Getting Clean From Twitter

On addiction, and the guy supplying the drug, and why it's time to quit

Two and a half years ago, I stopped drinking.

I didn’t do the traditional “bottom out” kind of exit from alcohol. I had a few afternoons, in the early months of the pandemic, when I found myself tracking the wine delivery guy on my phone with a little too much zeal. I had a couple of evenings where I found myself, after a couple of glasses of wine, a little too quick to snap at my kids. I had a few consecutive nights when I finished the bottle and then cracked another one . . . just for an extra glass?

And then in the middle of the night one night, I just decided I was done, because I didn’t want to feel like that any more. In the years since, I haven’t been to AA, but I have learned an awful lot about the impact of addiction to our brain chemistry.

I know addiction when I see it.

Which brings me to the fact that now, in a similar vein, I have arrived at the end of my experience with Twitter.

I wrote two essays last spring (here and here) on Musk’s potential destruction of Twitter, about how I wasn’t willing to give Elon Musk my time, and about how social media had already, I knew, claimed too much of me.

I don’t think I had put together at that time, though, the real truth of the matter that so many of us have been unwilling to recognize: that much like the cigarettes sold to we Gen Xers as cool additions to our punk wardrobes, much like the “wine mom” culture currently sold to us on t-shirts at Target, Twitter has been purposefully and intentionally altered over time to make us junkies for its supply.

I’m not the first one to observe this by a long shot, not the first one to point out how the addictive cycle of Twitter taps our natural learning cycle of trigger, behavior, reward, how it hacks our brain chemistry, alters our thought patterns, how it feeds anxiety and, worse yet, amplifies far right ideologies to stoke division and outrage and undermine democracy . . . but as with most things about recovery, you know what you know when you know it.

Twitter was one thing under Jack Dorsey, hiding its algorithmic proclivity to stoke outrage and disdain under the mantle of the proverbial “town square,” creating plausible deniability for its hooks and its abuse, while making Jack and many others into billionaires.

Under Elon Musk, though, it’s become something else entirely. It’s the doctor prescribing you Purdue pharmaceuticals in the form of trolls and bots and neonazi ideological triggers, designing the perfect needle to shoot outrage and fear into your veins (it’s right there on your phone, and he’s let Trump and MTG back on for you to fight with!), not telling you that once that drug has taken hold of you again, you’re going to want more of it, over and over and over, because the dopamine hit to your brain from the horror, the adrenaline rush to your body from the panic, is going to demand your attention nonstop.

Like every good doctor with a scrip pad handing out opioids willy nilly, Musk is doing it for profit.

He’s the amoral M.D. in VC clothing, the one who won’t even tell you that you’re gonna need Narcan by the time he’s done with you, because he doesn’t care.

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There’s a faction on Twitter right now that is staking the ground to “stay and fight.” An article dropped yesterday about how the coalition formerly known as Resistance Twitter has decided that’s a laudable cause.

I wonder, though, about how you can fight an algorithm that is consciously designed to suppress the truth and generate fight/flight responses in your own body, and outrage responses in your brain, that makes your addiction the thing on which it profits. Does shouting the truth into the void, where Elon controls who sees what you write, who gets access to the truth, and who responds to it, have any chance of success? Does trying to block the bad actors here and there, respond to the good ones here and there, modify your engagement with the algorithm, stand a chance of working when he holds the entire delivery mechanism of information in his tight white fists?

During the last days of my drinking, I was in negotiation with myself about booze non-stop. “I’ll only have one today,” was how it would start at 10:00 am. For the next seven hours, I’d be in an internal battle until the hard 5 p.m. moment rolled around: “why can’t I only have one or two like other people? Maybe if I only drink beer and not wine? Maybe if I have a cocktail and don’t crack the wine bottle? Maybe I’ll try it this way today: I won’t start until six. I won’t drink until the kids are in bed. I’ll delete the Total Wine delivery app from my phone. I’ll just have a gin and tonic because it’s hot outside and that’s refreshing. It’s been a hard day. I can limit this and change it by changing my behavior. It’s only one, or two, or three, oh there goes the whole bottle, whoops.”

Maybe if I just block Donald Trump. Maybe if I set time limits on when I’ll be on Twitter. Maybe if I emphasize how good it used to be for me. Maybe if I convince myself I can control it. Maybe if I justify staying on here because it’s “an important historic record” or it’s “an information war,” it won’t be what it looks like it’s become. Maybe I can talk myself out of the destruction, the damage, the ongoing abuse, the rabid harm it’s doing to me and my people and my nation. Look, I blocked Elon Musk, that’s progress, right?

No. No, it’s not.

Sometimes, the only way to stop is to go cold turkey.

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In recovery, there is a phenomenon known as the pink cloud. It’s the experience you have, shortly after getting sober, where suddenly you are gleeful at having escaped. For months after giving up your drug of choice, you float above the thing that had you in its grip, and you become wild-eyed at your own power, at how good it feels to be outside of what was pulling you down, stunned that you were able to walk away.

It’s bliss, that window. Better than any high you’ve ever known, because it’s a reclamation of your own power to decide how you will live your life, your one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver put it, and whether you will waste it spiraling ever-downward, or go build relationships to other things and people that make you truly happy.

Of course, you do return to earth. The things that drove you to drink are still there– the trauma, the life experiences you desperately tried to numb, the pain and the struggle of being human, the ever-increasing chance of the fall of democracy and the rise of fascism.

But here’s the thing: you can’t fix the underlying causes that led to your addiction while you’re still in it.

I look at the “stay and fight” crowd and what I think about is how much energy, how much political will, is going to be wasted trying to convince a malignant narcissist billionaire to fix what he broke that was already on its way to breaking, trying to fight with far-right political figures who are counting on your outrage to rise, while denying the true beauty and hope of what we’re trying to build, forsaking all of it to instead engage with trolls, neonazis, apartheid inheritance babies who get off on posting rape culture memes.

Elon makes his money off this drug. And the problems that have led to our addiction can’t be fixed by taking more of it.

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For the last four days, I’ve been hanging out on a new platform called Post.News. I was admitted to the beta as one of the first 2000 users on the platform. It is buggy and it is definitely not done. But I’ll tell you what it does have: transparent leadership.

Every day, multiple times a day, the CEO of Post.News, Noam Bardin, who is also the ex-CEO of Waze, posts in the platform and sends emails about the buildout. The team is responsive. Yesterday, we got firm content guidelines, a removed post that included a conspiracy theory about the Club Q shooting, and an admission that he’d made a mistake and accidentally hit the wrong button and let in 20,000 people off the waiting list when he meant to admit 3500.

We laughed, together, at his willingness to admit his own error to the entirety of the membership, and remarked on how this is what great leaders do: admit their failures, and seek to learn from them.

Post isn’t perfect, but it is clear and transparent. Its feed is clean. There are no bots or trolls. Journalists and media sites are joining en masse. Some of my favorite follows from Twitter are already there.

But most importantly, there is a peace on the feed. Check in or don’t. Engage in spirited debate and don’t be abusive. Here’s a pic of my dog. By the way, Biden is pushing for vaccines over the next six weeks. Can we please have an edit feature? Hey Noam, I ask that you consciously choose diversity when admitting folks from the waiting list. When will I have a mute button? Let’s please discuss anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech and how to combat its effect.

There is no outrage, though, beyond outrage at the current moment we are living through. There is no stress response beyond the every day experience of living in a teetering democracy– which by the way is enough. We don’t need cultivated fear or rage as the icing on the cake.

It’s quiet inside Post, with a lot of consideration of what needs to be fixed and how to fix it.

Without the rage, there is room to work to create real change.

There is choice in how you engage, and when, and for what purpose, and a clarity and pause in the response, and strategy to do the work to make the world better.

It’s lovely. It takes some getting used to.

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Twitter, I know, has been a tremendous organizing tool. It has been a site for disabled folks to connect as the vast majority of America decided, wrongfully, that the pandemic was over. It has been a place where racism and police violence entered the white American psyche like never before. It has indeed radicalized so many of us, in all the best ways, made us abolitionists, anti-capitalists, union organizers and campaign canvassers. It has taught us about the wild importance of true participatory democracy.

None of that, though, has to be, or is, a permanent set of possessions belonging to Twitter. I have the benefit of having been an organizer in the era before email, when I went door to door in the steel mill slums outside of Pittsburgh to get people registered to vote, when I attended my first Queer Nation meeting in 1989 because there was an ad in the free City Paper. I know it can be done differently, and that there are always new ways to do it that build on what came before.

Evolution is a defining feature of the human experience.

And what has happened to Twitter, how quickly it has been destroyed, the ease with which its worst qualities have become its defining qualities in one month’s time, requires our evolution.

But what a lot of folks won’t tell you is that when you give up the substance to which you are addicted, you grieve it.

You miss who you were when you were on it, before it got out of hand.

Sometimes, you’ll still dream about the drinking, the smoking, the drug, and you’ll wake up with a start, wondering if you actually fell off the wagon.

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A long time ago, on a summer night in Manhattan, I danced on the bar that was featured in the film Coyote Ugly, while absolutely wasted. It was a bar in the West Village called Hogs & Heifers, now closed, where everything you saw in that movie came to pass, and a hell of a lot more. That night, I had been flirting with the bartender in her low cut top, and she had been running her finger from my collarbone to my breastbone as she served me shots, and I was giddy, in the company of good friends, avoiding all the drama of my outside life as a lawyer at a big famous law firm, quite beautifully numb. 

It was something I would have called freedom for a long time in my life, that I would have justified, I would have told you I was willing to fight for.

And then a gross white man, greasy and so profoundly drunk that even I was disgusted, approached me and asked me, point blank, to take off my top. When I told him no, he told me his wife would do it too if I would just comply, and that he had come all the way from Indiana to New York to have an experience like this, would I not entertain him, he would buy me more drinks if I would just take off my bra. He grabbed my arm, left marks as he did it, and for a time, just wouldn’t let go.

I told him no. And no again. And then that I wouldn’t do anything that would cost me my job on Wall Street, notwithstanding that everyone I knew was also similarly drunk or high on a Friday night there, because the attempts to cope with what we had to do to make money had burned us raw to the core.

I told him to let go of me. And eventually, he did, and moved on to someone else, eager to stoke the response he wanted for his own gleeful and stink-dirty pleasure.

When he did, I turned and said goodbye to the pretty bartender. I paid my tab. I gathered my friends who were there with me, who I loved, who are still with me every step of the way in life, and I left that bar, never to return.

All good things come to an end.

We are not who we were when we started.

And sometimes, it feels really good to quit.