Sometime in the early 2010s, I was attending a Left Forum in New York City. This is an annual convening of Leftists across the country and globe to exchange ideas. At the time, most conferences of this type were siloed between different factions of the Left, but at the Left Forum, anyone could host a panel. I was there to speak on a Jacobin panel about the struggle to democratize teachers unions and the fight against neoliberal education reform.
Prior to my panel, I attended a talk (keynote maybe?) by Frances Fox Piven in a large auditorium. As we waited for it to begin, a man walked up to me and handed me a flyer. Nothing to see here, of course, this was a Leftist event and a plethora of flyers and newspapers were being handed out our hocked to anyone daring enough to make eye contact with a stranger (or simply wander within a five-foot radius). I took a look at the two-sided, single spaced diatribe and simply said “thank you.” The man asked me if I would read it and I said “Sure, thank you.” This was my polite version of Mitch Hedberg’s line “Thank you, I will throw this out for you.”
He glowered at me, “No, will you read this right now and discuss it with me?”
I had never been presented with such an ask before and I responded very plainly, “No. I am here for this talk, but I’ll read it later when I have a chance.”
He pulled the dual-walls-of-text away and said “Fine.” He stormed off and I saw him do this same thing to another unsuspecting talk attendee.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was witnessing the future of Leftist Twitter in real life.
At the time, I was an early-ish adopter of Twitter and an early contributor to what will later be referred to as “Left Twitter.”
At the time, Occupy Wall Street was still in very recent memory. Democratic Socialists of America was boasting membership in the four figures, and Obamamania had relegated the anti-war and anti-globalization movements to the radical fringes. Social media was looking very promising as a means to connect the small and burgeoning movements across the nation and world.
As a writer and organizer, I took to the medium with relish. I had a fun new way to promote my writing. At the time I did quite a bit of freelancing (and blogging — not going to lie) and with the blogosphere dying a quick and painful death, it seemed that politicizing the places where people posted pictures of their lunch was a great opportunity. And shit, it worked! At one point, I had 40K Twitter followers. This was attractive to publishers and editors who knew that I would write a piece and it would get a lot of attention. As fewer people used RSS feeds or visited bookmarks of their favorite sites, and more people were tweeting and posting to Facebook, it was becoming the new normal.
This isn’t hagiography. Although Left Twitter was once a helpful tool for spreading ideas, there were camps that formed pretty early on in its existence. I’ll spare you a taxonomy of this ecosystem, but I’ll mention that we brought a lot of real world bullshit into the virtual space.
Navigating this space created a new consideration to my writing process. I was starting to anticipate counter arguments from various camps that I felt were “winnable” to my ideas. I integrated their anticipated concerns into my writing. This was new for me, as someone whose writing style always had a polemical edge and frankly I didn’t care what others thought about it.
I kept the integrity of my ideas, but I was catering my writing to multiple audiences. I took the organizing principle of reaching people where they were at and applied it to my writing.
A major problem with this writing practice is that Twitter subcultures got way too much consideration. Outside of the Twitter bubble, there was no way to know what worldviews actually constituted a sizable constituency. Social media politics became navel-gazy and cult-like in their orbiting around a small number of influencers. I was writing counterarguments to arguments that I could only assume would spring up from people who may only represent a small cabal of people who may or may not engage in politics offline.
In the short term, it helped gain more views to my writing, but the cost was my writing from a truly authentic space. I didn’t want to be the guy who shoved my writing under people’s noses at conferences, practically demanding a response, but I became a writer who was influenced by virtual in/out groups.
It’s now been more than two years since I left online social media politics. I continue to write about politics, but publish with far less frequency. I narrowed my posting to Substack, which was a completely arbitrary choice. It just seemed popular and wouldn’t go out of business any time soon. I do not want to migrate my email list any more. I no longer pitch pieces and publish outside Substack only when I am approached by an outlet. The hustle grindset that goes with being a prolific Leftist runs counter to my own politics around work.
I have become a slower writer, taking the luxury of not posting a hot take every time I have an opinion about an item in the news. And I’m no longer writing for social media consumption.
At the time, I felt that strongly fighting for my ideas would make them stronger. I still agree with this, but I was largely wrong about my assumed foils.
This is a discipline I recently realized after Substack unveiled its Twitter alternative “Notes,” a feed where Substackers and readers can post microblogs to their followers. I was cautiously optimistic about it as I saw it as a space where writers and readers can share ideas without the noise of social media influencers moving the dialogue into unhelpful directions. I held back from posting, but would scroll through it, hoping the other shoe would stay firmly on its respective foot. Without fail, within weeks my feed was bogged down by in-group/out-group bickering.
I’ve been here before and to quote my favorite meme:
So I’m logging off Notes forever and focusing on refining my ideas without the help of various cargo cults. My mind and my ideas are mine and as a private citizen, I feel no need to defend them to the masses.
I wonder if that Left forum attendee I met hopped onto social media. If he did, I wonder if he found himself an in-group who shared his passion for spreading ideas and a total lack of ability to engage with people in the real world. Hell, I wonder if he became one of the faceless accounts I was trying to win over to my ideas.