Quitting Twitter: The heady feeling of giving up the habit

I quits. I quit. I quit. That pronoun, I, io, which the Italian language allows you to omit, and which the illustrious engineer Gadda defined as “hateful”, finds its right to exist in categorical statements such as these. In Anglo-Saxon I a vindication and therefore a manifest pride is implied: demarcates the boundary line between me and the others, and sanctions the encroachment into a new state: I passed through here, you stayed over there.

Saying, indeed, writing: “I gave up Twitter” gave me the intoxicating sensation of having made it, the same feeling experienced by a drug addict who has given up the habit of doing drugs, an alcoholic discharged from the Alcoholics Anonymous group or a former smoker. Exaggerated? Perhaps. Yet the analogies are similar, naturally with due proportions. Sense of initial bewilderment, possibility of a rethink lurking (the phase I’m going through, having suspended and not yet permanently deleted the account, like Ray Milland in “Lost Days” by Billy Wilder, who hid a bottle of whiskey in a chandelier, you never know …), moments of euphoria .

It is an interesting and somewhat revealing experiment. As with everything that concerns me, the decision was not rational, let alone calculated: I reacted impulsively to a series of insults and gruesome offenses received following a post concerning the most divisive and decisive issue of the last year: the war in Ukraine . There is no argument that doesn’t inflame factions, but in this case the paradox was that the most virulent comments had been conceived by so-called pacifists. In the name of peace they had fallen under the troublemakers. Nice oxymoron. The second triggering element (and equally contradictory) was the confirmation of a habit now inherent to social media, namely that the majority of comments do not concern the object but the subject, i.e. who said and not what he said. The original post thus becomes a pretext to give free rein to insults aimed at the person, his family, profession, physical appearance, interpreting the sacrosanct right to speak in a sinister and opportunistic way. Which has nothing to do with the right to be insulted. If in a public square a group of people took it into their heads to insult me, common sense would suggest that I withdraw and the guts to answer (temptation to which I succumbed at the beginning, without however insulting myself): in both cases would still come to a conclusion. The opposite happens on social networks: a few start the beating, but with the help of the dark, the others quickly join in, protected by balaclavas and dark glasses. And the herd grows, becomes more and more numerous… Once sheltered, we begin to reflect: why did I end up in that square? And above all: why in leaving did I believe I had lost something without immediately realizing that I was, if anything, finding that something again?