Musings On Writing and the Failure of Twitter Management

            I haven’t nurtured my writing in a long time. From the age of eleven to the age of somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five, I wrote every day. It was a hobby and an escape more than anything; I told my young and naïve self at the time that I would make a career of this, but I never took it that seriously in truth. I’d created an entire universe in my own head at the age of eleven, both inspired by and including characters and toys from my childhood. I still remember bragging, childishly, that I was going to write a book and get it published, but that book was a ridiculous little fictional account of my own toys coming to life. I continued to play with my toys until I was fourteen, locked in my bedroom for hours and giving each of them their own voices, adventures and relationships. I had real friends and spent a lot of time outdoors, but I valued my alone time to imagine. In my writing, my “living toys” starred alongside characters I had created and existing characters from other media.

By the time I got into high school, I shifted from playing with toys entirely to writing, creating a superhero universe and a broad outline of how this universe was going to take place in multiple selling titles for years to come. A huge pipe dream. I had at least five years completely outlined and another five years in the planning stages, but now I can’t decipher my own codes and abbreviations on those surviving sheets of notebook paper to remember how all of it was organized. Despite maybe a hundred original heroes and villains I put together, the problem was that the entire universe revolved around a fond family pet and his owner, me. This was the Me universe, only for me. Secretly, the family pet was the real star, but things spun out when I became the ultimate hero of that world. I was essentially a carbon copy of Superman, but I had the likeness of that family pet. My ultimate villain? An amalgam of Predator, Doctor Doom, and the same family pet. It was a lot of derivative drivel designed to recreate real-life situations of my experiences with abuse and to resolve them with science fiction and the supernatural. It was a way to stay in the places I loved and had to leave. I realized that. I loved that pet, I loved the Ninja Turtles, I loved comic books, and I loved the short time my family spent living in Florida. So I combined them into a parallel world of mash-up characters without much regard for taking the ideas to professional print, a static world without any upheavals that didn’t end with everything going back to what I wanted for normal.

When I got out of college, I did make an attempt or two at professional print with some fan fiction. I wanted to write comic books and sent letters and submissions to several publishers. Rejections all around, but Dark Horse Comics specifically sent me a letter back letting me know how much they cared about my desire to write. They sent me a thick comic book scripting template that became my bible for years, but I still didn’t use it as more than a hobby. When I started taking it seriously, I began to see all of the real flaws in my writing. I saw the derivative nature of many of the stories as I retold a few classics with my own characters as the stars, and there was no way to make them my own no matter what I changed. So they began to sit and stew for years. I finally finished a Godzilla fan fiction story that I intended to submit to a fan magazine for publishing, but the fan magazine was barred from publishing original Godzilla stories shortly before I could do so. Toho threatened to sue me just for writing to them to ask their protocols for getting it published in Dark Horse Comics prior to that. Not the understanding sort, those folks. Part of that story is still unfinished on this blog twenty years after I wrote it, and I came to see a lot of flaws in it as well as an entirely new angle that I wanted to pursue. It’s one of many unfinished stories, including the story of my life. In my own original writing, every once in a while, I felt like I had the right changes in mind, a different medium to approach, or something radically new that surprised me and made me proud of myself, but the sad truth was that writing no longer was working as an outlet for my depressions and anxieties. I couldn’t escape into that world because the real world around me was growing louder and louder all the time. Family members were suffering from debilitating and, in some cases, terminal illnesses, and the family dysfunction already was bad enough to start. The writer’s block refused to go away. I kept drawing a blank.

I guess I have to say that I lost some of my imagination when my family began to fall apart. Those doors weren’t open wide enough for me to step through anymore. I still pick up something now and then, a brief spurt of inspiration that feels like it’s going somewhere, but it always drops off. The writer’s block always comes back harder than before. Almost five years ago, I finally figured out how to turn my “Superman” into an original hero, altering into a completely different hero genre, but the narrative shifted entirely with the invention of a new character to adventure with him. She, too, was inspired by a few other characters I loved, but she felt real to me. She hasn’t had the opportunity to come to life outside a few summaries. Then, about two years ago, I came up with an idea for a young adult novel, something completely different and putting aside all of my superheroes and toys and cartoons. The first few chapters are finished, but that, too, dropped away from me. I even found a way to work my original superhero into the novel as a fictional mythos within the fictional mythos, creating a backdoor of potential just in case I ever finish the novel and publish it. Nevertheless, I’ve been unable to go back to any of it. I want to. I need to. But I feel so stuck and distracted and alone and frustrated for the rest of the world.

As a child, either I didn’t have the anxiety over the state of the world now or simply translated it all as being so much easier to solve through writing. Now, almost forty years old, I find it harder and harder to find something to say and how to say it with feeling. Timeless feeling, not just a reaction to a moment. Twitter (and chatting online in general) doesn’t help, either. I have done away with almost all of my usual chat programs online, growing apart from a few friends I have known more than fifteen years, but it feels like it’s been a good thing for me. I think they understand my feelings, but I don’t feel like I’ve explained myself to them adequately. I use Twitter almost exclusively now, which brings with it its own problems. This is what I meant by a timeless feeling and not just a reaction to a moment. Because that’s what Twitter is designed to do: collect reactions to the moment. I’ve known this from the beginning. In the beginning, that used to be one of the main points of my use of Twitter: to mock it to some degree and to offer a little comedy and philosophical opinion. I didn’t believe in sharing deeply personal stories there because they “fed the beast,” and I didn’t engage in highly volatile or emotional conversations back then for the same reasons. There seemed to be no point in it. It was a useless exercise in raw nerve emotion. I enjoyed listening to other people I admired with a better finger on that pulse, I shared a few meaningless and boring details during my free time about my “job” driving friends and family members to doctor visits and VA appointments, and I shared a few nature photos. And I quoted a lot of movies and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Phil Hendrie Show.

I remember being full of reason when I first discovered the Internet almost twenty years ago. I don’t think I’ve lost it, but there is a frustration that reason has vanished from a number of places. Either that, or I held on to some of that simple translation longer than others. On the other hand, after almost twenty years, I have a growing feeling that I am running out of places where I feel comfortable communicating. I recently re-shared one of the most deeply personal stories of my life here, and it came in response to some of the material I have seen on Twitter and in the news with regard to sexual assault and abuse. As a sufferer myself with many more stories I have yet to tell, the PTSD I suffer from my own personal experiences pales in comparison to the helplessness, pain, and empathy I feel for others going through similar situations. In part, that’s one of the only reasons I’m sitting here writing for the blog again tonight because I have joined in a vow of Twitter silence for October 13, 2017, in response to an utter failure on the designers of Twitter to manage their platform with their users’ best interests in mind.

I have stated on Twitter already that I believe Twitter’s platform has lost the very concept of its inception. Twitter is a glorified global chat room, and all of its millions upon millions of users around the world are a literal crowd of people swarmed in the same public place. Places like Twitter and Facebook are attempts at the world stage. Everyone is performing. Everyone is the audience. Everyone is the critic. All at once, simultaneously, incessantly. To run such a platform as a business model comes with hurdles that Twitter’s managers fail on a daily basis to jump successfully. Rather than to address the true flaws in their programming, they instead continue to pass their responsibilities to algorithms. They’re using robots and artificial intelligence as hall monitors for real people like an ED-209 from Robocop patrolling a high school campus. Not only is one group of people going to find a way consistently to avoid encountering ED-209 in the hallway, but any number of innocent people are going to be gunned down for incorrectly assumed noncompliance. It’s already happened. This metaphor isn’t just a metaphor. People are trying to communicate some important things, even some not so important, and they are penalized while others spew threats, hatred, and bigotry, all the way up the chain to the so-called “president” of the United States with no consequence whatsoever for their negative behavior.

There is no description more accurate to describe it than negative behavior. It serves no purpose but to divide and incite anger among people, and I don’t think it truly counts as free speech, particularly when some take so much joy in causing others to suffer. It doesn’t matter what feelings you have about another person. You still need to remember that there is a real person on the other end, and that person could be you. You have to evaluate how deep your own rabbit hole goes that you would set up a fake account or multiple accounts to target someone else with negative behavior. It’s psychotic, and psychosis, I believe, doesn’t fall under free speech. It’s a vendetta or anger, misplaced or justified, and it goes beyond sharing a personal opinion.

Much of this negative behavior is, I strongly believe, a concerted effort to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater on a constant loop 24/7/365 until no one can tell any longer that their skin is burning until it’s too late. It is a deliberate attack on other people through harassment and unpunished abuse of the Terms of Service of basic human civility, Twitter or Facebook terms be damned, and it is the ultimate example that the Information Superhighway is covered in potholes. Vulnerabilities that can be exploited to turn the tide of any argument in favor of the side with the technical skill to pull it off. Truth doesn’t matter. Dignity and human decency don’t matter. Groups of foreign subversives, Nazis, basement-dwelling sexual predators, celebrity sycophants, and even blindly misguided “Christians” and “American patriots” are finding a voice for their prejudice, their sycophantic rhetoric, and their misinformation and disinformation, and those vulnerabilities are not being closed off. Those potholes are not being filled. When they are filled in, someone digs them back out in the dead of night with a shovel before the asphalt can harden. And the only ones truly being punished for it are almost anyone with the courage to speak out about those vulnerabilities and potholes, anyone with the strength to call this negative behavior what it is. Because those vulnerabilities are just that easy to continue to exploit when ED-209’s handlers are looking at his diagnostic screen and typically refusing to talk to anyone facing down ED-209’s gun barrel.

It is not a losing battle, but Twitter’s creators ultimately will be to blame for its downfall should the day come because they can’t be consistent with management. Picking and choosing what Terms of Service to enforce in seemingly random situations while leaving ED-209 to open fire amongst everyone else to sort it out. On one hand, they are trying to deny responsibility and claim that Twitter is a decentralized chat, washing their hands of it through an automated answering service that tells most of its users to mute or block each other when they can’t resolve an issue and sort it out themselves. On the other hand, they continue to centralize and tweak programming, giving speeches about how seriously they take the survival of the environment and the presence of their user base while their decentralized service keeps returning the calls of complaints to say, “We’ve reviewed your harassment claims of being told that you’re going to be murdered and found no violations based upon out terms of service.” You can’t have it both ways. I’ve been in chat rooms for well over ten years longer than Twitter and Facebook have been around. Even the ones that were decentralized often commanded a little more respect to human decency than I have seen on display today. Just from my own personal experience, things seemed to be better and had a greater air of dignity. Political and religious discussions got nasty, as they always do, but they worked toward some common ground. Trolls existed, of course, before they were called trolls (spammers, flooders, room-crashers, RTF bombers, and people starting their own chat rooms to badmouth other chat rooms), but I suppose the best explanation of what I witnessed is that they were not so emboldened as they are now. Emboldened to be dismissive and abusive toward a total stranger. Emboldened to be completely lacking in compassion for fellow man. Emboldened to bully and harass. As a result, here I am just writing whatever comes to mind instead of using Twitter or another communication platform like it. Because silence is the only thing that really hurts Twitter in the long run and gets them to listen. A complete lack of analytics and activity for them to cultivate. I could complain and have complained, but I have no real voice myself. It can be frustrating when something is very important to me, particularly in the realms of injustice and common sense, but I have to accept that I’m Joe Blow from Nowheresville. No one has any reason to listen to me. I could be ignorant of half of it and wrong about more. All I can do is offer to listen to the story of the problem and hope that my response shows that I have some understanding and compassion as a kindred spirit. Will a Twitter boycott of people in solidarity with Rose McGowan be the straw that fixes all of it? No, but that isn’t the point. The point is that the right things are beginning to change a little at a time, and voices are gaining strength. It’s still imperfect, but no one is giving up trying to move in the right direction, no matter how loud the screams of hatred are. That’s how it needs to be. Those voices need to keep finding themselves, no matter how long it takes. Eventually, it all converges into a powerful moment and, in a handful of cases, a powerful movement for change.

I wasn’t expecting to venture into this conversation. I just wanted to talk about my own writing and my need to come back to it, and then I wanted to finish watching a good horror movie to continue my month-long Halloween festivities. I guess this is a good start on the writing front because I’ve been at this entry for a solid two hours and feel somewhat soothed as my writing used to soothe me. I also have the added confidence of writing this with the intent to post it publicly and not having the anxiety about having an audience. At the very least, Twitter has been somewhat therapeutic for my social anxiety. I still don’t leave the house often enough to do it out there, but I, too, keep working to find my voice and my strength a little each day. This, unfortunately, is a “one step forward and two steps back” ordeal with depression, traumatic memory flashbacks, and the loss of many loved ones that meant the most in me to my life and helped keep me grounded. October is a rough month for me, and I can feel those memories pushing me to abandon most of human communication in exchange for drowning myself in manual labor as I have every year since my mother died in 2013. If it paid well enough to be a scarecrow during the autumn season, hanging from a wooden pole and sitting motionless as a decoration from one day to the next, then I’d probably apply for the job. October is the most difficult collection of good and bad memories for me rolled into one, and I have to try extra hard to enjoy the good while processing the bad and trying to allow time to heal.

Things feel a little better in places this year than they have in a long time. I was able to watch Carol Burnett for the first time without crying a few weeks ago. She reminded me too much of my mother, and I couldn’t handle it. That’s a good thing, but a few other places in my life remain stagnant and need to be churned up again. Maybe I’ll be able to get back to a place where I feel I can go through that door again, to reach that place in my mind where I can find the strength I used to have to do so much more. Maybe I can find the help I need to stop pretending that I’m happy more often than I am and grab hold of some real purpose again and pursue a few dreams I abandoned. Even though I’ll never stop listening to people’s stories and encouraging them to tell those stories, maybe I’ll regain more of the confidence that I can contribute more than just an ear or a shoulder. Maybe I’ll find some way to put my own stories together as a real writer so that someone else, anyone else in need, can read them and glean something from them that will help their situation or, at least, let them know they are not alone. We all still have such a long way to go. I don’t know how many, if any, live long enough to get there, but there seems every reason to keep at it.