David Cameron was right about Twitter: too many twits make a twat 

I am free of the insane aviary. I have fled the coup and flown the nest.

Yup, I’m off Twitter. The mad medium, the best description of which I have ever heard was “like being pushed reluctantly through the doors of a psychiatric ward.” 

So I now find myself stood outside, my battered suitcase empty of baggage, I keep waiting for some kind of withdrawal both from the institution and its stupefying regime of quarrelsome over-certainty, mid-wittery dressed as unthought of wisdom and the pitch forks and torches it keeps permanently to hand. 

Kerbside, I look for someone to pick me up. Threads perhaps. Or Mastodon. But no. And I feel strangely relieved as I plod off solo  like a character in a French philosophical novel/play/film. Raincoat collar up, a cloud of squint-eyed cigarette smoke, I am alone but unburdened. “Aujourd hui Twitter est mort.” “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” 

And it’s that plain fact which has driven me off. Hell. Not Elon Musk, not blue ticks nor character counts, paid for add-ons and the rest of the hugely unimportant facets of Twitter use to which its devotees seem hopelessly addicted. 

Addicted. The dopamine. The slot machine bells and flashes of… approval. Of false friends and mob rule. Follower numbers and, oh, the brief ecstasy of a block. 

I was, I have to admit, a reluctant joiner. David Cameron was right. Yes, read that again if you want. David Cameron was right.  “Too many twits make a twat.” And for years I was with him. Then I convinced myself I needed it professionally. There’s some truth to that. When the rest of the world joins a club there’s little point standing outside claiming you’re not in on the gossip. 

But then you realise that, like most gossip, it’s worthless, malicious and largely wish being father to the thought. 

Increasingly I confined myself to commentary on the output of His Majesty’s Press which, on any given day, was hand-crafted genius of which Grinling Gibbons would be proud – in other words I agreed – or the worst kind of half-informed, self-revealing drivel, typifying the trivial pursuits which so occupy the Street of Shame. In other words, I didn’t. 

Sports stuff too. Marcus Smith joins another French club. Yet mysteriously starts for Harlequins every September. Re-runs of Freddie Flintoff taking it to Ricky Ponting at Edgbaston in 2005. Obscure music archive footage and the site where a very attractive girl does a tutorial on the guitar solo from Comfortably Numb or Touch Too Much. 

I do, I suppose, miss the one where people in gyms try and lift far too much weight or battle with machines they don’t understand. This involves catastrophic joint failure or being flung through a wall by high-tension elastic. The destructive power of vanity. Of which Fesshole is probably the fascinating nadir. In this, people confess to increasingly unlikely misdeeds which everybody then turns into a John Peel meme: “That was Fido and the Doggers and their latest, Lost Among the Crowd.”

This, in many ways, is Twitter. Even negative attention is attention. Like taggers and Banksy, a brief moment of prominence in a world that largely ignores you. 

It’s quite useful as well for by-passing the endless wait for bot-driven complaints and query procedures. Your problem sits there like a steamer on the pavement, reeking of corporate inadequacy, until someone scoops it up quick.

But if you’re not interested in pursuing controversy for the sake of it. If endless, increasingly personal, arguments don’t interest you, if you’re largely indifferent to attracting hordes of followers, then there’s so much not to miss. Remainers who cloak themselves like melancholic Jacobites in a comfort blanket of their own misery, eternally cursing the world and shaking their Drambuie bottle in the frustrated expectation of the return of the king over the water. The faux outrage, the specious wording, the eternal search for moral impurity, the ‘c’mon, let’s all laugh at this poor sucker,’ the hypersensitivity, the conspiracy theories, the week-long abuse of a referee, the provocateurs and ‘the fascinating threads’ or Tweet archaeology. 

To be on Twitter is to lift the rock on the human psyche and to find such horrors crawling there that it’s hard to stifle a Munchian scream of utter despair. Is this  really what lies beneath? 

Fortunately, it isn’t. As Twittersphere’s denizens so often discover to their shock, the world moves on largely heedless to its obsessions. Conservatives win elections. Vaccination still works (unless you know someone who has contracted smallpox or polio). Each phone still comes with its own mast. Karl Dickson will referee a game next season. Britain voted to leave. Kristian Niemitz is only winding you up. The country is not in thrall to fascism. Most people rub along. Your storm largely breaks on the rocks of whichever politician or pop star you’re shouting at. Some poor intern is probably managing their account anyway.     

I do, very occasionally, feel the short synapse brain-to-mouth need to say something like “Broad’s got Warner again!”, “Rishi Zzzunak trying to inspire” or “Rachel Reeves still believing the Bank of England is a credential”. But it’s brief. Nobody cares if I do. Nobody misses it if I don’t. Least of all me. 

So please, if you’re tempted to Tweet this, don’t bother on my account. Or your own.  

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