We're All Ants Under a Magnifying Glass

Or: why is some rich guy's thin skin now my problem?

Me and my remaining Twitter mutuals be like

Author’s Note: I’ve been quiet on this Substack for a while because I’m working on a longer essay about birth control and the discourse around it, which is hard to do while also working full-time, balancing a long-distance relationship, and trying not to lose control of well…everything else in my life. I’m hoping I’ll get that out soon, even though I’m not sure anymore it’s worth the trouble I put into it. For now, have this quick musing inspired by Elon and co.

At some point, I came to terms with the fact that I am chronically online. For a long time, my identity was that of the kid who was perpetually behind on the Internet as my strict parents dictated my screen time. I wasn’t even allowed to make a Facebook account until my second year of high school (my parents were against it until, weirdly enough, my mom realized you needed one to comment on articles from her favorite Croatian local news site and made me make an account so she could log in and correct the columnists. Go figure).

Ironically, my strict parents were then the reason I became chronically online. I couldn’t go anywhere really except school or extracurriculars, so I went online. My social skills were pretty damn stunted from not being allowed to freely socialize with people my age for much of my life, so I felt on guard and uncomfortable in real life interactions. But online was different.

When I went online, I never spent much time on Facebook or Instagram, full of the same people I saw in school. I spent most of my time on Tumblr. When I was online, nobody cared that I was the weird girl that had panic attacks in class, because they didn’t even know that stuff about me. They knew I was an aspiring writer that wrote funny posts and was fairly knowledgeable about my interests. When I was online, I could just post about the things I liked instead of carefully weighing each conversation item to make sure my interests weren’t too niche for the person I was talking to.

And I became good at online. I had posts on Tumblr go viral and earn thousands of notes, I had a tight-knit community of followers that wasn’t too large, but felt like they were my friends. When I migrated to Twitter, it was a very similar experience. I have an OK profile, mutuals I’m friends with online and in real life, and posts that occasionally do numbers, as the parlance goes. As a freelance writer, Twitter is how I’ve found work opportunities, calls for pitches, and attention for my work.

One constant in my time online is that it is the one place in my life I’ve always felt free to express myself.

Another constant is that this space is always ready to be yanked away by greedy rich guys.

Tumblr’s very public demise was due to the porn ban, which wasn’t necessarily the fault of the company but done in response to pressure from Apple and payment processors (who have spent the past decade or so cracking down on sex workers using the Internet to keep themselves safe). However, the site was bleeding users even before that, as increasingly unpopular changes made by the people running it, especially after the sale to Verizon, sent people packing.

Now that Elon Musk bought Twitter, I see it happening again. People are leaving, either going offline or migrating to a different platform where I probably won’t be able to reconnect with the same friends (if I ever figure out the damn thing). Even if most of my mutuals decide to stay despite our dislike of the political tone of the site’s CEO, it’s looking increasingly likely that the platform will become unusable soon due to Musk’s mismanagement. The communities we’ve all built, as well as the professional opportunities for freelancers, writers, and artists, seem fragile.

I am finding it hard to shake the feeling recently as if every aspect of our lives is subject to the whims of random billionaires. I obviously knew that was true for real life (I’m a leftist for a reason), and that nothing is ever for free, but for a while it felt possible to carve out your own space on the Internet where you could do your own thing or at least forget about the shit that was bothering you in real life. If you were puny enough, people would mostly leave you alone.

Now everything, from having fun to chatting about stuff to finding out basic information, feels impossible to do because some rich guys decide to fiddle with their toys. Staying in touch with friends on ad-riddled Instagram is gone. Finding professional opportunities on Twitter may well be gone soon. Even looking up how to do stuff is gone because Google has no problem letting SEO-filled garbage clog up its top results, burying any semblance of useful information. But what do we do? We still use Google because the rich guys have left us so thoroughly without any choice.

It sometimes feels as if we are all ants under a magnifying glass, trying to go about our daily lives, and at any moment some entity can just decide to train the beam on whatever we hold dear and eliminate it. Not because he needs to, or because he even wants to as when you’re that rich, it’s hard to have wants anymore. Because he can, and he wants to show us that we can.

My boyfriend, a blissfully offline person, sometimes makes fun of me for how I feel about the Internet. Twitter is not all great, I can admit that. I often got so invested in Twitter fights my heart would race and I would struggle to focus on anything else. It is an excellent vehicle for abuse and bullying, even before the current ownership took over. I definitely spent way too much time on the platform, often at the expense of being present in real life. But it was also a place that gave me a lot of good, allowed me to connect with people based on niche interests my friends in real life didn’t always share, and I am worried it will be gone soon.

It’s not the destruction of Twitter that upsets me so much, it’s the loss of power, which I feel every time I think about the politics, the economy, my own job prospects, climate change, and now the place where I used to spend my free time. Someone else gets to greatly change how my life looks, just because he can. I can try to make friends, I can try to do my silly writing, I can try to block promoted accounts and make fun of Twitter Blue. But in the end, someone else gets to take it all away.