It’s true. It was always true. But it’s even more true now that we are in plague times. I follow several writers on Twitter, and for the past three months they have really been excelling in the depression department. I realize that there is plenty to be depressed about in these unprecedented times, but this is a layer above, a top spin on the already sad news of the day. Perhaps it’s a consequence of imagination, of a need to project into a fictional future. Perhaps it’s just the tendency to push rhetoric forcefully unto its limits. Perhaps it’s the ability to pluck out the most alarming/rhetorically forceful detail from a news story. There is one writer I follow, R, whom I really enjoy and whom (in this fantasy of friendship) I get along with splendidly. But R possesses a golden eye for the most disturbing snippet of the most disturbing news story of the day, an ever escalating stream of alarmisms. Turning over one of his quotations in the daily leaf pile that is Twitter is like being bitten by a sleeping snake — in the eye. 

Certainly I’m not depressing to be around. You either, dear friend. But in general writers are depressing, anxious, inward curling, and yet highly strung, excessively verbal, overly self-conscious. I am generalizing recklessly, but hopefully I’m not wrong, or not entirely wrong. I went to a writers’ conference once; it was simultaneously a thrilling experience and also a black hole of insecurity. Everyone needed a hug but no one was spiritually able to accept a hug. At least theater people are entertaining. 

A smarter person would have gotten off Twitter years ago. 

I reconnected with an old friend and discovered that he’d never signed onto Facebook. It was like finding someone who had never done drugs. How refreshing! What a naive, healthy blessing! Then, a couple of months ago, he signed up. Why would he do this? Why would he weather the social pressure of that platform’s plateauing domination? Why get this far only to succumb now? I think he’s still off Twitter but I’m too nervous to ask. 

I used to think that the main problem with Twitter was that its signal-to-noise ratio was broken. That is, everyone links to the same junk over and over. That is, entire conversations manifest in a private language of meme exchange. But instead Twitter is all signal, overwhelming signal — everyone signalling constantly with nuclear force. Every tweet is overburdened with meaning, overt or implied, a rhetorical peacockery. Everyone was insufferable on Twitter already and a slow-moving global catastrophe has only made this worse. The human quality previously known as charm now has the half life of your sourdough starter. To follow a person’s Twitter stream with any granularity is to become convinced they’re growing progressively unhinged. Unfortunately, this is also the only way to understand a person’s Twitter stream.  

And this is not to imply that these Twitter writers aren’t genuinely upset or don’t have legitimate reasons to feel upset. Lord knows they do. Perhaps all this note is is an admission that I can no longer stand the unrelenting broadcasting of their anxieties, and yet, paradoxically, I am seeing exactly what I’ve chosen to see. I have both clamped my own eyelids back and begun the unending scroll of horrors.

Another writer I follow — S — says that no one should be writing during this time, and that people should especially not write about this time. This is the same person who chronicles her life in graphomaniac detail, a fractured diary years in the making, a serialized hot mess. (It is wildly entertaining.) Her point is that this writing will surely be bad, which is probably true, though I don’t know what metric she’s using to determine what bad means. I think she resents people being performatively sensitive, which, okay: noted.

T is yet another writer I follow, one I admire to an almost painful degree. I don’t believe in writely perfection, in terms of prose or persona or general gestalt, but if I did, he would be it. And this ongoing calamity has turned T into a puddle, linguistically speaking. The reason you follow someone in the first place is you admire their prose and the way their sensibility filters through that prose. But in the context- and editor-free agglomeration of tweets you see that same personality and that same prose in all of its backstage, make-up-smeared freakyness. But it’s not backstage. There is no backstage anymore, at least not online. There are only additional trap doors of performance. 

A couple of other writers I follow (I know, I know: get off Twitter) have disappeared from the platform entirely over the past two months. They’ve obviously gone into hiding. They know when to hunker down, go dark with their verbs. The tweeting-writers who continue to thrive are the ones that dish out generalized, feel-good, you-got-this cheerleaderism. It’s a kind of tweet-hug, and I’d accept it if I were able. 

I feel like Twitter is a kind of live action role playing, but whereas other LARPing activities have separate characters and plots that move alongside life, Twitter LARPs with the same ingredients of actual life. It’s like a laminate of language wrapped over the coarse plywood of everyday activity. It feels apiece with the real thing but it’s actually a veneer upon the real. Within the scroll, it feels the closest thing to life, but when you’re simply walking around the real world (back when you could do that), you are confronted with real people who don’t know you’re playing the game and who can’t catch your signals. 

Why I’ve spent countless hours reading these unhinged fragments thumbed out by strangers is a question for a licensed professional, or God. But perhaps the better question is why do I feel compelled to follow anyone at all? Besides, no one can withstand that much unaccommodated attention — even happy people.