X Toxicity

I didn’t really start following X (formerly known as Twitter) until around the time of the Biden -Trump debate. It was a rare time in recent US history when the mainstream elite didn’t really have a narrative, not a planned one anyway.   They were investigating and discovering as they went, as if they were actually journalists. It was like one of those anime monsters that tries to form itself into different shapes before resolving back into protoplasm. Everyone seemed a bit confused, at least among the talking heads. One of them, Jake Tapper, later wrote a book about his epiphany and that of his peers, called Original Sin, which I read a few months ago. It was an interesting refresher course, and contained some insider insights, but the basic story I had already seen unfolding on the X platform.

After that I continued to check in and grow my list of followed sources. There are a lot of fine thinkers on there, and links to valuable commentary, and beautiful photography — basically, your own curated view of what’s out there.

BUT — it gets old fast. You go very quickly from social media euphoria to scrolling and hoping to regain the endorphin surge, to feeling a bit disgusted. At least, that has been my process more than once.

Today I scrolled through just glancing at the captions, like a table of contents, and I was struck by something I had noticed only subliminally before — a uniform note of desperate pleading. Everyone plans their headings to maximize engagement, even if only to send you to a substack they liked. Then there are the truly stupid advertisements and sponsored posts. Then there are the people who are suffering, either with their own problems or with what is happening to their loved ones. So many sad stories, often combined with great heroism.

It all gets flattened, and magnified at the same time, and commercialized, by the technology. Yes, I realize blogging is the same, but X shows it in time-lapse form. It is like stepping out on a street filled with people all talking to you, all telling their story, or selling you something, or performing or preaching. It is all right in front of you.

People have said that digital media is artificial; I see their point, but to me it seems almost the opposite — reality distilled to a concentration that can easily become toxic. It makes me wonder what the angels and the cloud of witnesses see when they look at us.