conversation. You didn’t overhear two people at the bar talking and pass comment on what they were saying. You didn’t spend Friday night as part of one mass conversation involving everyone out drinking that night. You stood at the bar or sat at a table with your friends—new or old—and had a chat. It was public. People could hear you. People could join in but manners and the lack of anonymity meant they rarely did, at least early on in the evening. But the public aspect meant you watched what you said.

I’m not claiming it was idyllic, of course not. Alcohol was involved so when everyone was drunk enough then it could “kick off” and things could escalate. I worked in bars, I was a bar manager in Aberdeen for 18 months, I know these situations well. The fights were broken up, the people thrown out and, in extreme situations, barred.

If you get this joke, you are truly my brother or sister.

No one would ever describe a pub, cafe, or marketplace as an echo chamber. You had no control over who else was drinking in there but you did have control over who you interacted with. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times in my life a friend has said “let’s move on” when someone was getting loud, lairy, obnoxious.

There are of course pubs that you would never go in, such as football bars. I’m a Celtic fan and when living in Glasgow even walking by a Ranger pub on a match day was tense. And thats’s fine. There is more than one pub in Glasgow, so people can drink where they feel most comfortable, that’s how it should be. A Celtic fan in full kit who walks into a Rangers bar shouting about how not being served is discrimination and how everyone in there is a coward for hiding in their own bar is in for a short, sharp ending.

But they don’t live in those pubs. They hang out there and come out eventually. Even a Rangers bar isn’t an echo chamber; it’s respite. And that’s the rub for me.

I go on social media the way I went to the pub: to chat with my friends, to debate ideas, to share opinions, to learn about new bands, books, and films, to meet new people. I don’t go there to shout at strangers or to be shouted at in return. I don’t go there to fight. I don’t go there to seek out fascists and try to explain to them why they are dumb and wrong. They have their own pubs. But I wasn’t living in an echo chamber cut off from the world.

That’s where I fundamentally disagree with my friend. He is taking an “all or nothing” approach to this. Either you are standing in the middle of the pub trying to engage with every single customer or you are at home with your head under the pillow. No, I am in the quiet basement wine bar I managed in my 20s, with the good music, the art on the walls, and drunken people semi-politely arguing about everything from football to the great moral issues of the day, taking the piss out of each other while getting a round in.

TwiX could have been that. It was for a brief time. It isn’t anymore. TwiX is one of those saloons in a western that has erupted in a mass brawl, tables flying, bottles smashing, whisky burning on the bar top, bodies everywhere. I’ve seen pub fights. I’ve nearly been in a few. I’ve broken up loads. At no point did I ever think it was a fun, relaxing, or worthwhile thing to do. TwiX is no longer fun or relaxing and it is certainly not worthwhile.

So that’s why I’m off to Bluesky. Not because it’s an echo chamber but because, for the moment at least, it seems a nice place to hang out where I can hear my friends speak over the ambient noise, where I can find out about new ideas, bands, books, films, where I can meet new people and, hopefully, not have a pint poured over my head or a bottle shoved in my face. If that makes me mean-spirited and short-sighted, then so be it.