flat earth society has members around the globe

Holding tightly to a truth like that, one that runs counter to a cultural hegemony, is lonely. I just knew it was feeding the worst parts of me, the parts driven by ego, parts that would never be sated. It’s hard to express this properly without unironically using phrases like “Freudian death drive” or suggesting some kind of metaphysical corrosion was taking place. The rot had not set into the platform as fully as it has now but there was rot nonetheless.

I finally gave up on Twitter in May last year, pre-Musk’s acquisition.

Then came Trump, and the guardrails were gone. Twitter was no tower of virtue, but general adherence to codified behaviour and less incentivisation of outrage meant the moral arc of the Twitter universe bent towards being able to justify spending time there. Before then, it felt as if we least had something resembling majority consensus on objective truth. I unscientifically pinpoint the beginning of the end not to Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, but to the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. A place where you could shitpost and be your most based self while also gaining influence and status. The hunt has also been on for a past era, a reclamation of a time when Twitter was all at once a game of both high and low stakes. Nothing so far has provided a potent enough hit emergent successors have suffered from a lack of critical mass and been overly technical, too niche and exclusive. I soon realised my mistake.įor a while now, Twitter users have been nostalgia hunting, hoping that something would emerge to replace their decaying home platform, one now owned and occupied by a billionaire post-truther. Against my better instincts, I joined Meta’s new ‘Twitter-killer’.

Flat earth society has members around the globe