Virginia HeffernanWhen I was a newly single mother in the fog of war of very young children, what I longed for, more even than sleep, was what I’d so recently had in graduate school—polymath interlocutors who could tell me about new things—muons, BLM, QAnon, etc—and with whom I could discuss my own work, as well as books, ideas, law, politics. I found them on Twitter. Glancing at Twitter while nursing at 4am kept my mind alive & undepressed & my imagination fired, awake, curious, forward-looking.
It’s what the nascent ARPANET-era internet had done for me as a preadolescent 1979-1984: spring the trap of girlhood conformity—intellectual and emotional obedience—& open up a new world, that I was somehow a PART OF. And even (on the very small conferences of their days) a big part of it — if I made a good point about, say, Reaganomics. It didn’t matter than I was 11.
Miles of the building blocks of humane public life and a beautiful private one—what Rorty called contingency, irony and solidarity—were available both on the cons & on Twitter. People who disaparagrd them seemed, tbh, anti-intellectual. “Go out and play” people. Or worse “you have ADD because your attention is not focused on ME and following my orders.”
Oh and Masto is absolutely hitting the spot for me. I like how it’s not self-hating also. Tweets and now toots are not reducible to the diseased firings of glitchy minds. I get that some people don’t like it but whenever they say it’s trivial or evil I think “keep telling yourself that Ill be here reading a thread by @jbf1755 or @AshaRangappa ”
Steve Williams
marie_cast 
tubaboy@virginiaheffernan @jbf1755 @AshaRangappa
It feels like a clean slate. And I don’t feel like I’m being played. #<8^)