“I weep for Adonais — he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: “With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!”
As the holiness of Easter and Lent get on my rearview mirror, and both the war drums and pandemic hysterics begin to fade into the background of public chatter for most, one of the recent ‘hot topics’ has been the Musk potential takeover of Twitter aka the blue bird app — which we could contend has become the contemporary analogue to the Roman Forum. I have already discussed several views and opinions of mine on the app itself, but now I want to write about the people who used to be around and either were permanently suspended or went away because they felt the censorship, de-boosting or shadow bans were not worth the hassle and never returned. Others got away because they found real life was challenging enough without all the black pills served daily. I don’t forget those either.
We all know someone, we all remember that friend who one day vanished, we are used to the display of the screenshot showing that one of us, one of our own, has been suspended or deleted their account. We press F to salute, when it was a friend, we press S to spit if it was foe. But at the end of the day, despite the multiple re-spawns (I’m thinking about you MelGibsonFan) we feel the bitter sting of the familiar who is now gone, his or her voice no longer to be read.
How can we explain to our irl friends and families that one day we were in a bad mood because AnonX will never return or because that person we exchanged text messages every single day for years is suddenly gone forever, and yes, perhaps you got their contact or an email but somehow it’s not the same, that friend is gone?
There is something in our human nature that expects those we care about to stay close, but as the “medium is the message”, how can we expect any staying quality in platforms that were designed for fleeting thoughts, fleeting allegiances and fleeting friendships… even love? Can we even attempt to make the things designed to be fleeting fixed?
I have. I have brought my friends from the digital to the real. And I have been online since the beginning of the digital time. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We made Gods of Words. The Words of the Algorithm. The Gods in the Algorithm.
Long diatribes have been written about the suspension of prominent posters like President Trump or James O’Keefe, very few if any were written for people like Pax Dickinson, Charles C Johnson or that poster who piqued my interest and made me dive into the “wrong side of Twitter Town”: the incredibly witty Ricky Vaughn — whose real name is Douglass Mackey — and proved the power of memes in the now legendary Meme War of 2016. Not one, I believe, has been written in remembrance of the Anon Poster.
There is a meme which shows a frog weeping at the sight of the deleted tweets of his former friends, now gone and it is portrayed as if it were the wall of a War Memorial, which shows graphically the loss we feel each time one of us is gone. If Musk ever gets his hands on the Bird app, the first thing I’d want is for an unbiased view of the “town square”, freed from the algorithm that chains it, and the bias, and the censorship… but more than anything else, I’d like to either see friends handles reinstated or even a return of those friends.
I remember vividly the innocence, exuberance and lust for life that those days around 2015/16 had, because in the wilderness there is always life. And this is — I know I always say this — what I seek for me and for everyone: Life & Love.
I know, I know, I dream. But we, we are the ones who let dreams be memes.
Eros against Thanatos.
The Will to Life.
Laughter.
Friends.
Love.
And a way to bring them back, the ones that got away.
I invite you, my reader, to remember your own missing ghosts, your friends and the joy they brought you today.