Reformatting the Twitter Brain

How to use Twitter without letting it turn you into an actual schizo

What is your attention worth? What are you willing to have your attention be disrupted by? Do you ever bother to even make that value assessment as you doomscroll Twitter throughout your day? While away from the Twitter timeline for 40 days, I had a very honest reflection on how it was effecting my mind, body and soul. I quickly realized that I was completely caught off guard by inviting this digital dopamine casino into my life. It very quickly disrupted my daily routines and turned into a large platform for me with an audience of 15,000 people, which I could have never expected let alone prepared for. It happened so fast that I desperately needed to reassess my purpose in using this technology, which is designed to manipulate its users, as I very consciously started noticing its obvious negative impact taking a toll on me.

Author Cal Newport writes a lot about these manipulative effects that social media has on us and I found that the 4 main points he raised are spot on with my experience being both on and off Twitter for extended times. Newport is off social media completely, so his solution is simply to abstain from it. However, I will be adding to and expounding upon his points, providing my own personal hacks that I have applied in a last ditch effort to make Twitter fun while not being a slave to the timeline. So here’s what I found to be the 5 most negative effects of Twitter usage.

1. Twitter gives you a false sense of importance. Getting a bunch of likes and retweets on some random thought that you normally would have kept to yourself, can lead to delusions of grandeur, which happens to be a symptom of schizophrenia. Newport accurately uses the metaphor of pulling a slot machine lever to describe the constant refreshing of the Twitter feed to check new engagements. It generates intermittent bursts of dopamine that fuel a sense of pride. Its the digital equivalent to sniffing your own farts. Your real life importance that you gain through the sacrifice, hard work and love you invest into your real life relationships and pursuits, all gets “subverted when you allow these little manipulated metrics, these little app icons on a phone, tell you whether you’re important or not” says Newport.

2. Twitter makes you anxious over things that have nothing to do with your actual day to day responsibilities. You will experience much less anxiety without exposure to the timeline. Your mind conforms to the world you have surrounded yourself with. And when that world is whatever appears on your timeline, it constructs a physical and emotional reaction to your reality. Twitter incentivizes and rewards outrage, conflict and division. Being exposed to this constant tension will produce a negative impact on your mental state even while you’re away from the timeline. Also if you spend hours on Twitter each day, going without it for even just a day will make you feel anxious, which is when you know there’s a problem. If you are someone who spends a lot of time on the bird app, try fasting from it for a day or two and really observe how you feel. You will notice you are anxious to know whats happening on the timeline and what engagements you are missing out on.

3. Twitter deprives you of simply being bored and having quiet thoughts and moments of self reflection. Being bored is not an inherently bad thing, it just depends on what you do with it. Boredom can lead to creativity, productivity, developing new hobbies, starting a business, going outside to do things and having more human interactions. Personally, I was the most productive I’ve been in years before I allowed Twitter to disrupt my life. Twitter and other social media apps, rob you of the freedom and opportunities that arise out of being bored and having moments of self reflection. In a recent interview, Fr. Josiah Trenham says that “acrimony is built into the core of the platform, especially with this addiction that social media has nourished, where you can’t read something or listen to something and simply have a quiet reflection about it. You must say what you think about it.” Spending time filling our heads with the shower thoughts of strangers in exchange for what Fr. Seraphim called “quiet and humble labors”.

4. Your time and attention is an invaluable asset and by spending countless hours on twitter, you are commodifying it. You may not be paying for the platform with money, but you are paying for it by transforming your attention into data and voluntarily giving it over to machine learning algorithms in exchange for dopamine hits.

The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention. In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform. -Substack Notes

5. The more you post content on twitter the more privacy you lose. Having a larger audience means you have thousands of people who learn more about you as you keep posting while you have no clue who they are. Even if you are conscious about maintaining your privacy, you will sacrifice more of it the more you tweet. The larger your audience grows, the higher the probability of bad actors finding your identity and using it against you. It’s very unsettling knowing there’s a large group of people who know a lot about you while you know nothing about them. Some may not care but most of us don’t have the luxury of losing our livelihoods over shitposts. Plus, it’s simply not natural to have thousands of anons reading and engaging with your conversations with other people. God created us to be communal and familial, surrounding ourselves with people who love and care for us.

The parasocial network effect

Balancing digital technology with having real experiences with nature and human relationships has always been my main struggle. The internet has served as an extremely useful tool for me to gain knowledge, establish meaningful relationships, build communities, and even helped lead me to the Orthodox faith. On the other hand, it’s been my worst enemy in times when I’m idle or feeling lonely. Although parasocial relationships aren’t a new phenomenon, they have certainly been amplified and accelerated in the digital age. There is truth to the meme of parasocial relationships depicted as being exclusive to onlyfans simps or weebs with anime pillow waifus. However, chances are if you are reading this, you follow YouTube personalities you can relate to and you listen to other podcasts because maybe you feel like you are part of the conversation or have a connection with that personality even though the person has no idea you exist.

Parasocial relationships also make up a large proportion of social media engagements as many of us are likely to continue engaging with accounts that have huge followings who very well may never recognize our interactions as we wonder if they have seen our comments. It’s in a sense what we all experience with having mutuals on twitter whom we only “know” essentially through shitposting, occasional engagements and some shared interests, yet we form these connections with them in our heads as if we have some kind of genuine relationship. This is experienced when a mutual unfollows us and we feel like we’ve lost a friend, wondering what was said to prompt the unfollow. These parasocial relationships are so ingrained in our experience on these platforms that it’s what keeps us rooted to them despite us knowing very well that they are built to exploit us.

When I took my Twitter break, I didn’t make an announcement that I was signing off, I just uninstalled the app and stopped posting and scrolling. Although I only posted the occasional promotional tweets and a couple threads for my Substack, I was absent from the noise of the timeline. If you really want false sense of self importance, sign off for some time without announcing you’re leaving. You will realize that hardly anyone notices you’re gone. Maybe if you were extremely present and engaging, someone might mention “I wonder what happened to that account”, but unless its some huge well-loved account that is suddenly gone, your voice is generally not missed.

So having said all this, I am not completely signing off Twitter and I will still contribute to the town hall, so to speak. For now, I find it useful for networking, leading people to the Church and for creative inspiration. Although during my break I have been working on developing a personal philosophy on digital tech in general and made some serious adjustments to how I am using the bird app. So here are my personal hacks for making Twitter fun and healthy without being exploited by it. I call them hacks because when it comes to social media and smartphones in general, we are talking about technologies that are engineered to enslave us and do so successfully unless we make conscious efforts to master the technology.

NOTE: I have since changed my position on this. I no longer believe these ad hoc “hacks” work in the long term, at least for me. I am leaving them up in case they are helpful to others in limiting your usage of the platform.

1. Do not engage with drama, scandals, gossip or community infighting.

2. Uninstall the Twitter app and just use it on your computer during assigned blocks of time.

3. Use the Better Twitter browser extension to enable "no vanity" and "no fame" mode, which will remove likes, retweets and follower count. This keeps you from growing a false sense of self importance and makes Twitter into something thats more like just a fast paced message board. To really hit the sweet spot you can hide likes from others, promoted tweets, trends and who to follow.

4. Only allow notifications from mutuals, if at all. Don’t let people who you haven’t invited into your digital life interrupt your attention.

5. Write down thoughts into a note taking app. Preferably one like Obsidian or Notion that allows you to link notes together and create a personal knowledge management system to develop and organize your thoughts. Twitter drafts are not that. Real ideas don’t have character limits.

6. Get used to not sharing every self perceived interesting thought with an audience.

7. (Hard mode) Grayscale your screen. The app colors are literally based on the colors used on slot machine graphics that deliver dopamine hits just by interacting with it. App designers and developers are well aware of this psychological trickery and many use grayscale themselves so they don’t fall victim to it.

I myself am working on applying these hacks and building a philosophy of digital tech so I can keep a sober mind, value my attention more and maintain focus on things that matter throughout the day. If you haven’t done this already, I pray that as you continue navigating through this digital hellscape that you will consider doing the same. Godspeed, anon.