Taming the Blue Bird

Writing on Substack as an antidote to Twitter addiction

I have escaped from Twitter for a few hours. I’m here on Substack to remind myself that there are other places to write online. Back in the day, when I worked at the RSA, I used to blog almost every day.

There is a case for sharing thoughts within the blue bird’s cage of creative constraints, and it still offers training in the crafting of sentences. But I miss the experience of flow that comes from actually writing.

Substack is not the only place to write of course, but I grew tired of the capitalist sensibility of Medium, I need more creative freedom than professional platforms allow, and a personal blog on a website becomes a hungry giant. So if all they say about Substack is true, I hope this will be a place where people can follow me without necessarily looking for me. I have realised that to some extent I live on Twitter now, and not in a good way. I seek a new creative tempo, and reprieve from the arena.

I hope to share meaningful thoughts here without concern for notifications. When I write for writing’s sake there is a part of me that is writing for God, or at least my idea of God. But when I write on Twitter there is little sense of aesthetic or existential commitment. I am literally playing to the crowd.

I hope that Substack might therefore be a transition drug to wean me from my Twitter addiction. I have come to accept that I really am addicted to Twitter, and we don’t overcome addiction just by leaving something alone, but by finding alternative means to meet the underlying emotional needs that the addiction serves - in my case that is wordcraft, self-expression, feedback, ‘being part of the conversation’ and more. To reach for substack now is to reach for the methadone of longform prose to free me from the heroine of tweets. Writing here is like taking a long meditative puff of a vape as a way to say farewell to chain smoking. It’s a decaffinated coffee, a diet coke, vegan cheese, and dark chocolate with 85% cocoa content and almost no trace of sugar. You get the idea.

While my motivation for starting here is quite particular, I don’t want to overthink the enduring purpose of this substack. Writing, like life in general, is always a process in motion, and the point is to let thoughts flow, rather than to compose and curate them within an inch of their lives as I sometimes do on Twitter. What I share here will be a personal offering, exploring whatever is on my mind in work and life, and it might therefore be a little rough around the edges - my life is full and time for editing and rewriting is tight. I will regularly describe and sometimes even do some of my work at Perspectiva here, and I will refer to my book about what chess has taught me about life now and then, which you must of course buy immediately. Mostly, however, I want to use Substack as a place, perhaps even a friend, where I can share my stream of consciousness, in a way I’ve been doing with Twitter now for a little too long.

Perhaps this rationale seems elaborate to the the reader, and you might be right. Nonetheless I am starting here quite consciously as a way to release the hold Twitter has on my attention, creativity, and imagination. I have been a prisoner of the blue bird, you see, to a greater extent that those without Twitter addiction can imagine.

I entered her realm as a free man just over eleven years ago with the following tweet:

Jonathan Rowson @Jonathan_Rowson

Just fixed errant dishwasher. Fail to resist urge to write of wet pear tree outside, bathing in momentary sunshine. Family sleeping soundly

At first, I thought: how ridiculous! The very idea of these tiny statements seemed absurd, indulgent, and unserious. What could be worth saying in such a small space? Clearly, I struggled to know what to say initially (haiku vibes notwithstanding). Yet I remember the scene and the moment of that first tweet. I was venturing into a new domain that was also a new world that I sensed I would come to know better. I feel something similar now with Substack. I can already feel the motion…

That motion initially takes me back. When the blue bird started flirting with me, I was long since married. I had known Siva since meeting her at university twelve years before, and our first son Kailash was just two. At the time of that first tweet, the two of them had conked out in our only bedroom nearby while I was perched on a breakfast bar stool looking out at the rain in the garden, which was the highlight of our tiny flat. There I was with time on my hands, and for the first time I was not reading or writing as such, but tweeting. In a biographical sense, this was a big moment, even a turning point, because Twitter became a big part of my life.

Back then tweeting felt cheeky and subvervise and experimental. How could this modus-operandi of communicating possibly work? Could brevity-by-design be a good thing? Is there more to the platform than the anti-heroic threading gesture and a torture chamber for grammar. And then there is the seemingly endless micro-editing to fit a message into a digital bottle that would surely get lost at sea.

It turns out that the blue bird is a cunning temptress. She seduced me with her legion of beguiling eyes, those neon nuggets of meaning that flash on the screen as lighthouses calling the ship to shore, momentarily soothing the ego’s need need for company, and then as we dock, her beak scratches our itch for social validation.

It is late September 2022 now, and I am sitting outside on a warm Autumn day in Southwest London with sunlight streaming onto my face as I sit at a cafe’s wooden table. It feels safe to ask myself: exactly how did the blue bird capture me?

Well she’s generous for a start. She doubled her offer of 140 characters to 280 in 2017 but more generally she affords us a great deal. Over the last few days, I have been using Twitter to advertise jobs at the organisation I co-founded in 2016, I am commenting on a cheating scandal in the chess world, and periodically I’ll share an experience of parenting or get into some benign chit chat about something I’m watching on TV, like CobraKai. From an engagement and attention point of view, these have been good Twitter days, and I have gained two hundred followers in just over a week. Yet these good days did not feel good, but more like an over-dose, which is why I am here now.

Like many, I have become trapped in the blue bird’s gilded lair, even though I am ostensibly free to leave at any time. The walls of Twitter’s home are not built from straw or sticks or bricks, but by layers of habit energy that live inside our nervous systems, and they manifest in physical form through the movement of our fingers as we scroll and approve, and type. Like the most gracious host, the blue bird invites us to speak our truth to the crowd assembled for our performance. Please do go ahead your excellency, she says, and make one short statement after another.

And so I did. 36,300 tweets and counting.

That’s roughly nine a day on average over the last eleven years. Several weeks go by without tweeting sometimes, especially over summer, and those days have their own kind of bliss. But sometimes there is more intensive activity on Twitter, for instance during major political events or when engaging in conversation about something contentious or amusing. Those moments have their own charm too.

In all the clamour over ‘the virtual’ and ‘the digital’, we tend to forget that social media is more about the social than the media - it’s about people coming together and what people think about us and what we think of ourselves because of that. I seek out the app on my phone or the website on my laptop as if in response to a call which is, let’s say, a silent social squawk. Twitter’s invocation is not a church bell, nor a muslim call to prayer, and nor is it the drum of the tribe calling us to our indigenous home. In fact the call to Twitter doesn’t feel like a source energy at all, but something that filters what is already there, shapes it, and amplifies it.

At a mythopoetic level, we might imagine Twitter as an enormous blue bird flying around the globe, camouflaged by the sky. This bird carries the news of the moment - created by us - in the feathers of her enormous wings. As she flies, she flaps her wings with rhythmic and relentless force. This flapping is the active ingredient that drops the news into electronic devices on the ground but as it happens a semiotic jet stream is simultaneously created behind her. This semiotic jet stream is not news as such, but a miasma of images and words and signs and memes that carries itself through is own propulsion. Through this propulsion, the miasma reaches not just the devices but the people using them, and the blue bird’s semiotic jet stream wraps people around it as a kind of cultural prison with its own algorithmic and commerical logic. Twitter thereby becomes a vortex of meaning where millions of humans swirl around in our search for ourselves and each other. While this search is not unpleasant, the source of the process we are part of is the blue bird, rather than our own or something divine. The dice are therefore loaded against us.

To give a simple example of ‘the call’, while writing that paragraph I noticed that Substack wanted me to change ‘clamour’ to ‘clamor’ and I couldn’t resist tweeting out the experience.

Jonathan Rowson @Jonathan_Rowson

I'm a Scottish writer. The audience I'm writing for is mostly American. My spellchecker auto-corrects to American English. Changing the settings so that British English prevails rarely seems to work for long. Should I just acquiesce? Or continue to enjoy swearing at it?

It took me about three minutes to compose that tweet and get it curated in the way I wanted to offer it. This sharing of experience has become a social reflex, the socio-digital equivalent of leaning across a desk to ask someone if they saw the same thing on television last night. I notice my effort quickly acquired two likes, which I acknowledged as a feeling of relief at not being completely ignored and a promissory note for more. I gave serious thought to letting the tweet accrue some more attention before sharing it here, but I am trying to break free of that entrapment.

Twitter is - intellectually and socially - intensely stimulating. Twitter is also personally validating when you find like-minded people who appear to like what you have to say. But Twitter is also a gateway to status anxiety, time wasted, an ambient fear of missing out. Twitter is recurring ennui as a lifestyle choice. I am welcome to leave Twitter at any time, says the blue bird, and this is true, but it is not the whole truth.

The blue bird is also a kind of matron, and she has me on her own kind of intravenous drip, tied up to my performative identity. Within her digital grasp, she feeds my mind crumbs of attention and validation, as if keeping a captured soldier alive. Sometimes she teases me with her aforementioned capacity to carry my words around the world, flapping them out from her wings to hundreds and occassionally thousands of folk. At those moments she seems to say: Jonathan, you see what I do for you, for us?

The problem is that I do love the blue bird. She has been a big part of my life for over a decade and I am grateful for all that she offers. I don’t actually want the relationship to end. Twitter is awash with meek returns of prodigal exiles who made ostentatious goodbyes in a way that guaranteed they’d come back. Just as smoking ‘the last cigarette’ is a way to ensure you’ll keep smooking, I suspect the only way to release the hold of Twitter is change your life habits in a way that you don’t even feel the need to say goodbye.

But I do want the relationship to change. For that change to happen, I need to write in a new place, and I’ve decided to do it here on Substack. I think Twitter is great as a regular tasty snack or a side dish, or a condiment, but for a writer who is not writing enough, it doesn’t satisfy as the main meal.

Don’t cry, blue bird. It’s not you, it’s me. And you have many millions of others. Surely you can see that it is just not reasonable to expect me to simply resist your irresistable charms. I have to go somewhere new now to establish some distance. I’ll think of you often, and I will come to visit. But let me now take a moment to rediscover what you cannot offer: the beckoning canvas of the full page, the momentum of paragraphs, and the simple joy of letting words flow.