There is an issue in most British cities these days with the sheer density of hi-vis clothing in circulation. Walk through any busy urban location and it can take a while to adjust to the fact that pretty much everyone and everything is draped in some shade of luminous yellow, an entire world clamouring to be seen before the other things are seen.
It raises some interesting questions. If everything is hi-vis, is anything ever actually just vis? If you were, for example, to walk past a cyclist and an Argos delivery driver being arrested by a vanload of police, watched by a group of builders and 400 members of a charity walk, is there a danger the entire spectacle will be completely invisible, that all we have in this scenario is emphasis, hi-vis on top of hi-vis?
This is of course a clumsily realised introductory metaphor, on this occasion for the internet, news media, social media and the shared Algorithm Life. For anyone who spends any time in it, the daily online existence is basically all emphasis now, all clamour, coalescing into a single increasingly nudged and politicised field of noise.
It is a process that reached an interesting stage this week with a significant migration away from one of these sources of static, the posting site X. The Guardian has suspended its own accounts and resolved to share its online content in other ways.
On the face of it this is very obviously a good decision, if only because anything that involves not being on social media for any period of time is always a good decision. Humans are not really supposed to live inside a globally networked hive mind. And certainly not a hive mind like X, which feels from the first moment of log-in like being dry humped by a malevolent robot, and in the longer term like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the brain with a white-hot knitting needle made of hate.
Many former X users have shifted to alternative apps called things like AgreeSpace or BeardGuy. The Elon Musk ownership has altered things in this respect, and not just by diminishing the basic experience. Musk is a highly unusual human, obviously super-high-functioning in very specific areas, perfect for right here and now, and with that oozing quality, spreading himself into every surface like human AI.
Musk has also chosen to make himself a political figure, and to engage like this on his platform so that it too becomes political. This in turn forces users to make their own political choice. Annoyingly, both staying and leaving have both now become unavoidably significant.
Here’s the thing though. Sport Twitter (as I will insist on calling it) is both highly socialised and weirdly absorbing. The idea of leaving it is still hard to swallow. Not because it’s good or nice. God no. Sometimes it is simply the worst place in the world. But it is also perfect content for the medium. In its best moments it’s a genuinely warm and funny online community. You’ve got to admit, it has been a pretty wild ride these last 15 years.
Even an average Sport Twitter day – share thought, read posts, learn things, get called a nonce, scroll some AI stuff about how Max Rushden’s appearance on the Tonight Show has people talking about his tax planning scheme (“they were shocked”) – can feel like a party.
Back when the world was young, when the wild frontier was wide open, it was exhilarating to hear those distant, instant voices for the first time. Here is Darren Bent talking about his shoes. Here is Jordan Pickford wanting a McDonald’s. As long ago as May 2011 I wrote a naive and hopeful article about the Twitter phenomenon of open access to players, gushing about grappling hooks being thrown between two worlds, a new sense of warmth and connection.
Naturally the first comment underneath the article, still present to this day, is “What a load of middle class garbage”. And this is the real tone of Sport Twitter – unruliness and iconoclasm, endless waves of hate-fun, often just hate, sometimes just fun.
Twitter would go on to become a highly effective rolling news source. I first heard of Nelson Mandela’s death via a Pakistani cricket account. Stars have risen and fallen here. There are vast tangled empires now based solely around one well-groomed man telling you about a transfer news story slightly before it actually happens.
Good things happened on Sport Twitter, or spread there from the other socials. Marcus Rashford and food for kids. Raheem Sterling redefining racism in the media. There was a genuine thrill of event glamour about, say, Pelé tweeting, which always did feel like actual Pelé, twanging at your chest every time. In between there have just been loads of laughs, from Danny Gabbidon telling the entire Swansea Twitter fanbase to fuck off after trying and failing to have a friendly discussion, to Ian Botham’s “hacked” cock.
There are clear subsets within this world. Cricket Twitter is waspish, funny and, ineffably disappointed. Tennis Twitter: obsessive, cliquey, passionate. Olympic Twitter: very enthusiastic mums who are nice. Boxing Twitter: informed grudge-laden one-upmanship. Rugby Twitter: no idea, but we could all definitely learn a lot from rugby Twitter.
And so we arrive at the desiccated present, with an app that seems to be populated now almost entirely by robots, lunatics, one-note hobbyists, and one-note lunatic robots. It has been easy to grow slightly addicted to this stuff down the years. But it has also got noticeably worse.
Ambient anger levels are through the roof. Some people are just out there to break things. Otherwise it can feel like this is the space where we all put our most toxic part, where the collective black dog lurks.
The whole place feels less human and more automatised. Maybe because it is, and maybe also because this is what a decade in here does to you. We’re all robots now, another side-effect of that sustained hi-vis exposure, senses dulled, bored but over-stimulated, always looking for something to feel.
Perhaps it really is time to deactivate X. Personally, I still quite like it on there. Filter the replies. Never, ever scroll. Take the good bits and exit when it’s bad. And what about those newer social sites? Yes, you can join Windbag: Communing in Pleasancy. But how long will that purity last?
This is the real moral of the story of Noah’s ark. Sin will always bloom again. Someone will have the wrong vibe. Your views on Emile Smith Rowe or craft ale will be unacceptable. People will get angry about not being angry any more. Before we know it Hal won’t open the doors. Humans are humans. It’s all in there still.
It will be hard to say goodbye to this thing, to accept that the party is over, that the last few years have been spent trying to dance with a corpse. I don’t think I’m done just yet. I still like the fight, and the warmth that belongs in the end to actual people and the things they like, not to human plutonium in a baseball hat. There is surely time for one last glass. Look, it’s already open. Margaux 53. Best of the century. Before it’s time, finally, to close the door on all this.
