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Now it’s Fran time
I am on “bluesky,” or “Blue Sky” or “Bluesky,” I’m not sure, and I fucking hate it. To me, it is not “Twitter but nice;” it is not even “Twitter but” anything. It is an entirely different app with the functional makeup of Twitter and when I check on it, I feel dread. Not because I am missing out on any significant conversation (there is none) or because I am seeing bad stuff (I am not seeing anything of note; I am sort of just posting food and leaving), but because I don’t want to be there, I’m not interested in being there, and I’ve yet to determine what it is I’m doing there besides giving away my invite codes to people who do seem to really want them. (Do you want one? Let me know…) I’m not on Mastodon, I’m not on Threads, I am half-heartedly on Substack Notes because they make it easy for you. I tried for all of five seconds to have fun on Notes, and then someone who works in tech or business, or worse, “fintech,” replied to one of my shitposts in inane earnest. And he didn’t subscribe to Fran Magazine??? So that’s that.
Last April, I wrote for Gawker about a lesser-known syndrome called “poster’s disease,” which is what happens when you start to inherently believe that posting matters (and to a lesser extent, that replying to posts, quote-tweeting, sharing, engaging with them also matters). I had spent a number of years obsessed with poster’s disease in part because much of what I did for work required posts, posting, reading posts, and analyzing posts. No one specific job I’ve had has “required” me to be on Twitter, necessarily, or any other specific social media platform in language that plain, but it was implied that in one way or another I would perpetuate an online lifestyle in whatever form that meant to me so that I could draw from the endless well of shit that is the social media experience.
Did I develop poster’s disease? Certainly at some point, but none so terminal as to not recover. I took a long hiatus from regular Twitter usage when I quit The Onion in 2018 in order to have the kind of ego death that comes with moving to New Jersey, and perhaps there is no better way to return to social media after a brief hiatus than to no longer have a place in your bio that makes people think you might be able to give them a job. Possibly the best thing to happen to me online was to develop a life so mostly unenviable as to be left alone. Posting got fun again in 2019 in the way that everything felt kind of fun in 2019, and then awful in 2020 for obvious reasons, and then neutral after that. I also probably have some lingering poster’s disease, the same way that I get heat rash a few times a year depending on my activity levels. I manage with some consistency to be surprised every time I get heat rash, even though it has been happening to me for upwards of a decade.
Perhaps it’s because the app is bleeding users left and right that I feel like I am having fun on Twitter for the first time in five years. To be clear, I don’t think the Musk takeover is good. I hate Elon Musk, maybe more than I hate anyone else on earth, for reasons both personal and theoretical, and I don’t think any changes to the platform — from the bastardization of the verified system to the pay to play checkmarks to MORE characters to changing the name to “X,” the place where tweets live — are smart, functional, interesting, or long-term beneficial. That said, to me it is a kind of extension of poster’s disease to call it quits with Twitter now. It suggests that posting matters, but not where the bad posts are, and the posts will be better elsewhere — this is a naive, strange understanding of tech, and there will almost certainly never be an ethical version of the thing people want. Let’s not forget that Jack Dorsey, like Elon Musk, is a dipshit.
I suspect that the other thing happening is that people are not getting jobs from Twitter the way they used to. I’m not sure they’re selling books that way either. The tectonic plates are shifting, maybe not for the better, but who was to say the system was good to begin with. I’m no fan of innovation for innovation’s sake, but I like having a challenge to work through and around. Of course it should all feel easier than it does, but I think it’s always been that way. The dwindling numbers on Twitter, that nothing anyone does has the same kind of engagement it would have four years ago, feels like when I quit a job worth putting in my bio for grad school. I can’t embed a Tweet in a Fran Magazine issue. My Substack links literally don’t work on Twitter. Who gives a shit. No one has anything anyone wants anymore. Good! Go be free.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe one of these platforms will take off in a meaningful way and that’s how people will start getting TV writer jobs again, but I doubt it. (I maintained similar skepticism about BeReal, only using it from Memorial to Labor Days of last year, and it seems to be holding steady with the “doing computer job” crowd. Fine! Keep having fun on there.) Working more adjacent to tech than I have been in the past, I do not see that industry doubling down on social media by way of posts so much as I do things like Roblox fashion shows and Twitch and when Christopher Nolan debuted the Tenet trailer in Fortnite. Communal watching experiences that came to define the COVID-era landscape.
As such, I suspect Oppenheimer and Barbie were more popular than anticipated because these were social outings, “important” in the sense that all art that isn’t Sam Levinson’s The Idol is important, but otherwise leisure- or curiosity-based time passing. People saw the movies with their friends. They shared memes. They posted. They discussed. Whatever. I have to say with all earnest that I have enjoyed reading every tweet imaginable about both movies across ever degree of praise or misunderstanding or meme-making available. Whatever poster’s disease, and I often find myself wondering if I have it all wrong, the needless, countless, obnoxious posts about two movies that are both fine is a far more unimportant and in turns, truly social experience than any other type of thing that has gone on on any platform since I can remember. I speak to a limited audience, I’m sure, but it was a weekend that felt on par with live-tweeting the Oscars or Jason Derulo falling downstairs at the whatever. These are just posts are posts’ sake, the best kind out there.
All of which is to say that I am not going anywhere, you couldn’t pay me to go anywhere (just kidding — you can pay me to do most anything), and I intend to stay where I am. I don’t think this is, like, being an old grouch or a stick in the mud. I am committing to what matters: which is to say, that the posts don’t. We made them up!
i never did twitter but no one told me it was secretly linkedin all along - one of my friends tweeted at united airlines after college graduation asking for a job and they just gave it to him. if only i knew i would have spent more time posting and less time studying
substack notes is weirdly LinkedIn for blogging?