One of the universal currencies of online, these days, is the tweet. Maybe currency is the wrong word; it’s more like a shared language, a lingua franca. You see them pop up everywhere, on every platform — as slideshows on TikTok, or as carousels on Instagram meme pages, or even as static screenshots in YouTube videos.
I guess what I mean is: online, tweets are the unit of thought. Like Kelvin, or miles per gallon. And that’s why I think they’re still so universally popular1, even after the tragedy of Elon Musk.
Naturally I’ve been taking some time to reevaluate my relationship with the website. I think I assumed that the site would be around in its current iteration — you know, the pre-Musk one, where the culture was annoying and histrionic but still faster than everywhere else — forever. I thought a Twitter handle was more like a personal website than a rented apartment, but I was wrong, and now the rent has gone way up. (It’s like, what am I even endorsing when I tweet? Catturd2’s vision of what posting should be? The American right wing’s collective online induced psychosis? etc.)
It’s been hard to separate myself from the website that introduced me to the people I’d work for, befriend, and occasionally bang2. Pulling back feels complicated because Twitter has served a lot of different purposes in my life, all of them important. The structure of the site has also made it difficult to think about leaving; it’s where a lot of the people — my people — still are. Or were, I guess I should say. Everyone’s posting way less now, and the site feels deader than ever. That central hub of people I really liked hearing from has already begun to shut down.
In the meantime, I’ve reactivated my Mastodon account and have started posting there. As I said to a friend the other week: it feels like methadone. I’m still getting used to it — the pace, these new people. When it’s good, it’s because it’s not Twitter. It’s something else entirely, a different paradigm of posting.
But I want to get back to tweets for a minute. There’s a concept on Twitter that I really like: the banger tweet. If I had to give it a definition, I’d call them posts that give you a shock of recognition, the kind that Herman Melville described in that essay3. You see genius at work: something private, unexpressed even to yourself, described somehow with perfect accuracy. Like Borges’s map, bangers bear a 1-to-1 emotional relation with life itself. They’ve always existed but somehow had never been said before; the brain naming itself, etc.
I’ve started bookmarking bangers when I see them cross my various feeds — something I’ve never done before. I think my urge to collect these various jewels is because they suddenly feel like they might disappear. If the servers die, some of these posts will die with them. Though I know that true bangers will live forever in the infinite sea of recycled screenshots, as flotsam that washes up exactly when you need it.
Anyway, here are a few I really like:
They kind of ring in your ears, don’t they? If you come across any good ones, send them my way. I want to add them to my collection of true and beautiful things.
xo,
Bijan
From today’s issue of Garbage Day: “Amid all this chatter about Twitter replacements, I think the real punchline is that they’re sort of proving what we always assumed about Twitter: There are a million ways the site could have been improved on or made better, but it doesn’t matter. The site wasn’t the point. It was simply about the users and their proximity to irl power and influence. How depressing!”
I mean, it’s kind of hard to express, you know? I’ve loved the people I’ve met there, as friends and more. Twitter has been the source of a lot of personal joy. Lots of frustration too, but that’s not the point right now.
Melville: “And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author, of your own flesh and blood,--an unimitating, and perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man--whom better can I commend to you, in the first place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is one of the new, and far better generation of your writer. The smell of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara. Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is. Take that joy to yourself, in your own generation; and so shall he feel those grateful impulses in him, that may possibly prompt him to the full flower of some still greater achievement in your eyes. And by confessing him, you thereby confess others, you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”