Against Microbloggers

This post exists for such a small group of people that I’m almost ashamed to upload it to a general blog as this. I always try to write for a general audience - not today. If at any point you encounter a name or phrase that doesn’t make sense, I encourage you to click away and go read something else - I have some short fiction pieces you might like. I will not explain anything below.

I have a special fondness for bloggers. I love how unpretentious it is - maintain a website, dump all your thoughts there, people may read or not as they choose. I don’t appreciate the more recent swath of SEO-optimized garbage that gets dumped onto the internet by small- and mid-sized companies looking to increase brand recognition, of course. I like people who write blogs. Not surprising, considering I maintain a blog of my own, in 2023. No Substack for me, no Youtube podcast. I just want to write my thoughts and allow you to read them.

I do not have the same respect for microbloggers (Twitter posters). They use the platform’s social networking features to maintain an ultra-tight feedback loop with their audience. They optimize a message for audience capture, which necessarily means emotional resonance, loyalty to the persona they fabricate, etc. etc. The nerdy, autistic, eminently gullible internet community currently (although not for much longer) calling itself “TPOT” has been almost entirely captured by microbloggers.

For no particular reason, here are three such Twitter accounts:

• Nick Cammarata - a slimy, manipulative control freak. His desire to control the frame includes a desire to appear to lack control. He possesses a deep cowardice, a fear of his own fragility, which he copes with by constructing tortured pseudo-Buddhist psychadelia ethics. By justifying self-interested narcissism as a virtue, he hopes to never have to address it within himself. He coincidentally happens to do some interesting AI research, but his day job doesn’t play much into his eceleb persona, so we can leave it aside, just like he does.
• Qiaochu Yuan - a shallow, self-obsessed manchild. Not enough conviction to be a hippie, not enough dedication to be a scientist, just enough emotional oversharing to give his audience the illusion of personal growth. He desires to be all-encompassing, but is so uniformly mediocre in all things that he resorts to spewing prodigious quantities of words into every medium in an attempt to appear spiritually large.
• Roon - The most naive nerd on Earth. It’s an open question whether he’s really as stupid and trusting as he appears - but since we’re considering only the persona he puts forward, his “real” beliefs or motivation is irrelevant. He is the goodest boy, the most useful idiot, electing to turn off his brain for any subject that isn’t a math problem. He is a technocrat, but in the sense of one who wishes to be enslaved to technology, not a master of it. He is so deeply embedded into corporate America that the Machine’s interests and his actually align.

All three of these men are… fine. They have personality flaws and vices, magnified by the inherent scrutiny of a relatively large online audience. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them as people, certainly not when compared to other people as a whole. But their flaws do exist, and do preclude them from being inspiring figures. They each enjoy a level of influence and respect they do not deserve.

Whenever a shitty product is successful, you have to examine the audience. I don’t think there’s anything addictive about reading rambling Twitter threads on how you can, like, totally control your own emotions, man. So these men’s audience can’t be excused on the same grounds as heroin addicts. Nobody is forcing them to read this garbage. Absolutely nobody is forcing them to sign up for newsletters or coaching sessions, or to take psychadelics, or to turn off their adblocker. What is drawing people to venerate such mediocre figures? Is it a lack of options? When it comes to emotional self-regulation, there are thousands of books from the past thousands of years - methods that have proved successful, that are not complicated, and most of all do not demand a parasocial adulation from the reader. If you want to follow technology, you can just read the papers. If you want to follow pop-sci technology, you can just read The Economist.

Recently, a bunch of the same gullible nerds that fill these men’s audience also went to summer camp. Why did they go? To connect with community? Did they? Or did they stand around awkwardly as second-class participants, watching the main circle of the subculture primarily engage with each other, sometimes participating but never being invited to the afterparties or the independent group chats. Did they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to have the same experience they get on Twitter: to be a peanut gallery spectating the social engagements of those more dynamic, more connected, or more established than them. I’m sure they had fun - it’s fun to spectate characters you know. But did they become a character in the play themselves, or were they paying to be an audience member?

I hate ecelebs. Not content creators - the internet is for making things, and being a popular artist isn’t a sin. But ecelebs, who cultivate and feed an audience, who extract attention, validation, and ultimately cold hard cash from people who are too boring or too timid or too trusting or too needy to recognize how they are being exploited. And I despise the fans of ecelebs, who enable otherwise normal people into being two-bit Oshos, who are blind to how their energy and resources are being used to inflate a persona that provides nothing of value to the world. Everyone could be an eceleb. Everyone could run a Twitter account like they’re the most important person on Earth, treat themselves with reverence. Or no one. If you went back in time and assassinated Leafy as a baby, would the world be any different?

“TPOT” has always been a little bit pathetic, in the manner of a herd of domestic rabbits. They want to claim strength, but are unable to ever flex it. They want to playact at being aggressive, but can only do so with the guardrails of safe words and silly costumes. It takes all their combined effort just to exist. Small wonder that any slightly megalomaniacal microblogger can easily scoop them up and turn them into an adoring fanbase. Somewhere these people have been taught to discard the skepticism and gut instinct that would normally protect them from such manipulation - but that’s for another post. To conclude this one: this is disappointing behavior from people with abundant resources who should know better. A stranger on the internet is not your guru, nor your friend.