Honey, [Elon] Shrunk The Internet!

Welcome to Hollering with the Armadillo, the section of Home with the Armadillo wherein I publish essays, fiction, and various, well, hollerings. If you’d rather only get my abortion news roundups, or only want the occasional holler, or would rather get all my content in the Substack app versus on email, you can select which sections of my newsletter you’d like to subscribe to on your Substack reader dashboard.

It happened to me: I got rate-limited on Twitter.

It took awhile! Longer than I expected. As in, literally yesterday1 — just a few days after, as I am given to understand it, Twitter’s sad exploding car daddy Elon Musk lifted rate limits. But nevertheless, the rate limits persevered.

Background: Several weeks ago, folks started complaining that Twitter’s internal-whatever determined that they had … read too much twitter? … and told them that they therefore had to pay to read more twitter. Many jokes were made about New Bad Twitter looking out for the mental health of us doom-scrollers.

Of course, New Bad Twitter is not looking out for us. It is looking for ways to dig itself out of a hole tens of billions of dollars deep. What this means going forward is that I guess I have about eight hours of Twitter available to me every day. Unless I want to pay for it, which I do not, because I would no more pay Twitter for the non-privilege of creating the content from which it (hopes to) profit than I would pay Campbell’s to sell my (extremely delicious) homemade tomato juice.

Twitter was once a vast and nigh-unknowable network of nonsense both awful and revelatory with all the promise of a seven-billion-strong swath of humanity. Now it is a stuffy closet full of Nazis whose door one swings open at their peril.

These days I dart between a half-dozen or more social media platforms, hoping to find some semblance of the community I once had at any and every hour of the day on Twitter. I sweat over what to post to Mastodon (I’m on two instances, everyone is earnest and a stranger), to Bluesky (mostly shitposting, which I do not understand, and strangers’ nudes, which I do not want), to Post (a weird sanctimonious graveyard), to Spoutible (a kind of snoozy liberal newsletter), to Tumblr (only bad advice and niche fandoms), to Cohost (forgot my login), to Instagram (once a repository of snacks and pet photos, now just a weird promo-dump?), to Threads (where I can find nothing I want to read, by no one I care about), to Substack (HELLO, FRIENDS!), to TikTok (still figuring that out), and … to Twitter.

More than anything else, losing Twitter feels like losing my local bar. A reliable spot where, who knows, I might meet my best friend or get into a shouting match or both.

I long, desperately and embarrassingly, for the Twitter of 2018. I long for it the way that Austinites long for the Austin of the day they moved to town. I long for it the way old punks long for CBGB. I probably long for it the way Elon Musk and his ill-spent $44 billion longs for it.

Now, my internet is small and open between the hours of 9am and 5pm, mostly central time. I have some friends on the coasts who get online a little earlier and stay online a little later. I get most of my news and news-context from a handful of Slacks and Discords; I share the news and news-context I have on those same platforms. I have to hope that between me and a few dozen or couple hundred folks at the most, we read and subscribe to enough publications that we’re getting what we need to know, and that we know what we need to know about it. My internet-world is now limited to people just a few degrees outside of my immediate social circle, sharing what we know and what we or other people we know know about it, usually when we happen to talk about it together.

Elon Musk’s cancel-cancel-culture-by-platforming-Nazis plan didn’t blow up my echo chamber, it ensured an echo chamber is all I have access to.

I don’t mean a political or ideological echo chamber, although of course the bulk of the stuff I engage with these days skews toward my own views.2 I don’t mind that; I don’t need to hear the latest from bigots and misogynists about what’s happening in their world, and what they think should happen to me and mine. I don’t lack for information about what the “other side” thinks, nor am I unfamiliar with mainstream-center, right-wing, and far-right politics, because they are the default in legacy media coverage.

When I mean that I am now in an echo chamber, I mean that I lack the easy and free access to both a hyper-local and global, wide-ranging, context-rich world of conversation that was once available on Twitter, in the form of dunks and yes-ands and no-buts and ugh-okays from all corners. For all its faults — and it had many — the heyday of the platform was a boon for journalists, content-creators, academics, organizers, and activists. It was a welcome rejoinder and supplement to the news of the day.

Today? Tonight? If news happens after 5 p.m., after I have consumed my ration of content — if protests break out, if a mass shooter attacks a school or a night club or a shopping mall, if my city or my state loses power and hundreds die — I will have to hope that my little echo chamber has the news I need, or that I will have the news my little echo chamber needs. And I will have to hope they have the means to find it, that they have not overconsumed their ration, that they know who to know who to know who to know. The grimmest prospect, and the most real, is that I will probably have to watch the (increasingly monopolized) television news and hope that the information I need reaches me that way.

Probably the contemporary news ecosystem, and journalists like me, failed by becoming so dependent on real-time news and social platforms like Twitter. Probably. Okay, fine: certainly. If I had a time machine, I would go back and yell about this on 2014 Twitter and still be ignored, and people would dunk on me for suggesting that the dippy South African car/space man was, someday very soon, going to tank it all. And I wouldn’t be alone, and would hardly be the first — marginalized folks, especially Black and queer and trans women, tried to warn us about the inevitable fall of the social media ecosystem to both-sidesism and tech-bro-supremacy, and no one listened.

It’s awful and depressing and even as I wrap up this little holler, I am already tired thinking about the gazillion different ways I am going to have to figure out how to share it, on which platform, and when, and how. And sure, that’s all part of my job. But it’s a part that didn’t have to be this hard, and didn’t use to be this hard, and really needn’t be, and ultimately sucks for me and for anyone who cares to read what I have to say, or to correct it, or to argue against it — all things that are part of a healthy media ecosystem, one that is growing sicker by the day.

I don’t want to lose my local bar, but I am tired of not knowing when’s last call.