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Finding something to read after Twitter

Apple Classic Macintosh II Main Board. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Not very long ago a friend sent me a draft of an essay to read, a brilliant work in progress that I’m sure will be published sometime this year. It’s the kind of piece you want to press people to read, and for the last decade, longer than that, the most effective way I’ve found to urge new work onto readers has been to tweet about it.

I got started on Twitter in 2008 and stayed for fifteen years. By the time I left I’d been at the party too long, all the cool people were gone, and I wasn’t even really posting. I’d left my job at the Sydney Review of Books so I had nothing in particular to promote. I dutifully posted links to a couple of essays I had written and invitations to the launch of a book that I had edited. I’d retweet posts by friends with new work to share now and then, and post my own frustrated comments about arts funding in Australia. I wasn’t chatting, I wasn’t engaging. Elon’s Twitter, X if we must, amplified all the worst features of the old Twitter and brought back the Nazis. My attention was being sucked into the abyss and I couldn’t find anything good to read anymore. The inane and hateful hot takes that greeted the defeat of the Voice referendum and the outbreak of war in Gaza were what tipped me over the edge. I deleted all the tweets that were still linked to my account and shut it down. In a haze of sorrow and anger, I hit my breaking point. I don’t know if we’re at an inflection point for the internet, or a breaking point. People have been ruminating in this manner about literature for decades, if not centuries. Are these new technologies of distribution going to break literature, or make it something new?

I do miss Twitter, because in its heyday the platform gave me access to a bigger, more elastic understanding of contemporary literature. It got me out of my grad-school head and helped me find new writing and writers, new publications and publishers. My feed was an easy way to track weird currents in non-fiction. Bookshops used to do that, but in Sydney they were all shutting down. I bookmarked reviews of books I wanted to read, essays by authors I’d never heard of, academic writing that would otherwise have passed me by. During the years that my kids were very small I didn’t go to industry parties or launches so I had no idea what book people were gossiping or bitching about. Instead, I was able to sit on the sidelines of conversations about literature, and sometimes also contribute to them, sometimes even while breastfeeding. I guess I made friends too, or made connections that turned into IRL friendships. I formed a sense of the literary worlds that existed on the internet, a set of digital communities, rather than cliques and coteries linked to a particular city or nation. Of course it all went to shit, but it was good for a while.

What now? How does a person find anything good to read – anything new – to read now that Twitter has tanked? I’m still figuring this out. Since quitting Twitter I’ve signed up to a bunch of newsletters and made sure I’m on the subscription list for the publications I want to read. I’ve become a paid subscriber of many more publications (and newsletters) than I was a year ago. My inbox runneth over. I’m still waiting for my hard copy of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism to arrive, and I know I’ll have more to say about it, but this excerpt published in e-flux speaks to my experience of an ever less mediated digital literary culture:

Everywhere we look, mediation—the social activity of putting ideas into the medium of language or art; the social work of making meaning; the social processing of connective tissue—has been rendered illegitimate.

I saw a vexed comment about this excerpt, to the effect that Kornbluh was advocating the return of gatekeepers and exclusion. I’m not sure that’s quite the case; I read her work as a jeremiad in part against the dismantling of cultural and media infrastructure in favour of an algorithmically sorted right now. Once upon a time immediacy was the great promise of social media; that presentism now seems restrictive, a way to upend collectivism and collaboration.

Another comment on the Kornbluh extract: ‘All this bullshit during a time of GENOCIDE’. Who cares about literature and the internet when bombs are falling on Rafah and Gaza? Now is the time for protest, advocacy and donation, but it’s also the time for thinking in critical ways about the mediation of the present, about how writing circulates and connects with readers, about whose histories and stories come into view. One of the staple observations about the current blizzard of lay-offs in the US media is that the New York Times is the beacon of hope, with a subscriber base that can fund on-the-ground reporting and retain a legion of journalists. That may be so – but the best-resourced newsroom in the world continues to broadcast a skewed and dangerous editorial line on Palestine, even as the atrocities against Palestinian people accumulate. There are alternative perspectives available – with the not insignificant caveat that you know where to look, or have social networks online or offline already populated by activists and advocates.

I know plenty of writers who’ve stayed on Twitter because they’re worried they’ll lose their audience, because the platform still holds for them the possibility that the social work of making meaning can take place there. I’m perching on Bluesky, watching earnest, effortful little coteries form. Instagram has long turned into a mall, and anyway, it’s always seemed weird to me to encounter pockets of literary culture on a platform so committed to the visual and, secondarily, to the aural. If you are reading this screed via Substack it will surely not have escaped your notice that many, many writers have started newsletters in the past twelve months. As have I.

This is a newsletter about literature as it is circulating online in this liminal, is it broken beyond repair or is it evolving? moment. Maybe it will turn into an exploration of digital literary culture after Twitter. I’m interested in questions of distribution, in how readers and writers find each other, in the connective tissues between readers and writers that help fuse literary networks and communities online. I’m curious to track emergent digital literary genres, especially newsletters, and the role they are playing in building new constellations of writers, readers and publishers, and how the platforms are shaping new literary forms. As the climate crisis escalates, how do we talk about these emergent genres and forms without excising the toxic technologies upon which they rely? How do newsletters, which promise (and often deliver) unmediated encounters between writers and readers, represent yet another extension of the self-branding labour that writers are told is unavoidable? This is labour that took place on Twitter and Facebook, that continues to take place on Instagram, TikTok, festivals, launches, workshops, labour that promises (but does not always deliver) great deferred renumeration. Since I started thinking about putting together this newsletter there have been huge lay-offs in the US media and a new wave of discussion about whether there exist business models that can support diverse journalism and particularly independent investigative reporting. My questions about literary culture intersect with some of this but I’m wary of treating literature and journalism as interchangeable, even as convergence culture brings them closer together.

Speaking of journalists infiltrating the literati, onto Trent Dalton. I’ve had my say about TD and the way the commercial success of his novels eclipsed any critical attention to their style, substance or form. We’re now experiencing another moment of Dalton-saturation with the success of the Netflix adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe. Not only is Eli Bell everywhere – publications are dredging their archives for old profiles, festivals are re-upping podcast episodes, Dalton is working his aw-shucks schtick all over – Boy Swallows Universe is back on the Australian bestseller list. At a time when so many books are published, and so few of them find readers, here we are again, being told that the fiction of Trent Dalton is the apotheosis of Australian literature.

The Dalton debacle involves books – but it bears on how culture is discussed, promoted and distributed online. It’s not just recommendation algorithms bombarding readers with an ever-narrower range of options, the editors and curators driven by traffic metrics are, in their commissioning decisions, consolidating these effects. I’m still sorting out my ideas about Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, which blames The Algorithm for our current cultural woes, letting a do-everything technological bogeyman stand in for a more thoroughgoing engagement with media and culture. Even so, his description of the ‘flattening’ that we can see in the Dalton example is useful, and it’s why every even vaguely popular story published by the New Yorker or other legacy media institutions reaches me and also why new stuff published in, for example, the very good Cleveland Review of Books doesn’t, unless I hunt it down.

The closing flourish, an eclectic list of recommendations, is a standard feature of the literary newsletter. Perhaps I’ll start to gather and seed my own, once I’ve hit my stride. In the meantime, here I am, nostalgic for the recent past of social media, planning to post every fortnight, still treating the feeds with caution.

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