Today I deleted all content from my X.com page (formerly Twitter). My motivation is not merely political, or in protest, though of course I am doing that. It’s also because I have not been happy with the erosion of the site as a platform for public discourse for quite some time now, and both the newsfeed and the technology have become entirely unstable. The app only worked intermittently on my phone ever since the transition from Twitter to X. The site also deleted my newsletter (through its subsidiary “Revue” platform, which it canceled) after Elon Musk wrested ownership of the company at the time and tried to monetize it. And most of my friends and readers have jumped ship from the site for their own reasons over the past few years. I’ve been having a big “why bother?” feeling about it for over a year, and lately have felt some revulsion about some of the posts that were forced into my feed by people I wasn’t following. It has become essentially dead to me for awhile, and now I’ve canceled my account and walked briskly away.
However, I’ve moved to Bluesky for the time being (I’m at mikearnzen.bsky.social). It feels uncanny there, acting like a double for Twitter, with the creative feelings it used to have in its heyday. I may continue to post some microfictions and poems there, as well as the usual Blather. I feel I need the news, the connectedness to other creatives, an outlet to touch base with like minds. But I’m becoming more and more skeptical of the utility and necessity of social networking across the board. Which is sad. Mobile technology should enable some amazing conversations. And it still can; you just have to dig through a lot of trash to find the treasure, and you can’t be passive about it all.
I want to say thank you to everyone who followed me on twitter, or collaborated with me on poetry exchanges or similar literary experiments there. I appreciate anyone who retweeted my posts or commented on my stories. I had thousands of followers and was an AVID user of twitter, centralizing all my social networking there, since about the mid-2000s. I used twitters to host contests, and I published in early “twitzines.” I not only used it creatively (or even subversively, I like to think) to post micro-sized horror stories and twisted poems and dark jokes, but I even taught students in my creative writing classes to use the site as a way to practice brevity. I rarely just tossed off messages about what I was eating or responding to memes… it was all just more horror writing to me; it was another literary toy, allowing me to write in the same genre as Gorelets poems from the days of yore (which began as PDA (palm pilot) poems, predating the widespread usage of mobile phones — and you can read all about this in my book, The Gorelets Omnibus, which collected a decade’s worth of them). I always felt I was crafting miniature horror stories when I posted there. Tiny Jolts. Little Gorelets.
Although I deleted my “xitter” account, I have kept copies of ALL the content. For, you see, I felt all along that I was just building a new collection of short-short horror, as a kind of sequel to The Gorelets Omnibus, capturing “the next decade” following that book. (This personal archive began with a sideblog I kept here called “The Nest” as a few loyal readers might recall). I have plenty of these micro-stories to share from this archive, and I’ve been calling the manuscript for it BLUEBIRD GUTS. I’ll be sure to post any updates if it becomes available for purchase in book format, so stay tuned.
How to stay tuned? Well, try my podcast or my instagram accounts if you’re not on bluesky. And feel free to email me questions for the podcast, as I’ll be randomly answering listener questions at length on future episodes of 6:66!
Related: TWEET AT THE DEVIL from 2010.
