#ByeTwitter

I was sitting in a Baltimore conference room in 2016  when my friend Tom Geddes asked me why I wasn’t on Twitter. 

I told him that I thought it was “stupid,” and that I wouldn’t be able to get it to work right. Technology and I have our disagreements — to say the least. The last time someone told me to AirDrop something, I responded by saying, “I don’t even know what that means.” I’m that guy, but worse. Truly.

Tom said I should do it, and he offered to get me started. He took my phone and signed me up. Later, when there were more than a million people following me I had to call Tom and ask him if he remembered the password. He did.

Twitter is a cesspool. It always has been. It has coarsened society by allowing the instantaneous global transmission of any thought at any moment behind the safety of a keyboard and/or through bots. It is a virtual space and an isolating one.

I spent thousands of hours on television sets between 2011 and 2016 before I signed up for Twitter. It was there that I had my first exposure to the platform’s impact. With very few exceptions, nearly every single person with whom I ever appeared on television immediately picked up their phone at commercial breaks to see what people on Twitter were saying about their TV appearance.