Read on Twitter
Reasons why I hate this website and will be deleting it in January to start 2021 ~purified~. An extremely long, aggrieved, and earnest thread/rant:
1) for the most part, it makes everyone, including me, mean, angry, and stupid—I’ve spent days fuming about some thing Ben Shapiro said or some YA author i’ve never heard of dissing Moby Dick. I could and should have spent those days doing literally anything else
2) it is not an accident that twitter’s most obvious effect is to make everyone angry and suspicious: the point of the platform is to outrage people because outraged people generate more clicks and therefore more cash for the tech overlords. Mark Fisher is SO right about this
3a) plus, it’s not good for people, or at least for me, to think in real time in front of huge audiences. It’s not good because I don’t have good ideas until they I revise my original, impulsive ideas, often in the course of conversations with others...
3b) and the best conditions under which to do this are those in which you are comfortable admitting you’re wrong. On twitter, where people are “calling each other out” with great hostility, reconsidering your position feels like losing face in front of thousands of people
3c) (one of many reasons I think “call out culture” is not good in pedagogical contexts, but anyway)
3d) I am someone who LOVES to argue for the sheer joy of it—no debate-hating, please, it’s anti-Semitic—so twitter makes me, in particular, into a complete monster. Arguing is an epistemic good but only when you feel comfortable “losing.”
4a) plus, twitter increases the risk that you will be “cancelled” because it increases the risk that you will voice a stupid thought or, worse, voice a stupid thought of the sort designed to scandalize people (see 1, 2, 3)
4b) Idk if cancellation is capital-R Re but I do know academic/writing jobs are scarce and becoming scarcer. An ill-advised tweet is realistically likely to make your life a lot harder, not if you’re Steven pinker, but if you’re a loser grad student like, well, me
4c) Worse, it might prevent people from reading your writing charitably
4d) and it’s easy to write a bad tweet when you live your whole life on a screen. I’ve def tweeted half-baked rants I should’ve just texted someone because I lost track of the chatting-with-my-friends vs screaming-into-the-public-void distinction (sorry, all)
5a) it’s easy to mistake twitter for real life, which mercifully Twitter isn’t. I don’t mean this the way people do when they say online harassment doesn’t matter. Online life has material consequences: it can rob you of your income or make you unsafe. it’s real in that way
5b) but it’s unreal in the sense that it makes it seem like people are meaner and dumber than they are by providing structural incentives for them to be mean and dumb (see 2). Many people who are mean and dumb on twitter, including me, I hope, are not mean and dumb in real life
5c) I don’t want to encounter people at their meanest and dumbest: I would rather encounter someone’s thoughtful writing than her thoughtless attacks on someone’s bad tweet or whatever. And that’s how I want to be encountered
There are a lot of people on here who comport themselves with a lot more grace than I‘be been able to and I’ll miss them/you. I’ve made a lot of twitter friends despite the churlishness of my online self, and I hope you’ll keep in touch at ilikenabokov@gmail
Please do write just to say hi or whatever and I will do my best to answer you, since I will miss the approximation of existing in a public sphere that twitter affords when it’s not terrible
I also have a lot of pieces coming out that I was excited to share with you all—especially one about Celan and one about the relationship between politics/ethics aesthetics (glad I won’t have twitter for that one 
)—so I hope you will keep an eye out for them!
)—so I hope you will keep an eye out for them!
To find them u can stalk my dweeby website here: https://www.beccarothfeld.com
Maybe I’ll also start a blog or *shudder* a substack, and if I do I’ll post it here before I leave
I’ll be around until the end of month, wasting time getting mad about Ben Shapiro and not writing when I should be, if you want to say bye or give me your contact info. ~*~*ThAnKs fOr tHe MeMoRiEs~*~*
