"Twitter is destroying humanity" and other things the spirits taught me
or: on learning to be a wave
Several years ago, in the fall of 2022, I had a powerful waking dream where I suddenly found myself floating in space, surrounded by brilliant stars. I was aware, immediately, that some entity was communicating with me, though I never saw them. There was a baroque choir singing, who again, I could not see. I don’t remember the exact melody, but I remember their message clearly: “love and truth and joy, truth and joy”. Over and over.
As I came into awareness, I saw this giant, clear, crystalline sword floating in front of us. They said ‘this is the sword of consciousness’. I was awed by it, and still, let’s be honest, completely confused by why I was where I was. I have never heard of a sword of consciousness in my waking life, and it’s not a concept I have ever used. After a few moments of contemplating it as it floated, the sword was suddenly placed in my hands. Kind of VR style. I could see my hands but not the rest of my body.
The moment the sword was in my hands, I could feel how immensely heavy it was. A gravity beyond comprehension. We began hurtling back to earth at top speed. I remember feeling a bit scared and still, very confused. As we hurtled back to earth I wondered if we would crash.
A streetscape was rapidly coming into view. As it got closer and closer I marvelled at our speed.
And, just as we were about to crash onto the rainy street, we came to a halt and floated just above the road. They brought my attention to a wad of flimsy white filmy plastic laying discarded on the road. I focused my eyes, and started to see tweets printed out on the plastic, just an endless stream of thoughts in 240 character prose. They un-wadded the plastic to show me the stream of consciousness in its undignified glory.
I was trying to make sense of why they were showing me this when the message suddenly manifested: “Twitter is destroying humanity.”
I absorbed this, making sense as it did in the realm I was in.
Yes, of course. Twitter IS destroying humanity.
The chorus picked up, louder and louder: “love and truth and joy, truth and joy.”
And with that, I woke up.
I remember laying in bed completely in shock: “What was that?”
And then, the second realization popped into my head: “oh my gosh, how am I supposed to stop Twitter?”
A third thought quickly arrived: “you aren’t supposed to do it alone, silly.”
I’m embarrassed to admit that, at the time, I was also struggling with the realization that I would have to let Twitter — and the 36.1K followers I had at the time — go. This has become much easier as the platform descended into further and further racism, fascism, and decay.
But at the time, it was difficult to wrap my head around letting go of a place that I had come to know so many of my friends and colleagues. A platform that had shaped my life — both for better and for worse, more often for the worse — for 13 years at that point.
My identity, my two-dimensional identity anyway, was intimately wrapped up in that platform. And the spirits, guides, or Guardians, whichever existence they prefer, had shown it to me as flimsy white packing plastic. A wad of nothing on a rain pocked street.
Only days later, Elon Musk proclaimed that he was taking over Twitter to help humanity.
I remember how I stopped cold when I heard those words. It immediately brought me back to the dream/visitation.
I knew they were not lying to me. This was in fact a deep truth. Twitter is emblematic of, and entangled with, something much deeper than I can fathom in my singular human body. It has come to amplify, superpose the worst of techno capitalism and what River Barad (2007) calls the ‘metaphysics of individualism’. I am not blameless — a dear from from my youth said recently that she couldn’t read my tweets for years because she couldn’t see where the I that she knew, the giggly, absurd, heart-forward person had gone. In the strident anti-colonial tweets I became known for, the persona I developed over thirteen years, the Zoe she knew intimately and from the heart was nowhere to be seen.
More than once, upon meeting someone from Twitter ‘in the wild’, they would comment to the effect: “you’re nothing like your tweets” or “you’re not what I expected”.
Nietzsche wrote about how, in shifting from writing by hand to writing by typewriter, his consciousness was transformed, stating: ““Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”” (Hassan undated)
I have no doubt that Twitter, with its 140, and later 240, character limit changed my thinking. I had to parse out ideas in succinct ways. This promoted more linear, binarized thinking, just as how Hassan describes the process Nietzsche underwent in shifting from handwriting to his typewriter. I began to internalize the invisible algorithms of my peers, learning what they reacted to, what had a better chance of being retweeted. It was a reciprocal relationship, we were reinforcing specific narratives, drawing one another into our own parallel universes. I really liked the dopamine I got from engaging with others, and I want to be clear — there were moments of clarity and beauty in engaging with brilliant people on there. But, I also know that I was performing, seeking attention, and I have been thinking a lot about what that was all about energetically. So, as I look back, with gentleness, I can say it was exhilarating but also exhausting as well (particularly when white nationalists were angrily reporting my tweets to my employer). I don’t want to estimate how many hours of my life I spent on Twitter from 2009-2023. It is too depressing.
Over, the years, something I started to notice was that when I met people organically, in person, we could suss out each other’s energies and decide if we wanted to be entangled. I could also access my vast lifetime of intuition to recognize patterns — were these folks safe? Would they understand me? Maybe this person is best left as an acquaintance, which is ok! We are not all meant to have heart-rending soul expanding connections. Sometimes you just really need a competent person to review your taxes, or fix the phone you dropped on the asphalt.
But with Twitter, particularly, this intuition was short-circuited. More than once, when I met someone from Twitter that I really felt energetically drawn to on there in person, we did not connect. Our energies were at cross purposes, or heading out in completely different directions. The ‘spark’ we may have felt online was completely absent in person, a trick of the photons emanating from our screens. Our collective ideas of one another did not map on to the fleshy person in front of us. Sometimes I over-rode that insight, that intuition, and tried to make things continue to work as they had online.
It never panned out.
I was particularly susceptible to seeking connection and recognition and dopamine online for most of my thirties because I had moved away from home and was lonely as heck. I missed my friends back home, the familiarity and comfort of all the places I had known. I missed my family, I missed stability. I missed the people who knew me as my real self, by my real names. Twitter, the dopamine slot machine, filled that void. And the stakes, and the dopamine rush, got higher the more people followed me.
Once I moved back west, to my family, the pull of the ‘digital town square’ gradually diminished. A family member banned me from checking my phone on car rides. I balked at first, but it was necessary. I needed to be present with the people I love.
Talk about a timely intervention.
My world was ‘smaller’ as I slowly, begrudgingly let go of these online platforms. But it was richer. I spent way more time in the trees, at the water. Dreaming in hammocks or imagining with the birds.
And this is what brought me to a deep realization.
The world I was seeking online was an entanglement with Newton’s ghosts. To be legible online, particularly as a Métis person, I had to bracket out whole parts of myself, simplify my narrative. Traffic in things that would be amplified by an existing paradigm. I was trying to use machinery and coding developed to calculate the blast radius of hydrogen bombs to connect with other humans (Dyson 2012). This was and is, too often, a mirror-world, a two-dimensional and narcissistic one where we anticipate what each other covets and keep reflecting it back infinitely. To put it in the framework of Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of the Diamond Sutra, the influencer and digital world of Twitter and other platforms I was addicted to in the 2010s is an ‘image’ one, about projecting simplified and flattened concepts and accruing social capital through linear, particularized terms. But, as Nhat Hanh teaches us, we must move to the ‘substance teaching’, that is, the world of ‘depth and density’ (Andersen 2009) where we cannot bracket out our complexity, entanglement, and co-constitution.
That world I was addicted to was always cursed.
It was also, maybe, destroying humanity.
I think these platforms are also primed for a kind of collective psychological ego masking.* A manifestation of the ‘metaphysics of individualism’, and being the chosen/measured/apprehended particle, that can unravel as soon as we meet and reckon one another across our quantum relations, in living, breathing space. In the trees, in the wind, where the land is bearing powerful witness. The gift is that once we divest (as best as we can) from the technocratic platforms (or insistently disrupt and diffract them on our terms), we are left with some very generous opportunities: to breathe together (to conspire (Habtom and Scribe 2020)). To dream together. To learn to trust our guts and our intuitions again, too.
In Indigenous governance spaces in so-called Canada, we are manifesting a great unmasking of people trafficking in what I call ‘hollow-gram’ representations of Indigeneity (a hologram is a ghost wave trapped forever in a 2D medium, forced to reiterate into eternity a passing moment, and to appear as though it is a solid, 3D representation of the truth). To start with, we are navigating the realization that many people who spoke for us, for generations, were white colonizer scam artists. They had perfected the art of reflecting back to the settler gaze exactly what it had prefigured about us. Possessive, extractive, and flat (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Newton’s white possessive ‘ethnographic Indian’ is a lucrative business here in this country. But it’s not just ‘pretendians’ who are guilty of this. Any of one us who is lulled into the flatness of the ‘settler politics of recognition’ (Coulthard 2014) and reflecting back to colonial society what it wants are also implicated. I definitely did that at times when I adopted my Twitter persona, giving progressive settlers exactly the verbiage they hungered for. We became entangled in a recursive loop. This paradigm emphasizes and isolates the particle, the individual, at the cost of the collective, the wave. This paradigm has given some folks the ears of the colonizer — whether in federal ministries or publishing houses or media empires or even universities — in a way that undermines our co-elected, co-constituted wholes.
When given space to breathe, folks are really adept at reconnecting with intuition and sussing out that something feels ‘off’ or superficial, or distorted. That’s why the perpetrators of a scam or a con try to keep the heat up, throwing accusations, threats, and false information etc to try and keep the truth-tellers off-balance. Dopamine and adrenaline can be harnessed as a technology of chaos. But, when folks come together collective in love, truth, and joy, this co-constituted energy can recentre on what our hearts and guts are telling us. That’s what I bore witness to this weekend at the Robinson Huron Waawiindamaagewin event ‘(Un)Making of Metis Claims in Ontario’ conference. Speaker after speaker presenting from the heart, from their homelands, re-centring truths, love, and joy in being from their co-constituted nations and peoples through to time immemorial. Seeking a way forward that is not distorted by ego, celebrity, possession, or capital. Seeking a way through truth.
Some of our most prominent celebrities and influencers in so-called Canada are also entangled in the recursive loop of distortion and colonial recognition. And have become very comfortable speaking over our wave-based collectivity, mistaking popularity for integrity or authority. Sometimes this balloons into decades-long sagas that irrevocably damage our collective and inherent rights. I have borne witness at times to the harrowing impact of celebrities thinking they are our de facto governance, and the cost that comes with questioning these particularized, Newtonian logics.
But the lesson is undeniable: colonial celebrity paradigms amplify ego. In Red River Métis society, we may grumble at times about our elected officials, and some Métis bodies are in absolute chaos right now as unelected folks vie for power and authority to sidestep the collective will of our assemblies. But governments by their nature have to adopt collective accountability mechanisms that celebrities are never held to. Speaking plainly, from the heart, with love, truth, and joy will never steer us wrong.
The lesson from all of this is: colonial celebrity rots our collectivity. And digital culture diffracted through technocratic white supremacist fascist capitalism is always inherently violent (see: Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Bender, Gebru, et al. 2021; Browne 2015; Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018). Can we completely divest ourselves from these digital platforms? Probably not. But can we move with more awareness of their distorting impacts and tendency to flatten, particularize, possess, and linearize us? Absolutely.
I have a new rule in my interpersonal life: no more meeting new folks solely online. And I also have new marching orders within my own Red River Métis society: working very hard to find out who has been erased by colonial celebrity culture. Who are the storytellers we need to revisit, reaffirm, and celebrate with humility and collectivity? In Red River Métis society, there are plenty of folks who have been forgotten in the colonial embrace of a few chosen (un-elected) spokespeople who have taken us down very wrong paths in the last few decades with bad law,** distorted stories, and frankly untruthful narratives that benefited them but harmed our governance and relations. These folks sometimes have large online followings they appeal to when they don’t like what the collective. The ego can no longer speak over the collective.
Last night, I turned on the TV and a Dolly Parton film was playing. She was at the gates of Heaven, and Saint Peter told her she couldn’t enter because she had been a bit too selfish in life. She was going to be given a chance to redeem herself.
She suddenly hurtled back to earth.
I was reminded of that visitation/dream from 2022 and hurtling back to earth with the sword of consciousness pulling me. And the message of “love and truth and joy, truth and joy” that rang out from the cosmos.
I really do believe that in re-embracing our messy and human entanglements and collectivity — the wave — is an act of love, truth, and joy. Truth telling may feel uncomfortable and certainly threatens the ego-centric paradigms that have allowed some to accrue immense social capital. However, to be reminded of our sacred collectivity as Indigenous peoples is a gift in a world hurtling towards fascism. This moment is gathering momentum and is what will carry us to ‘the other shore’ of suffering, to borrow a concept from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Engaged Buddhism. Letting go of ego and softening into our wave-based entanglements and superpositions is what we need to move into more integral, loving, and effective ways of moving and being.
The spirits were trying to teach me something that day back in 2022: that selfishness, ego, and the metaphysics of individualism are what is destroying us. Twitter is one manifestation of it, but there are many others we must confront as well. When we forget we are a wave, a co-constitution, it’s all over.
For my day to day life, I now seek to meet folks organically. Then we can let the dust and leaves and flowers decide if we are meant to stay entangled.
It means my world is physically smaller. But my gosh, it is much richer.
*(thinking here, carefully, with the points raised by Fanon (1952) and Coulthard (2014) respectively about masks and masking to survive white colonial regimes and empires)
** this was the compelling framework that lawyer Stephen Mussell offered to describe the 2003 Powley decision during the conference.
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