The End of my Twitter Journey.

So long. Thanks for all the fish.

Snapshot of my Twitter profile as at right now

Fifteen years ago, I was a student who signed up to Twitter because I heard celebrities were so funny and cool there. And I’d see the tweets, on the news. Funny one-liners. Profound wisdom. Brutal clapbacks. The clear alpha was baked into the idea, not the product: make your point with fewer characters. Do this over and over again. The reward: powerful concision, straight from the gods.

People called it a micro-blogging site.

I spent a chunk of my time on Twitter in relative obscurity, hovering in a local cluster of classmates and other generally gregarious Twitter users. We had no native image support, so third party media handling thrived. The app constantly crashed. I hopped from third party client apps to third party client apps. People’s DMs frequently got leaked.

The absolute state of Twitter, man. And yet I loved it like a son.

Still unknown, I started to try my hands at getting better at writing for the medium itself. I started writing short jokes on a site called Sickipedia. It had, to me, a sweet game: people could up/downvote your jokes. Most times I bombed. Jokes that didn’t flop moved on to Twitter for a second battle-testing.

One day the system sent me a signal. A small story went viral (when virality meant something). It was a photo of a group of pigs being transported in the back of a truck. One pig, for some reason, leapt so high it cleared the truck’s barriers. Frozen in time: a pig flying.

Most people made the obligatory “if pigs could fly” comment. I thought to say this instead:

“When you’re in the night bus and the Holy spirit places it in your heart that these people are gbomogbomos”.

Gb’omo gb’omo: A serious term referring to kidnappers or people who abduct others. It is often used as a warning, especially for children.

For some reason, this went viral. Over a thousand retweets. It was fascinating to me. It wasn’t particularly funny or interesting to me, but I’d finally understood what makes people intrigued.

This gave me a signal for experimentation.

Today, I have 42,500 followers. I have experienced a lot of things in that time, and as I shut down that part of my life, I’d like to pour out libation:

Social Component to Turing Completeness

Being an awkward, asocial, slightly off-putting assortment of knees and elbows (or “Justin” as I preferred to be called), I mostly kept to myself as a teenager.

It just made me even more of an awkward, asocial, slightly off-putting assortment of knees and elbows.

Twitter was where I learned to modify my entire personality in the pursuit of social harmony. It cost me dearly. I may have sacrificed a significant chunk of my mental health in favor of understanding people as cheaply as possible.

I am not proud of the total of my Twitter history. I have been short with people I should not have been short with. I have been uncharitable in my interpretation of people’s positions. I have judged people without the right to. I may have misused my influence.

Still, I picked up art from Twitter. I learned to draw here because I was surrounded by such incredible artists in the beginning. I got better at fiction here. I was second runner-up for the Etisalat Prize for Flash Fiction. I transitioned to tech thanks to randomly being on Twitter at the right time one evening. CNN called my transition to tech “the weirdest job interview ever”. I have worked with incredible people I could only have met here. I have worked with horrible people I could only have met here. Obaranda was born as a side effect of my trying to see if I could ‘encode’ what I’d learned from trying to understand Nigerians. Lambda School changed my entire life prospects, thanks to Twitter.

I made art, I wrote, I spoke, I wrote code. I became a multipotentialite purely because Twitter showed me so much potential in the world.

Half the time I conducted art and expression experiments, people tried to give me money, and I treated them poorly (either by not taking their money or by not “locking in” and doing the work they wanted). I was stubborn, unwilling and unable to do anything I did not want to do.

I have never considered myself a writer, artist or developer. Monetizing those things seemed dangerous, somehow. It seemed like they marked the end of my exploration.

Twitter was the crucible for my mind, and an interface for me to seek out peers. It worked incredibly well for that, until it didn’t.

Elon Musk

I have been carrying some rage in my heart about Elon Musk for a while now. I even refused to call the app “X”, on principle, because he bought it.

Life felt unfair. The mechanics of the system I’d learned for years to study had been changed entirely. All the associated learning had disappeared. Twitter was now all noise, no signal.

Still, I was committed to rebuilding in this paradigm. I kept posting as I typically did, speaking shriller and shriller to justify my voice in this new “free speech” era. I was neither woke nor anti-woke (but a secret third thing), so I didn’t care one way or another.

Then Elon’s maliciousness became rampant. He was a Reddit soy-boy who did the Sieg Heil among his friends because he thought it made him sound subversive. Like Hitler jokes and this kind of edginess didn’t go out of fashion as early as 2006. Still, a child is a child, and all you can do is hope they grow up.

Before Elon became more of who he always was, the tone of the platform changed. You see, in what I used to consider the “dark” days of Twitter, I still considered reason an effective tool of truth negotiation. This may sound naive, but I strongly believe that if I got better at arguing, then the only person to ignore is the troll.

But the troll problem evolved. Everyone on Twitter became a troll. I’m not sure why to this day LMAO. They seemed more interested, more than usual, in ruining the lives of everybody they disagreed with.

I, foolishly, moved like I couldn’t see the landmines. I chose to believe reason would win.

Then the incel incident happened.

The Incel Incident

In May 2023, after one of my many internet sojourns, I posted a single tweet that would bewilder me for a long time.

I had just come back from visiting the incel.is forum. I’d become piqued by an essay I’d read about a movie I’d seen several times before (Hitch, do you know it?).

It’s the story of a ‘fixer’ (Will Smith) helping dudes who are losers get better at being someone a woman would want to be with.

The essay called it ground zero for incel discourse, and then mentioned that incels have an online community now!

I had to see that shit for myself.

“Incel.is” is a forum where self-described incels commune.

I’d just read a fascinating conversation there, initiated by a teenager who was complaining about how his secondary sexual maturity (puberty) was ruining his life. He was starting to hate his body because he was filled with sexual urges, and his poor attempts at flirting with his female classmates often ended in vicious mockery.

He talked about wanting to kill himself, and his question to the community was to ask if it got better.

The typical incel “mentor”, see, does kids a disservice. What followed was an onslaught of advice that followed the form of:

“You see that feeling you feel deep within you. That self-loathing? That you’re subhuman simply because you like a girl? Hold on to it. It never gets better, so you need to internalize it”.

I disagreed with this perspective, but understood (and still do) why this argument would be more compelling to this kid. Dealing with hurt warps the mind in favor of any empathetic ear. The older incels were empathetic to him, planting inroads to radical ideas.

Thinking to explore the idea on a platform I’m “native” to, I tweeted, then deleted this:

“Might be a controversial take, but I have empathy for incels”.

Naively, I hoped this would be an intriguing (provocative yet not offensive) opening salvo for a dialogue I thought might help. I was immediately crucified.

This is not the first time I’ve come under vicious attack on Twitter (trust me, nobody just gets handed even 5k followers for free). This, though, was the first time I experienced genuine insanity.

People, that day, fell into three fuzzy categories, based on my assessment:

1. People who thought I was always contrarian, and were therefore elated to see me suffer.

2. People who thought I have always been a misogynist, and that this was my opportunity to, as they say, “come out”.

3. A disgruntled, inarticulate agglutination of people I have hurt directly or indirectly in the past.

The misogynist allegations, by way of contrast, were particularly confusing. I was branded (still am branded, I think?) an “incel daddy”. People theorized that I have become emboldened by the platform to finally show my right-wing card. I was called a fake progressive.

I watched people salivate in anticipation of my “meninist” arc.

What did I say to convince everyone I was a raging misogynist? I have nothing to hide. Here, I’ll show you.

The tweet I deleted (“Might be a controversial take, but I have empathy for incels”) was part of a longer thread.

Here is the entire thread from that day. Nothing else was deleted. You have the full context of my argument:

“to the people quoting my tweets, your anger is justified. just to be clear, we may have — possibly — very different definitions of what an incel means. not saying your definition is wrong, just that I have a much broader one.

to the point that the only reason I empathize with incels is because I'm a man, that is absolutely correct. it *is* because I'm a man — and have male friends — that I can see just how easy it is for a person to become an incel.

There is a Motte and Bailey with the word “incel”.

First, a definition: a motte and bailey argument is an intellectual bait and switch where someone presents a rather innocuous and easy-to-defend point (the 'motte') and then deftly conflates it with another controversial one over the course of the argument.

Usually, the Motte and Bailey have some resemblance (which is where the trick is: when arguing, you pretend you're presenting the Motte, but secretly you're pushing the Bailey) An example:

You can already see where I'm going with this. The sympathetic read of an incel (and it _is_ one I have real sympathy for) is a person for archetypal reasons outside their sphere of influence, are deemed undesirable to their preferred choice of sexual partner(s).

To have contempt for these people is to punch down on someone who's already down. This incel is the guys Will Smith's Hitch character (in the problematic, eponymous film) was helping for a fee.

But the Bailey is really that there is a culture of incels, who believe they have been severely wronged by the Chad-to-Stacy ratio, and as a result it has spawned a virulent strain of misogyny and violence against women. The Bailey, here, is that these incels *do* feel entitled”

Here’s a link to the thread. Decide to what degree I was being a misogynist, if that’s your kind of thing.

Put together

The Elon Musk Twitter buyout. My being “canceled”. Elon launching Grok (you know how that’s going). Elon sponsoring Trump for the White House. Elon getting the DOGE in the white house.

These things tasked my soul on Twitter in ways I’m only now beginning to quantify.

I started to take more breaks. I changed my handle to get less noise. It did not work. Spiteful people found me and yelled down my roof (“YOU THINK WE HAVE FORGOTTEN BECAUSE YOU CHANGED YOUR HANDLE, INCEL?”)

While I was away, someone found a way to make an unrelated story (about a girl being stabbed in school) about my empathy argument.

I eventually returned to Twitter and read the tweet. The fact that nothing in notunscripted’s tweet showed any empathy towards the girl in question made me further confused.

It seemed to be less about empathy for women, and hatred for me specifically. Why else would you connect something I said on a tenuously-related issue (in May 2023) to a stabbing in September 27, 2023?

This tweet accomplished what it sought to do: it permanently connected me with killing women, and as a result I have gotten a permanent pipeline of hatred.

Because I asked us to have empathy for incels.

While I have no idea what set off notunscripted, I feel compelled to catalog my history with her.

On May 31, 2022, notunscripted created an impromptu Twitter Space titled “Surviving Nty”. In the space, she warned everyone on Twitter that a mutual friend was a scammer. People logged on and vented about their experiences. The condemnation was vicious. Perhaps deservedly so.

The thing is…Nty also did the same with my girlfriend. I remember my girlfriend telling me “Nty just wants to borrow money from me”

And I said “Are you close?”

Her: “Not really.”

Me: “When someone popular on Twitter starts borrowing money ‘out-of-network’, it means something has gone seriously wrong in their life. Lend her the money *only* if you’re comfortable losing it”.

My girlfriend chose to lend her that money, and I don’t think she ever received it (though Nty did apologize for this)

Yet, when Nty was ridiculed and mocked on Twitter that day, I refused to join in. In fact, I asked that we be less cruel. My request on Twitter for level-headedness earned me the badge of “simp” in my CuriousCat (app for posting anonymous messages). I was flooded with insults and accusations. I was “whipped” and “edgy” because I asked us to consider the mental health of what was supposed to be a Twitter mutual.

I suspect this began the rift between me and notunscripted. That has to have been the moment she decided to destroy me just as she did Nty.

Oh, well. I’ve been toxic before. I can’t blame the sharks for flipping out over blood.

As you can tell, I am still pretty upset about this. I realized in that moment that Twitter had stopped being useful to me, specifically. It was no longer the place for thought.

Elon Musk had won, and I loathed him for it.

Fey

By 2024, I’d gotten deep into machine learning and AI at work. I was spending less time on Twitter, and I’d made a new friend, named Fey.

Soon after, I lost that friend, and life has been a haze since then. I had never lost anyone before (I know, sus), so I was not equipped to mourn.

I haven’t yet.

Allow me reproduce a transcript of the last message I sent them when I realized I will never see them again. Final words, so to speak, belatedly sent:

Fey. It’s exactly a week since we last texted, and I am reading strange and frankly upsetting reports in my DMs.

<REDACTED FOR PRIVACY>, I’d have gone longer than week in the dark, thinking you were gearing up for your trip to <REDACTED FOR PRIVACY>.

I keep returning to our last messages, looking for a tripwire, a sign that should have clued me in to what was about to happen. Was it all a metaphor? A riddle you hoped I’d cleverly solve? I’m not that smart, and that has cost me.

I don’t know what to say. I want to say “sorry”, but I’m also really angry. You blindsided me. I do not enjoy this. I told you I’ll be here forever if you’ll stay on earth forever. Life can be intensely frustrating, exasperating and excruciating, and I always got the sense you were having a rough go of it (compared to me, for example), but I thought it was something solvable, with patience and the right frame of mind.

I got busy. With work. I told you this, and we talked on and off. I should have been present. I could have found a way to give you more time. I admit, now, that I was worried that I was falling behind at work and over-corrected by disconnecting from everyone and reducing my interaction with you. I am to return to Twitter on the 1st of May. I was pretty sure things would return to normal.

But they never will. And that makes me furious. I don’t like the other emotions I feel now. I’ve never lost anyone — close family or friend — to death. I guess this is another way you’re special.

I hope you’re happy. I like to think of your final messages as a thinly-veiled metaphor, of <REDACTED FOR PRIVACY> as this place you described as finally living a life, aligned with your values, where the chokehold of capitalism cannot find you. Where you’re finally happy.

I thanked you once for standing up for me once on Twitter when everyone was hellbent on misconstruing me.

I remember telling you how I felt on that day, and I remember you saying the way I felt is how you feel a lot of the time. I think that was the basis of our closeness. You were a relentless truth-seeker, and you were tough. Thank you for being my friend, for however brief that was.

I will never forget you, and if there’s an afterlife, I hope you give me the opportunity to do right by you a second time around.

When I lost Fey, it broke me. Coming to Twitter reminded me they were no longer there.

Twitter had completely released its grip on me, and I left on December, 2024.

Reflections

I have had to do some growing up through the years. I think this will turn out to be the most momentous over time.

I have been processing a lot of rage, despair and latent depression over the state of the things I used to love. Twitter. Rick and Morty. The MCU.

It occurred to me rather recently that I should just name it, and let it go. This is what this is. I am happy to arrive here, as long-winded as it has been.

I am now letting go of Twitter. This was my eulogy.

It will be fully deleted in 30-ish days, or so Elon claims.