On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey sent the first ever tweet, and it was, fittingly, about the platform itself. “Just setting up my twttr,” he wrote, to an audience that didn’t yet exist. Early on, the consensus about the emerging social internet was that it promoted self-absorption and navel-gazing—too many food photos and pointless updates. It’s actually kind of impressive how quickly that conception was proven wrong. From the Arab Spring protests in 2011 to the fact that the current president, Donald Trump, uses it unrelentingly, Twitter is a place where stuff actually happens. Still, the most lively conversations are usually about things happening almost exclusively online.
So it makes a lot of sense that election night’s absolute worst tweet was, at its core, also about Twitter. When Madison Cawthorn became the projected winner of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, his immediate response summed up the aspects of his candidacy that aren’t about slightly inscrutable appeals to racial grievance:
Conservative disdain for Democrats is nothing new, but it’s alarming that the person who will represent the very liberal city of Asheville now relates to a portion of his constituents primarily as people to make fun of online.
On the one hand, it’s been revealing and useful to see politicians on Twitter, and the moment’s most adept politicians, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, use the internet entrancingly. But after decades of partisan polarization and several months of social distancing, online is politics now, and we don’t know how to deal with it yet. As of this writing, Joe Biden could still become the 46th president of the United States, but anyone who spent Tuesday night doomscrolling probably finds that to be cold comfort. It was demoralizing and maddening, sure, but it was also boring. Ostensibly, social media could have been a way to learn about what was happening with the vote counts, but there was so little information actually available and even the experts seemed confused. There were a lot of anguished howls and darkly comedic asides, and I gave out plenty of those little hearts. When I finally logged off, at about 3 a.m., it was hard to feel like I had done anything more than move my thumbs a bit.
Twitter is a great place to talk about Twitter, and because the internet really does affect what happens in real life, it can be a pretty good place to talk about other stuff too. But it’s extremely unpleasant in moments of stress or fear that exist off-line, because we simply cannot stop talking about the internet when we’re on it. The internet makes things worse, yet it’s also all we have left in the era of a pandemic. As anyone who has made real-life friends on Twitter can tell you, being online is social, but in a way that spreads anxiety more readily than consensus.
When Dorsey made his first sketch imagining Twitter on a legal pad in 2005, he used two examples of the type of information a person could share, “in bed” and “going to the park.” It’s funny to look back on that now, because it is still a little bit relevant: I can’t sleep because of the election; there are too many people at the park, considering the global pandemic. I don’t really know what the people who invented social media thought they were doing, but it’s hard to imagine that they wanted it to be a vehicle for whatever the last few years were. And yet, here we are.
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