Twitter brain.

Elon Musk bought Twitter today. There are all sorts of takes, most of them smart, about what that means for Twitter and the Internet and democracy and how it is proof that we are living in an oligarchy, when one man is able to marshal an unfathomable amount of resources ($44b, the purchase price of Twitter, is more than the GDP of 46 nations!) in order to make the most expensive purchase by an individual in human history. Go read those, if you’re trying to make sense of this! It’s got me thinking about something else, which is the way Twitter has affected my brain.

I don’t mean that in a bad way, like when people talk about how the hellsite has given them brainworms, etc (even though, I dunno, maybe that’s true for me too). But I’ve been on the site for thirteen years now and I think in tweets a lot of the time. If, as I expect, this man controlling Twitter changes my relationship to the site, that’ll change, too. Which is a lot to reckon with! I’ve written for the Internet basically my whole life. When I was younger, I thought in LiveJournal entries; big, meaty paragraphs about not very much except feelings and details, very much intended to be read by the couple hundred people who subscribed to my posts. My brain composed those entries throughout the day, as I rode the bus or waited between bands at shows. Before we had phones with us all the time, I sometimes wrote those thoughts on paper, so I could type them up when I got in front of a computer, so people could read them.

I don’t think in paragraphs in the same way I did when I was mostly expressing myself in personal blog posts. (If I did, I reckon I’d update this more often.) When I react to the world, I tend to do so at roughly tweet-length, since the first place I will go to express what I mean to say will be a place where you only get a couple of sentences and you want to be pithy so people connect with it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing—there’s something to be said for concisely distilling what you mean to say; in some ways, it reminds me of when I used to write poetry—but the fact that Twitter has been my first-impulse medium for saying whatever it is I am going to say has definitely shaped the way I think.

With that in mind, I’m going to choose to be agnostic about my future on Twitter, and whether my expectation that I’m going to use it less (maybe not at all, in time) is good or bad. That’s just speaking personally, of course—politically, one capricious dude who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the whole world controlling one of the world’s major communication platforms sucks ass, even if he just runs it into the ground, which seems plausible. For young people right now, they kind of come out of the box shaped like the Internet. Their contours, from birth, have gaps for TikTok and YouTube and whatever else kids are into. For those of us who are a little bit older—whose lives had some form and structure before the Internet, who were actively molded by it in real time—I think maybe we’re more like memory foam. The indentations are there, but it doesn’t sound so bad to have the chance to bounce back.