Twitter is an alternate universe

And I'm pretty sure it's not a good one

Twitter is going to doom us all.

It’s this bizarre world where people have a completely unhinged view of the world, take everything in its most literal way (even when they are told directly that it was satire) and are out to destroy everyone around them all the time.

And for some reason, this is the thing we selected to place at the forefront of our culture. It’s where all the journalists do journalism. It’s where the politicos congratulate themselves. It’s the virtual town square.

And it is the most vile place in the world, a hellscape that is completely disconnected from the normal world. Something like 2% of the population is active on Twitter. If you live on this platform, you will become completely disconnected from normal people.

And these are the people writing our news and producing our media. People who live on Twitter. Every day.

When you start separating who you’re following on Twitter into different cultural groups, it gets even more fucked up.

I use Twitter almost exclusively by looking at Twitter lists - it helps me filter out a lot of the noise and the nonsense (and lord knows I’ve experienced my fair share of nonsense). I have them separated into people that are on the conservative right, people who are on the woke left, and people who are libertarians (based on how I define all those terms, which may or may not be the same way they’d define themselves).

It is like looking into three completely different universes.

None of those universes have any relevance to the other.

They speak completely different languages.

They do not understand each other at all.

And, worse yet, they don’t want to.

One of the reasons the woke right (conservatives) come down on me so harshly is that I never belonged with them. I do not speak their language. How they view the world does not have relevance to how I view it. I do not understand them and they do not understand me. I was always a Libertarian.

The problem was that I didn’t know the Mises Caucus existed. Once I found out they existed and started spending time with them to learn their culture, I found out it was exactly where I belonged all along.

And the woke right took this as a personal and perpetual betrayal.

I am reminded every single day that I do not speak the language of conservatives.

They do not speak my language, I do not speak theirs.

That’s not a judgment of value. I am not suggesting that one is more important than the other. I think the Mises Caucus is a better fit for me and others will believe conservatives are a better fit for them. Fine, whatever.

But acknowledging that they are different simply means we have to accept that we are not speaking the same language.

I think about this horde of people I have who live to hate me on Twitter all day, every day. I see some of the things that come out of their mouths and it bares absolutely no resemblance to anything that’s true or real. It is a tall tale, a fantasy. And yet, somehow, they believe they know all this truth about me. Nothing presented that can blatantly debunk pretty much every story is good enough. It’s like they don’t even see it, they look right through it as if it’s not there. If it wasn’t targeted at me, I’d find the whole thing fascinating from a psychological level.

In fact, I did find the whole thing fascinating once upon a time. This was back when I was first figuring out what this horde was. There was this group of people that I noticed seemed to be reacting to everything I did and it was such an oddity. There was a long time that I would tweet things just to see how they would react to it and how they would twist it (ok, sometimes I still do).

And sometimes, when they annoyed me specifically, I’d play games of psychological fuckery with them just to see what would happen.

This is probably when things started to get out of control. I’ve always just been naturally good at triggering people - I always know exactly what button to hit just by sheer instinct. I don’t know why I was blessed with this gift (perhaps curse) but it’s just something I do without even thinking about it sometimes.

And I don’t think I realized how good at it I was. Part of me actually feels bad about this…but the other part of me knows that psychological fuckery doesn’t actually work on anyone who decides not to let it work on them.

In other words, if you don’t believe in something, it won’t screw with you.

And the horde kept collecting people who decided I was a horrible person (usually because I blocked them for something on Twitter when what they really wanted to be able to do was continue to harass me) and is now an out-of-control mob.

I actually really am scared that one of them will try to hurt me one day. I hope I’m wrong. Yes, I’ve spoken to the police about it.

But regardless, it’s so strange to watch it all happening right in front of you, and you know what the truth is because it’s your life, and seeing this group of people all spin each other up so much about you that they literally create a completely different reality.

I feel like I have a front row seat to watching an alternative version of my life play out right in front of me. But the problem is that it bares very little resemblance to what my life actually is.

I can’t imagine I’m the only person with a platform this has happened to. In fact, because I sometimes like to go into the bowels of the internet (Telegram) and pursue the alt-right pages, I know I’m not the only one. There are so many groups on there that just spin up these fantasies that have no basis in reality at all. I’m sure the same is true of the woke progressive left.

But the thing is that when those things happen on Telegram, they’re not influential as when they are happening on Twitter.

So, you literally have this platform that 2% of the population uses, where the most influential people in the world spin up story after story after story every day, and those stories can be so disconnected from reality that they are unrecognizable to the people living that reality, and yet it’s taken as the gospel.

What could possibly go wrong?