Twitter: a Necessary Evil That Increasingly Seems Evil and Unnecessary

I have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As a writer, I’ve long seen it as a necessary evil. I am a small businessman with a tiny audience that frustratingly never seems to get any bigger so I need every tool I can possibly possess to promote my website, my podcast, my books and my Substack newsletter. 

I have a little over twenty-six thousand followers on Twitter. That is theoretically twenty-six thousand people who could conceivably be moved to buy my latest book, listen to Travolta/Cage, donate to my Patreon or become a paid subscriber to my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. 

In actuality only a small percentage of twenty-six thousand people will engage with anything that I do and even fewer will see my tweets and links and choose to support my career in any real way, even by liking something that I have written. 

Because I used to hold positions of power and influence at powerful and influential organizations like The Onion and Pitchfork, a number of powerful and influential have followed me and continue to follow me out of habit or laziness. 

As a reader, Twitter is a hopeless time-suck that shortens my already minuscule attention span and promotes unhealthy habits like doom scrolling and becoming briefly obsessed with stupid bullshit that really does not have anything to do with me or my life. 

As a freelance pop culture writer you pretty much HAVE to be on Twitter. I do not have the luxury of not being on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. I do have the luxury of being able to not do TikTok but that’s mainly because I’m old and even reading and writing the phrase “TikTok” makes me feel silly. 

I wish I was I successful enough that I did not need Twitter as a promotional tool. But as I have established here in excruciating, depressing and exhaustive detail, I have been struggling for years and years and years, if not decades, to keep my head above water financially and professionally and that struggle doesn’t look like it will end. Ever.

I used to see Twitter as a necessary evil. After Elon Musk took over, however, I came to see it as just plain evil and nowhere near as essential as it had been. 

Seemingly overnight Twitter became a right-wing social media site, a more respectable version of Truth Social. The voices that it chooses to amplify and promote are those of Alt-Right provocateurs, out and out racists, homophobes, transphobes and the whole deplorable anti-woke mob.  

Twitter has become a toxic place where the second richest man in the world treats a man who calls himself Catturd2 with a reverence and sensitivity befitting someone like Jimmy Carter. 

It’s been fucking sad watching the owner of Twitter cuddle up to crazed bigots, post Boomer memes and anoint himself a five star general in an all-out war on the evil forces of “wokeness” and pronouns. 

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be on a right-wing website owned by a man whose values I do not share and who I think is a bad person with bad ideas intent on being a negative, destructive presence in society out of arrogance and an inability to change with the times or engage in all-important self-reflection.

I would love to be able to walk away from Twitter with my head held high but I am locked in a cycle of codependency and need. 

I no longer possess a blue mark of distinction. Those apparently don’t exist anymore and I sure as shit am not going to give the second richest man in the world money for the privilege of being able to say that I have chosen to give a man with billions of dollars eight dollars a month. 

Changing the checkmark from one of notability to a subscription service is kind of like if my alma mater the University of Wisconsin at Madison similarly decided to switch things up and announced that from here on out you didn’t have to school for years and take various courses and acquire knowledge to get a Bachelor’s degree; you just needed to send them seventy dollars through PayPal to get a Bachelor’s sent to you through overnight mail. Would a diploma like that have any actual value? Of course not. Its only value lies in its resemblance to real diplomas born of actual work, effort and determination.

I don’t like going on Twitter these days because it has become even more of a toxic, destructive cultural force than it was before the Musk takeover but I’m not quite ready to let go of the increasingly negligible power and influence that I have built up over a period of nearly a decade a half. 

So I unhappily remain in a place that increasingly feels like the opposite of a warm, supportive and fun home you want to return to again and again and again.

Check out my newest literary endeavor, The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that? 

Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/

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