"A Colossal Wreck, Boundless and Bare": A Living Eulogy for Literary Twitter

=> A Living Eulogy for Literary Twitter

I saw this boosted in my Bluesky feed late in December, a eulogy for the Twitter-that-was, from writer Hannah Cohen. To be clear, this isn't a eulogy for Twitter as the general platform - that Twitter, the Twitter of big accounts and Blue Wave accounts and Presidential reply guys, is a big, shambling, shitty thing.

But communities formed in the cracks, like the little ecosystems of tidepools in the ocean. Cohen writes about the joy of discovering a community with no barriers but participation. Cohen writes that,

Someone could go viral by sharing their poem or short story, and quite possibly land a book deal because the right publisher or editor saw the tweet. I personally benefited from editors soliciting me through Twitter DMs for creative work for their journals. Twitter was a career-changer for me. Most importantly, it was an accessible space that opened my world to the contemporary poets and writers around me; writers I would have never studied or read collections from were just a tweet away.

This was my experience, too: a RT from an editor of a packet of poems I'd had published in a Canadian lit mag turned into an offer to submit a manuscript, which then became my first chapbook. My first publication was via Twitter as well! It was (was) a wonderful community, certainly not without its drama; but as a representative slice of the poetry community at large, it's about the most representative place I've ever seen online. I've been in lots over the years: in forums, listservs, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky. And while Bluesky is probably the closest to the Twitter-that-was, it's not there yet, and unless Twitter collapses fully and completely, I'm not convinced it'll ever match it. Too many people and lit mags still hanging on at the original hellsite, telling themselves it's still good, it's still good.

Cohen writes that Twitter changed not just her professional trajectory, as a place where she posted (and shitposted) about poems and started a litmag (Cotton Xenomorph), but also her personal trajectory. Her now-boyfriend slid into her DMs. The experience, she writes, would not be possible on the current, cluttered Twitter: the one with Nazis, the one that pushes the boss's tweets to the top, the one that's likely to push a video of someone dying into your feed, whether you want it or not. Twitter wasn't a great bar, but you could get a beer, hang out with your friends in the corner. It eventually became a Nazi bar, to steal an expression from a famous tweet thread from Michael B. Tager a few years ago. But before that, while it was a bit of a dive, it could at least be yours.

Maybe it’s just my personal case of my sunken cost fallacy, but Twitter was more important to me than Facebook or Substack ever were or will be.

Facebook is a hole. Inexplicably, I still have friends who use it regularly - like, daily - and I don't understand how. And Substack...yeah. I'm not interested in a platform purely as a broadcasting medium. I find newsletters dull. Everyone wants a subscription, a few bucks a month. But I want to talk to people, y'know? And at its peak, Twitter was the best for that, at least in terms of what we have now.

It’s why in the borrowed words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Twitter’s gradual decline as a “colossal Wreck, boundless and bare” has been so painful to experience. My feed, once bustling with writerly news, unhinged drama, and submission calls, is now clogged with AI tech bros shilling for the latest plagiarism machine, weird ads for questionable products, and accounts freely posting bigoted remarks and parroting conspiracy theories. Sure, there were assholes and bullshit clickbait before Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, but the amount of psychic damage I receive from navigating a broken algorithm is not worth even two minutes of scrolling just to see maybe see a new poem publication from one of my friends.

Same. I mostly noped out after Musk took over in late 2022, part of the big Mastodon migration that November. And I went elsewhere. Geminispace. Cohost. The small web. Basically anywhere I could put down some words. And it was good. I mostly stayed off Twitter. I came back occasionally. Got an archive of my tweets the next July. Left for good afterward, when a CP-posting account was reinstated by the boss. That was all I needed to know: Twitter was fucked, the site I grew to love over more than half a decade collateral damage to his basically limitless capital.

I hate that I miss it so much. Anyone who used Twitter enough could happily go to great lengths about all its warts. But in terms of an actual writing community, I've never experienced anything quite like it. There were mid-career writers, newbies like myself, self-published Amazon hawkers, big award winners (Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown, etc). Unparallelled. And now it's gone.

=> gemlog