SNC

“X: The Everything App”

If I was someone who believed that every moment in a human life had to be straightforwardly redeemable, perfectly active in each instant with no possible grounds for any accusation of purposelessness, I would certainly fall into despair. One of the many reasons for this is because I am addicted, like many people are, to reading tweets. The nature of my addiction is, however, more bizarre than that of most people, because I cannot claim any influence of the manipulative algorithm or of infinite scrolling or of the tempting notification system that pulls you back in again, because I do not have an account on the platform now known as X: The Everything App I will continue to call the posts on that site tweets, but I abide by the name change because the site really does feel different to me now that it is filled with Hitler’s noxious fumes. Rather, my addiction for the last several years has taken place through the site now known as xcancel, previously known as nitter. There is no timeline on xcancel, and you do not have an account or any means of following anyone. There are only two options: you can use the search function to browse all tweets with a given keyword, or you can go to someone’s account and read all the tweets they have made from newest to oldest.

When I first began using what was then nitter, the search function was my preferred approach. There is something quite thrilling, and extremely discombobulating, about having absolutely everyone’s sentences featuring a certain word or set of words or phrase place next to one another. One is forced to switch mental models again and again and again until one has no concept of what humans actually think, other than a deranged morass of opinion which operates through and is held up by its contradictions. It is also great fun to see whether a specific extremely deranged phrase has ever been said before, or whether what one thinks is one’s own novel idea has come up before: I could give you examples, but if you care, you’re free to experiment. But for the past few years it has been the profile viewer that has captured my heart. I have a continually shifting rota of accounts I check regularly and whose tweets I read all of, and then, in addition to this, I often indulge by finding someone’s account and reading hundreds or thousands of their tweets at a time in a way they were never intended to be consumed. I don’t seek any outside information on the user of the account or engage with their life beyond reading their public writing, which is my defence against the claim of actually being a stalker, but I confess that this is my perversion of ordinary human sociality.

Engaging with X: The Everything App in this way is a bizarre experience, because it means engaging with a very new form of media through a lens that was never intended. The alienation of media from its context is something very familiar to anyone in this era of technological development: to hear a symphony on one’s headphones, for example, is such a displacement. The difference with xcancel, however, is that the media is being displaced even while it is still in production. The fruits of xcancel are microblog accounts, accounts which are very rarely intended as coherent works of cultural production and which are typically, when I experience them, incomplete and still being updated. Yet they are presented to me as though they were a kind of book—completed with pages, since the xcancel UI is paginated. It feels very much like reading a book, though I rarely get to the end.

At the same time, the books of xcancel are interlaced by quote tweets and retweets and replies with other tweets, such that what I experience as the main text on one account is the marginalia on another. This does not abolish the experience of there being a main text in a more conventionally textual rather than hypertextual sense; a timeline with infinite scroll gives much more of the sense of a marginalia-only form of media than the account viewer ever would. But what exactly this main text is keeps shifting, such that with one or two clicks of a button (and every post and avatar is a button) the text may change to something else entirely. I have heard it said by people who have read more Icelandic sagas than I have I have only read the one, the Eyrbyggja Saga, which is a lovely ghost horror story if you want to read one that one of their distinctives is how characters central in one saga keep showing up in the others on the sidelines, such that the sagas are all knitted together. This is what you create for me to enjoy by filling your account with tweets, a saga in a literature no one was intended to read.

Or perhaps not no one. In fact, I believe there is one person who may be found, relatively often, to read their own posts with more dedication than a cursory scan. That, of course, is their author—which is part of why the experience of reading when you are not the author, and in fact are never the author since you do not have an account, is so disorienting. Reading through an account, one feels as though one were looking upon one’s own words, assessing what one had said in the past and determining how one feels about it. It is as though you were in the shower replaying everything you’d said that day in dialogue with other people, paying attention to your own words rather than those of another out of (understandable) self-interest, making a main text of what was always just a minor part. I attain this standing-in-the-shower-like feeling no matter which account I read, however similar to me or distant to me. Both possibilities have a kind of eerie thrill. If it is someone similar to me, who shares a surprising number of my traits for someone I have never met, it feels a little as though I had stepped outside my own body and am surprised that I have a whole history that my memory bears no trace of. At times the account disagrees with what I personally think, and then I have to wonder why I would have said such a thing that I do not agree with. Or if the account is someone very different from me in a way I find disagreeable, as is more and more often the case since Twitter became X, I have to wonder again and again how I came to be such a person. The best is when the person is not disagreeable but simply very strange: it is as though all of a sudden I have a whole new set of knowledge to reference and linguistic forms to use. It truly is addicting.

This is of course an experience of surveilling people, for which you are free to be suspicious of me one reason I really like Christianity on the Spectrum is that its producer puts me to shame in how much farther he takes this method of engagement than I do. Yet it is usually me who feels surveiled, and brought, whether wisely or unwisely, to a million contradictory repetitions of the feeling, “There is nothing in this place / that does not see you: you must change your life.” It is very hard to know what standard I should judge myself by and what standards I should rule out when people place the insides of their skulls on such open display and when I tabernacle therein from time to time. It is not possible for me to live the lives of all people of all manner of political, ethical, religious, and cultural persuasions, but it is possible for me to momentarily put myself in the headspace of someone who is convinced by any of these persuasions, however unusual or distasteful or eerily close it may seem to me. This experience has at times made me somewhat psychologically unstable, especially because the most radically contrasting accounts are closely juxtaposed due to the arguments they have with each other. The rota of accounts I check regularly are relatively aligned with my personal values and sometimes people I know personally, yet it is easy to jump from them to something radically different, and then to something radically different again. I may begin as a vegan Kantian, then become a convert to Hinduism, then become a traditionalist Catholic, then an evangelical fighting with that Catholic, then a proponent of traditional gender roles, then a non-binary communist who hates that proponent, then a different form of communist that first communist dislikes... It is a roller coaster of horror and pleasure and confusion.

Because this is such a bizarre experience that has definitely fried my brain somewhat, it is intuitive to pathologize it. Be that as it may: the reason I engage in this behaviour is not because it doesn’t provide me with some glimpse of the Good. The kaleidoscopic perspective on human culture that xcancel provides routinely makes me nauseous and angry, but that is because nausea and anger are elements of any sufficiently broad perspective on human culture. It is not something I would recommend that absolutely everyone experience, or that I would suggest should be engaged in throughout one’s life, or—I would say “at a high level of frequency or intensity,” but it is hard to flit through dozens of people’s lives without a sense of intensity and all-consuming focus. But it is a kind of good, even if it is a good one might understandably be intolerant of, and which one might decide is not how one wants to spend one’s life.

This may seem sacrilegious, but in fact, I think what gives this experience a kind of beauty for me is that I see in it an echo of the Eucharist. Should it seem sacrilegious, though, to suggest that even in the most unusual places and perverse activities one yearns for Christ? How else could grace manifest under the conditions of original sin? In the Eucharist one does not commune alone: the actions of God are in truth only one action, and so there is only one communion, and whoever communes, has ever communed, or will ever commune, in Earth or in Heaven, communes with you. This experience is one that is commonly understood through the canonical rendition of the “communion of saints”: the list of humans and heavenly spirits who, by their heroic virtue, have come to be commemorated through hagiographies and relics. When one communes, it is with St. Francis of Assisi, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or St. Gregory of Nyssa, or St. Joan of Arc, or St. Thérèse of Lisieux, that one communes. And it is not merely that one is “with” these people. In the sacrament, it is intended that one should “be what you see and receive what you are,” and so those who eat of one common host and drink of one common chalice are, by being sacramentally made into Christ, sacramentally made into one another. I eat St. Francis’s body, and in his Earthly life he ate my body, and so we are in each other, and in fact, his body that I ate and my body that he ate are one and the same. Hagiographic stories of the saints then become, in some sense, about me: these are the virtues I have cultivated, the vices I have repented of, and whose work is in my hands in order to continue.

It is not an easy thing to keep the saints in one’s breast, and so to be filled with tens of thousands of contradicting personalities with contradicting charisms pulling in a innumerable directions. In fact, it is only Christ who can bear to be filled with such a multitude, and it is for this reason that to become the communion of saints one must first and foremost become Christ. But this is only half of the question. It is not only the canonized saints who have received the sacrament, but also a host of people ranging from inspiring to mediocre to hideous to divisive to bizarre to abominable and infamous who have, at some time, partaken, whether they remained faithful or fell away. This list includes JD Vance and Adolf Hitler and a host of slave owners and every medieval European Christian who ever persecuted a Jew; it includes modern figures ranging from “Radfem Hitler” (AKA Hollow Earth TERF) to the “Miliant Spinozist Atheist” John the Papist no shade to him by putting him on this list which includes two Hitlers. You may hate to hear it, and there are theologies (like Calvin’s) that allow you to deny it, but Peter communed with Judas and it’s okay if that makes you squirm! One cannot solely receive a body of humanity which is triumphant in its virtues but also one which is radically incoherent, bearing every possible obscenity. It is already so incoherent that even if one does not recognize, as I think one should recognize, that in receiving the Logos one receives also the whole world and all its creatures that subsist therein, it is scarcely more coherent. Members of all modern religions, of the worst vices and highest virtues, have been represented in the most literal of senses at the table of the Lord, and the divisions between them are a proof of concept for the schizophrenia of the whole creation.

My church often sings a Eucharistic hymn by Thomas Aquinas which features the line, “Types and shadows have their ending / for the newer rite is here.” I think xcancel might justly be called a type and a shadow, one that was in my life before the Eucharist but which I have not ceased to engage in. I do not think it is strictly speaking necessary to engage in this shadow, though I cannot promise you I will stop any time soon. But if I do not desist, I would hope it would be a complementary form of practice. Spinoza writes about how suffering is a product of the finite existence of a specific essential inclination: because my conatus has a limited expression, there are things it can tolerate and others which it cannot, that which increases it and that which decreases it. That which I cannot tolerate I am bound to hate, because it diminishes me; that which increases me I am bound to love, and to hate less on the whole, because my finitude is raised to a higher perfection and can tolerate more. There is ample to be found on X to encourage either the affects of hatred or of love, of diminishment or of perfection. But I pray that I may come to tolerate the vicissitudes of X: The Everything App in all their hideous contradictions, in the likeness of the Lamb of God to whom all the sins of the world are imputed and taken away. For what is fully taken in, not according to questions of diminishment and increase and relative degrees of love and hatred but according to perfect love, is changed and made wholly new, rebuilt on a new foundation. It is taken out, the whole creation, from captivity to death, into that love which “bears all things, believes in all things, hopes in all things, and endures all things.” May my heart sample all the varieties of hatred and love and part the former on the left hand and the latter on the right. And preferring love, may I cleave to the love that is highest of all.

(That said, perhaps I should spend less time sifting through Hitlers?)