In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sonntag concludes with an observation that remembrance is an act with ethical weight and, as a corollary, that in the prevention of future suffering it is also sometimes necessary to choose to forget. The internet is disjointly fragile: some things last forever, and other things break suddenly and permanently. As I enter my middle ages, I’ve been contemplating what I leave behind, how I want to be seen, and how I want to be remembered. And, thinking of how Lord Byron had unpublished manuscripts burned after his death, I have similarly been thinking that some cleaning house is long overdue. I think it’s important to curate your digital presence, if not in real time, then certainly after the fact.

Years ago I started undertaking this effort. It was a pass time for the most part: in 20 minutes on the U-Bahn I could delete a handful of tweets here or there. This casual activity got me shockingly halfway or so through the process. (I don’t know how many total posts I have lifetime, but my estimate is in the neighborhood of 40k). But I didn’t want this to go on another few years. I am entering a turning point in my life, my attitudes on social media have changed dramatically. I wanted to get it done. So I finally coded up a little script to help me out.

This process was not so simple. I didn’t want to delete everything. Some of my posts have real archival value: my posts around Unite the Right or Sines v. Kessler I believe will have distinct historical relevance. I’ve also worked with biographers and historians who have already found them to be important and useful. So I wanted to be able to preserve those posts. This meant wholesale autodeletion was out. I would have to manually review every post.

Revisiting every post came with emotional baggage. Many of the posts were cringe; several were from stupid internet arguments. Others were painful to watch, dredging up traumatic experiences or memories of loved ones who’ve passed. But reading them was also a unique and worthwhile experience. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned from 10+ years of microblogging and, hopefully, has made me a better person. So that’s what this post is about: a litle self-retrospective on what brought me to where I am and, by extension, a little clue of where I might be going. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Twitter was annoying

We so belovedly called it the “hellsite” for good reason: the daily trek through the timeline was like tapdancing in a minefield. Twitter was awful because it rewarded awfulness. I’ve written before about how Twitter was a global chatroom and that meant there was a lot of coal to sift through to find any diamonds, but reflecting on 10 years of posts really highlighted how terrible everything and everyone—myself not excluded—was.

Twitter users had a preternatural ability to infer context that was never present in a post. They’d assume the worst possible intention, they’d latch onto an extremely common and benign turn of phrase and then just destroy you over it. Everyday people logged onto the timeline looking for blood and if they didn’t find it they would create it themselves. The worst part of it was the self-certain belief that in doing so they were engaged in a legitimate and effective form of activism. If there was ever a valid criticism to be leveled against the perjoratively-designated “SJW” Twitter (once upon a time, before it was “CRT”, before it was “DEI”), it’s that people would simply badger someone until they changed the very language they spoke. Most of the time, it was just someone literally making something up thinking it sounded smart and progressive and then suddenly it became a shibboleth. God forbid you logged off to watch, I don’t know, a movie or a baseball game, and then logged back on to find that vocabulary shifted under your feet. Oh, you’re using transphobia instead of transmisia? Ableist swine. Oh, you’re using “MtF?” It’s “AMAB.” Oh, you’re using “AMAB?” Binarist asshole.¹ These battles rage on today, and every time I poke my head back in I see people who by every other measure should be in community with each other tearing each other apart instead over minor invectives that have no analog-world equivalents.

Having used Twitter for ten years meant being around long enough to have fought for normalizing certain language in everyday speech only to see people suddenly allege it to be bad as literal fascism. I’ve been openly queer for a very long time, and I remember keenly the fights to encourage straight people to use “partner” for their loved ones because it made social interactions more inclusive to queer people, only to watch a few years later as people would launch hundred tweet invectives about how it was “queer appropriation.” It was a dizzying experience. A shocking number of posts that I gleefully purged were deep threads about exactly these kind of debates.

But it wasn’t just the micropolitics that made the site unbearable. Twitter had legitimate relevance and that meant it was a proving ground for actual politics. Which meant that few could resist the opportunity to dunk all over Glenn Greenwald or Michael Tracy for some headass take. Of course, this only increased their engagement which made them more culturally relevant and the site rewarded them with this behavior. People literally turned hate into profit, and the Twittersphere gleefully took part. The worst of this was how it turned us all into mean girls, everyone vying for the perfect, incisive burn. To some extent, that was better than engaging directly, giving credibility to awful ideologies, but it was not nearly as good as using the power of the platform to build something new and more powerful. The most power anyone ever had on Twitter wasn’t in using it as a laboratory for journalism and research—although many did and it mattered—it was in harassing the everloving bejeezus out of someone, laughing maniacally the whole time.

Sarah Jeong’s heartrending farewell piece to the hellsite covers this. Jeong spent her time in conservatives' crosshairs (and, for a scary while, this could have meant literally), her obviously facetious tweets having been willingly taken out of context and used to impugn her. It’s not without a sense of irony and guilt that I note that this happened on the heels of her being named the New York Times technology editor, a post that was vacant because its previous resident, Quinn Norton, was bullied out of a job by left wingers outraged at her ties to the infamous neo-Nazi hacker, Andrew Aurenheimer. I remember this clearly because I was a part of that. Mea culpa.

The harassment on Twitter often led to a pattern of people trying to defend themselves: I deleted hundreds of posts trying to defend against libelous claims about my past, which were of course propagated through selectively-cropped screenshots and removed from context. This never worked, this never made any progress. Likewise, the magic “accountability” people sought, which I wrote about years ago, was a myth. Recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about how someone found her at a restaurant and hecked her, demanding to know when she would call Israel’s military interventions in Gaza a genocide. It didn’t matter much that she already did so months ago. Twitter brain is a prion disease that spreads offline. We don’t want the truth, we want to see your guts on the pavement!

I deleted all that, oh how it gave me pleasure to do so. These arguments weren’t worth having at the time, they’re certainly not worth keeping all these years later. Nothing edifying ever came of them, only ruin, and my responsible and self-defensive act is to evaporate them for all time.

The process was annoying

Let me just say that I definitely gave myself a repetitive strain injury. In the last month I’ve curated over twenty-thousand posts and purged almost three-quarters of them. This meant a lot of clicking, but also copying and pasting post IDs. About two-thirds of the way through this process I managed to find some keybindings that made this slightly easier, but it wasn’t pleasant at any point.

The process went something like this: because of Twitter’s rate limit—I could load 100 posts every 15 minutes or so—I wrote a script that would parse my Twitter archive calendar week by calendar week and open 50 posts at a time in a browser. Anything I wanted to delete I would delete, and anything I wanted to keep I would copy the ID to a text file. This would help me validate the curation later on, to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I arrived at this solution after trying several others.

Initially, my casual curation relied on Twitter’s search. I would simply type from:emilygorcenski until:2018-01-31 into the search bar and go backwards from there, deleting as I went. I could do 100 posts very quickly in this way. But after Elon Musk bought the company to turn into his own little global therapy session, the search indexing simply stopped working. Moreover, I discovered a while ago that this method wouldn’t return any quote posts of posts from blocked, suspended, or deleted users, nor quotes from deleted tweets. This was a not-insignificant number of posts.

The more manual approach I took showed me just how many posts were like that. I would estimate about half of what I deleted were replies to posts from suspended or blocked accounts, or deleted tweets, or accounts that blocked me. There was a huge amount of link rot, a lot of removed context. And while I realize I was contributing to that problem by deleting my posts as well, it felt a little like cleaning up an old battlefield.

Of course, I also tried with the API. But this was even worse. The free tier allowed for five deletions per fifteen minutes, a comical number. I could have given Musk money (blech) to up this by a couple factors, but it was hardly worth it, since I still needed to manually curate anyways, it was easier to microbatch the process. Of course the site is decaying, it’s hostile to anyone trying to do anything interesting on it. After working with the fantastic Bluesky API, the frustration of Twitter’s inferior product was palpable. It’s impressive to see what the ATProto (Bluesky’s underlying protocol) community is doing. It’s an early sign of what Twitter could have been.

Time is annoying

I was watching Stranger Things in 2016? I started watching Wheel of Time in 2021?? This makes no sense. Pandemic time is fake, let’s face it, but I remember writing some of these tweets. The linear passage of time has no right to attack me like this.

I was annoying

All those indictments I laid out in the first section? I plead guilty, your honor, to those and to crimes not yet charged. I committed every sin in the book. I weaponized identity politics. I bullied the “intellectual dark web”. I dunked with regularity. I spread awful content because I was angry with it. I wrote irritatingly long threads about stuff I was barely aware of. I am not asking for absolution, here.

Some of this was intentional. In the summer leading up to Unite the Right, I very deliberately made it all about me, so that the neo-Nazis marching into our town focused on me and not my peers who were doing the real organizing work. I trolled Andy Ngô, because I figured the more time he and his followers spent trying to harass and attack me, the less time they would spend on someone else. But this also empowered them, made his profile bigger, and I would eventually come to realize that the only winning move is to not play. Andy wrote a big chunk of his (in my opinion defamatory) book about me, but he hasn’t paid any attention to me in over a year. It turns out the best play was always to let it go—not ignore it, but not engage with it.

Eventually, trolling right wingers just became who I was. I was good at it—I still laugh at how I got Zuby banned for saying “ok dude” to me and then him writing his most popular song about it—but eventually I realized I wanted to be more than just someone who clowns on completely replaceable conservatives. I’ve said before that there are times for builders and times for breakers and I wanted to stop being a breaker. There are more things I want to be known for. That’s why I walked away from the site over a year ago and haven’t been back. And that’s why I felt like it was time for me to curate what I want to survive from that time, at least publicly. I’ll probably keep my archive files around for a bit. I might even load them into a database to search and view on my website, eventually. The tweets aren’t forever gone, they’re just now locked in encrypted files that I need to decide what to do with. Maybe a future archivist studying Charlottesville and its impact on early 21st Century US politics will find some value in them. I don’t know. Why did people in the past save their letters, if not for the benefit of generations to come? We hardly write letters anymore. These are our letters. Maybe this is my little candle against the digital dark ages. But that’s not for the present. For the present, I’ve curated what remains. I was annoying, I still am. But the six-thousand some-odd tweets that I’ve retained still have some value to me, and the others do not.

I may have been irksome but the journey was never boring. I’ve come to discover my tweets cited in several books, including several books by right wingers whining about “cancel culture.” I’ve had to explain tweets in court on two occasions (do not recommend—never tweet). My tweets were on the news and in the newspaper, I would see them float around Facebook as viral memes. They made their way into several court filings, even in cases I wasn’t party to. I made an actual difference with some of them, and I bought a lot of trouble on my own head with others. Some of them were even genuinely funny. I like to think I refined a sense of humor in this time. I became friends with celebrities, I helped shape front-page stories. I brough hurt and pain and stupidity, but I also like to think I brought a little laughter and wisdom, too. In the end, in ten years of active posting on twitter dot com, I only ever regretted one tweet: a tweet where I, a week before Unite the Right and with an overdose of hyperbole, said I would have punched James Damore in the face. That one was a mistake. I had to explain that one in court this summer. We learn and we continue to learn.

What’s next?

So what comes next after this grand exercise in after-the-fact prudence? I will keep my account, in case it ever has actual value to me. I still check in on a couple niche communities that haven’t migrated to a different social network yet. But I won’t be back unless the site radically changes, and I don’t think it will. I need to believe that that era of social media is dead. We can’t go back. We have to go forward. What that forward looks like, I am still trying to figure out.

I tried Mastodon for a year, but I found it unbearingly sweltering. Mastodon is not a fun social network. You cannot have fun there without an endless army of pedants dissecting your every post endlessly in your mentions. Its operating model is inscrutable, its moderation metadrama impenetrable, and its product strategy nonexistant. I eventually rage-blocked the entire mastodon.social domain and then set my posts to autodelete after 7 days. I use it only as an automated relay for my blog content now. The one gem in the ActivityPub (Mastodon’s underlying protocol) space is bookwyrm.social, a federated replacement for Goodreads. The site isn’t bad. They need some design love and to fix some performance issues, but it’s become my go-to for book management, and I’m happy with it.

My go-to social media now is Bluesky. The site is not without its dramas, but it has the most promising product and technical approach I’ve seen yet. The API is very open, which has allowed me to write some easy scripts to megablock bad actors. The “Feeds” function is fantastic, and the moderation tools aren’t perfect but they’re way ahead of anyone else’s. I’ve also made the site auto-curate: all my posts auto-delete after two days, unless I self-like a post. This way, I can still post my whims, but I can choose in real time what I want to endure. I’ve been running this way for a couple of months, and I have to say it feels incredibly fresh. Bluesky’s community is also much more averse to Twitter brain bullshit. Quote posts are possible but dunking is looked down on. The block function is brilliant—block and move on is the motto of the site. It means that the network there is much more pure and original. The one thing it lacks compared to Mastodon is that Mastodon was always much more receptive and supportive of DIY creation. I wish Bluesky to adopt that culture.

But I am also trying to figure out what is next for me. As I write this, I’m forty-two, almost ten years after I started my transition process. The decade my transition bought back is coming to a close, and I’m finding myself trying to make a decision on what my next big thing is, if I even have one left in me at all. I feel like I’m on the edge of reaching the next level. I retired from activism, where I know I made an impact. I left Twitter, which was my means and medium of change. I’m even doing ok career-wise: I’ve built an amazing team, did some really intense stuff that made a difference in people’s lives. I’ve helped people write and publish books, seen the world, and left a positive impact on it in ways that have never and will never post about.

I’ve taken the last year or two to step back a bit. I needed to focus on myself, my family, my health. I’ve read more books in the last 16 months than I have in the 16 years before them. I’ve ran 5k, 8k for the first time in my life. I’m able to do more situps now than at any point since I was probably 15 years old. I think I will be ok if the rest of what I do will just be putting around my house, reading books, grumbling about sports. But of all people my wife knows that I’ll be restless again before long.

There’s a poem I’ve held with me for many years, Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Everyone knows the famous final lines, “one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate…,” but every few years I come back to the poem to see how it speaks to me. It talks of Ulysses becoming restless in his old age, choosing not to fade into memory but to boldly tackle the world he once dared. It’s the first verse that speaks to me now:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

I, too, have another gear in me, if only I can find it. I’m looking for inspiration in the people I admire. People like Molly Conger, whose been with me step-by-step in so many ways since late 2017, who just launched an amazing podcast that is taking the country by storm. People like Molly White, who is doing some amazing and consistent impact journalism covering the tech industry. And, to be sure, many others not named Molly. I look up to these folks and what they’ve accomplished for themselves, for others, and in that admiration I want to find the clarity of mind and purpose the next step. I think I have some ideas, but I knew I couldn’t get to them as long as this was hanging over my head.

And so this is the little bow I tie on a ten-year chapter of my life. To move forward I need to close the books on what holds me back. The past is mine to write and so too is the future. Now one have I written, and now search the words for to write the other.

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1. this is not to say these points were meritless, but rather that the relatively frictionless way that they became axiomatic and mandatory, as well as the way people are brutally and disproportionately criticized for using the “wrong” words (which were often the “right” words just months before) with no ill intent, is a phenomenon on Twitter with few equals. ↩︎