RND/ In which, due to a particularly bad recent fit of existential depression and terminal boredom, you mistakenly try getting back onto Social Media, only to find it somehow even emptier than your old, half-undead life. Some notes in passing:
- You find the user interface a bit more slick and ‘friendly’ than you last remember
- You won’t even get the name you want because some idiot piss weasel with two tweets is cyber-squatting there
- The recommendations of ‘who to follow’ are toxic and worthless
- The ‘taylored ads’ that pop up are astoundingly meaningless to you; it’s like patchoui flavored nut-shaving foam was being advertised to Travis Bickle. No only is Travis violently not-interested in your foam, he now wants to casually kill you with something sharp
- You pause while writing this, to take on some watery yet disgustingly salty barley soup out of a old can, with organic brown pittas and strong cheddar cheese
- All the old sad faces you used to once follow are still there, denizens of nowhere, shuffling around in their empty open air prison, still forever waiting for something, anything to happen – but it never does
- One cool guy you’ve interacted before gave you a free Steam key to his crap indie game, which was truly generous. But it’s still crap, and he just can’t see it
- The worst tweet you saw within 24 hours was the following, willingly self-compromised, middling, spineless, carefully stage managed, weasel-like, hang-wringing, ‘one must always find a happy compromise’ style tweet by a generally good but annoyingly fretful videogame-critique Youtuber. It’s offensively-inoffensive nicey-niceness made you slightly puke in your mouth. (A little like his videos then..) Is this where we’re at on Social Media? [As opposed to what, Rob?] Jeez, might as well get yourself a fucking PR middle-manager bot to tweet for ya:
- Yuck! You tweeted back “Pussy”, and a Henry Rollins “Do it” video link. Drop and give me twenty, motherfuckers
- You didn’t find any way of immediately muting retweets – in which whiny hipster liberals, trustifarians and other ultra-privileged, cheap-champange weekend socialists ‘ditto’ some vaguely lefty™ news item – not that such often vitally important voices don’t need amplifying, not that you didn’t often entirely agree with the truth behind the stories retweeted, but mannn – there was still the sneeking suspicion retweeting such news was often simply more about ‘look at all the politically correct things *I’m* interested in – and therefore look how important and socially with-it I am. (why i also even watched ‘get out!’ with my black friends without sweating too much.)’ Of course, saying that online makes you out like some psychotic, professionally miserabalist alt right chode. Best to keep your trap shut, Kid – which seems precisely the point of Twitter from the very outset. (So why sign up with the other digital lemmings?) Shut up, keep your head down and get on with it – whatever the fuck it is – because the alternative of talking a load of time wasting shite to a bunch of *other* random assholes online – seems infinitely worse. (Hang on though, isn’t that the Interwebs itself? Other than just continually punching the time clock before death for something to do, what the holy cosmic shit are we all even doing out here? Where even is ‘here’?)
- Speaking of which, talk about the World White Web! Pasty guffawing nerds in a room, talking near-total shit about shit videogames. There doesn’t seem much in the universe that’s more tedious (other than wankers who follow Elon Musk.) And still – years after you left – the same old fragmentary, going-nowhere-fast conversations and too-little-too-fucking-late style mini rants about how ‘you know, i think we (the indie games community) need to #unionize’ and ‘the difficult issue of #pricing’ in the modern marketplace. Your eyes often rolled so hard while listening to all this, you got eye-lash.
- Unless your already famous, nobody gives a flying tinker’s tweet about who you remotely imagine you are, and nobody is remotely interested in what you’re doing – they just want positive feedback echo chambers where you talk to them about themselves, their endless bullshit little projects and plans. But try turning that conversation about for a nanosecond and try shoehorning in the fact that, ‘hey look over here, I’m an artist, too!’ and that sudden horrible sucking noise you’ll hear is the sound of all the air in the social media airlock being vacuumed back into the bottomless Electronic Void. “There is only self promotion on social media, the only self promotion allowed, is for those already (/self) anointed ‘Social’ enough to tweet constantly about their (digital) selves – their fucking amazing, endlessly artistic productive chipper and fun filled existences.’ How utterly cliquey and deeply.. pathetic it all seems.
- Twitter makes you feel like a desperate ‘try-hard’. Why the fuck bother tweeting when nobody’s listening? The whole thing seems vacuous and shallow. Who’s trying to please who, here? Do you really think you’re gonna get anyone to follow you – even the sad sacks with no life are too busy to know you even exist.
- Some indie game gamedev tosser was following 12k people. Just staring at his stupid smug head and that number underneath it made you mad. Like anything could have been less meaningful, or vain. He’d have to use a fucking rotatory sander on his smart phone just to swipe down fast enough to read his twitter feed. What a crock. What a paper thin sham. ‘Interaction’. You’d rather interact with a passing bolt of lightning than lower yourself to follow this wanker – or even worse, have him follow you. “You do understand that? It’s not really a special message to you, Mr. Cole.”
- You left, and nobody even knew you’d gone. How depressing – and how impossibly naive on your part. Like you could of expected anything else. This is not your scene. You were never part of the in-crowd. Make your own scene – crowds are not to be trusted. A mere 24 hours on social media, and you feel like an endless month of dead end Sundays has been dumped on your existential doorstep. To hell with that energy sapping white noise.
- Twitter and other companies of their ilk are nothing but data sucking parasites, concerned only with their warped version of ‘community spirit’. That is, feed them your secrets and dreams, and (passively, like morons) watch them bloat up like ticks. Tweet me about that when it happens – about how you helped made it happen – and *then* I’ll follow you.
