Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead people to join you.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I am no massive RBG fangirl — how much can you love a representative of carceral state power? — but this really speaks to me, because it’s how I try to do my job. It’s also how I think the job has to be done: higher education needs a culture shift in how we think about so many things, including accessibility, integrity, and data privacy, so it’s not enough for me to fight for better practice. I need my faculty to care about these issues too, and I need them to join the fight.

It’s not an excuse for tone-policing, though, and I seem to be seeing a lot of that online lately when it comes to folks earnestly engaged in the struggle for equity in higher education. People who don’t like the message begin shared have a tendency to complain about the manner rather than the content — especially if they feel attacked by the content. It’s how we got to a place where white people are more scared of being called racist than they are of doing racist shit. Going hard over the way people ask for change is one of those super-duper red flags.

I do acknowledge there’s a certain amount of privilege in being a short, white, feminine, soft-voiced person who does this work; not every body is perceived as non-threatening. I used to get upset at not being taken seriously, but now I treat it like a superpower that allows me to have difficult conversations — and say no! — with a gentle tone. I think I have the power to be persuasive in many spaces because of this. A kind of weaponized gentleness, in the words of a close friend. It feels gross, and at the same time, our privileges are our privileges. We can’t pretend they don’t exist; we just have to mobilize them in the service of positive change.

But!

I am aware of others who share my superpower and use it for evil. The ingratiating emails to faculty. The well-funded conferences. The smiling face. The kinder, gentler surveillance technology. I’ve been increasingly aware of the way pleasantness in edtech in particular is weaponized as an entré. I know, welcome to the world of sales, Brenna — but I guess I am still naive enough to think that educational tools shouldn’t be commodified in this way.

When I get these emails forwarded to me by concerned faculty, I am always troubled by how good they are. It gives Lionel Hutz pitching the monorail vibes — it’s persuasive stuff. They use language to show they understand the difficult position of faculty and the challenge of the role, and honestly, they come off a lot like contract cheating firms: I’m your friend, I know things are hard, I can fix this. The problem is that it’s not academic integrity that hangs in the balance but student data. You can’t un-ring that bell.

Anyway, it’s all got me thinking about how we lead people and how we share our message, and then need to be more persuasive and more honest (because we can’t be more slick) than the kind faces of EdTech’s bullshit. Centring the fight — the values! the reasons! the goals! — and telling the story in a way that makes people want to join the fight. I have to believe that’s the best remedy.

Although the assholes are clearly winning at the moment. So who knows.

Increasingly, it seems like both educational technology companies and our own administrators are interested in outsourcing the judgement part of our teaching to algorithms. I have written about these algorithms before, and my most significant concern with them is this notion of outsourcing something which is, for better or for worse, a bit part of what it means to teach — at least insofar as evaluation and grading goes.

It’s intuitively clear to most of us, I think, that what we use to train an algorithm matters, and that biased content in will result in biased content out. But recent research into algorithmic recommendation suggests that the mechanism itself, not simply the content used for training it, can be the source of bias. This is especially dangerous in a culture that pretends at the neutrality of algorithmic tools for it own convenience.

Perhaps the greatest source of harm is that the illusion of neutrality algorithms have can be exploited in attempts to roll back protections against discrimination. Appeals to the neutrality of algorithms as a cover for discriminatory outcomes has become a fairly common trope.

Catherine Stinson, Algorithms Are Not Neutral

The truth is that I think a lot of learning analytics are pointless but hopefully largely harmless at the level of collection (I’m talking, like, who clicked where in the Learning Management System stuff), but I’m still troubled that we hand so much data over to faculty without any kind of training on how to make use of it. I give this maybe-trivial example all the time, but if I can track when my students do their homework, and I have an in-built bias for morning people (because of our inherent superiority, obviously), how do I ensure that doesn’t impact my evaluations — and is anyone checking?

But that becomes much less trivial when what is given to faculty moves out of the realm of data and into the realm of judgement. For example, some tools profess to tell us what kind of a student someone is based on this kind of data and some kind of secret sauce algorithm. So we get told the student who submits all their assignments one minute before the deadline is in trouble or in need of some kind of intervention when what they maybe just are is busy.

Of course, the ideal is for us to know our students, so we know when someone’s behaviour changes significantly or what pressures are weighing on them. But of course, most of us don’t work at institutions where that is possible, because we design universities not for learning, but for scale. 300-student lectures and precarious faculty teaching eight sections across three universities to make ends meet. These are not the conditions where it is possible to know our learners. And so, instead of fixing the real problems, our senior leaders are drawn to shiny technological solutions.

Let’s outsource judgement.

I don’t love any kind of learning analytics, but I do see a world of difference between giving faculty the means to micromanage or microanalyze student behaviour — an ill-advised zero-sum game — and giving faculty a label on a student, whether that label is “at risk” or “strong collaborator” or “solitary worker.” I worry that once that label is heard, it’s hard to un-hear.

And then there’s the question of where those labels go. It would be one thing if they were course-specific, but what if that label gets to the next class you are taking before you do? Listen, in elementary school, a teacher read the roll and looked directly at me and said, “Oh no. Not another little Gray.” My big brother’s performance as a student prejudiced that teacher about how I would be in her class. (Sorry to throw you under the bus, Simon.) As it was, she was wrong about who I would be as student in a different course, but we never got along after that. Indeed, her preconception reframed who I was and how I behaved. How do algorithmically-defined labels on students circumscribe them any less than that?

And of course, as more enterprise-level tools masquerade as teaching and learning tools, we should ask if this data captured by Microsoft and LinkedIn and these other corporate-first products we’ve invited into our classrooms is going to follow our students into their working lives. And whether they have the right to make mistakes, to start again, to fail — all things we’re supposed to make room for as educators. And when all else fails, do these tools give students the right to be forgotten?

I always caution faculty that we should be mindful of what data we ask for, because once we have it, we become responsible for it and for its ethical use. When in doubt, don’t look at it. And I think that’s doubly true of the algorithmic judgements that are increasingly sold to us as some kind of neutral truth. The algorithm ain’t neutral, and neither is the judgement.

Just don’t look. It’s not radical, it’s not transformative, and it’s not the whole answer. But it is a start. When in doubt about what you will do with the information and how you will make ethical use of it, just don’t look.

I am going to start this post by pointing you to someone brighter, smarter, and more coherent today, because Tim Fawns theorizes everything I am about to rant about in his thoughtful “An Entangled Pedagogy.” Honestly, you can read Tim and skip the rest of what I have to offer here.

But if the ravings of a social media addict are more your speed, please, pull up a chair.

Okay, so the conference scene has been wild these past couple of weeks, if by wild you mean the silent nightmare of watching people talk about accessibility in spaces that are violently inaccessible to disabled people or really anyone who isn’t in denial about the pandemic we are living through, but Ann Gagné has you covered on that analysis. But it was also wild because there were a bunch of overlapping teaching and learning discussions happening, and in so many of them — at least the part of the discourse that filtered onto my corner of Twitter, anyway — the idea of “pedagogy before technology” kept coming up, as in we must approach teaching and learning from a pedagogy-first perspective (as opposed to, presumably, a technology-first perspective, which for the record no one is suggesting).

This is one of those phrases in education that we are encouraged to repeat without unpacking. It is a very popular concept in teaching and learning centres, especially those without a particular interest in the digital, because it asserts that true pedagogy is this thinking that happens separate from and in advance of our engagement with the sullying influence of technology.

It is not a phrase I have a great deal of respect for, not least because it seems to me that at least thirty percent of the time I encounter it, the person saying it acts like they are sharing some shattering new insight. I think part of the appeal of this phrase is as a rallying cry for folks who think a certain kind of way about education to find each other. Signals and signposts are necessary, but —

The Wikipedia definition of a thought-terminating cliché is actually excellent:

A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point.^[2] Some such clichés are not inherently terminating; they only become so when used to intentionally dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9

We are supposed to accept “pedagogy before technology” because we are supposed to accept prima facie that pedagogy is good and technology is less good and that the two operate in separate realms. It ends an argument I’m not interested in ending: namely, it defines a supposed hierarchy in how we think about the arrangement of our thinking about teaching. But if we think about it for even a second, surely it’s obviously untrue.

Technology shapes my pedagogical choices every single moment. If I walk into a classroom and there’s a whiteboard — or more frighteningly, if I’m expecting a white board and there isn’t one — this shapes my pedagogy. If I arrive in class to find that not one student has brought paper or pens to class, this shapes my pedagogy. These technologies are ubiquitous and non-digital, so we don’t think of them as technologies, but they impact our teaching and learning in myriad ways. It’s asinine to pretend otherwise.

I’m not being intentionally obtuse here. I get the intention of the phrase, that the technology we have access to shouldn’t drive our pedagogical choices. I understand that premise: I just don’t buy it. To me, the two are so deeply intertwined and the only reason to hold up one over the other is ideology.

The truth is, as Tim points out in the article linked above, when we assert pedagogy first, even as we do it to eschew a kind of technological determinism, we are suggesting that technologies are neutral, waiting to be folded into any pedagogy. That’s simply untrue, but it’s also dangerous: imagining that technology is unproblematically being led by pedagogy because we will it to be so is denying the power of algorithm and analytic to impact and shape practice. If you are thinking critically about the technological tools you are using in your classroom, you can’t put it last in your analysis; you need to be clear-eyed about the changes the technology makes to your teaching. Because it does.

The LMS circumscribes your choices; the learning curve on any tool is access-limiting; the choice of video or audio or text has an impact on the user. Considerations of these factors happens alongside pedagogical planning, not as an afterthought — if we’re doing it right. There’s simply no way to engage in critical digital pedagogy if you always already think that technology is on the backfoot.

“Pedagogy before technology” comes from a good place, but it lacks nuance and it also lacks faith in our colleagues to be able to have complicated conversations. It’s not “pedagogy before technology.” It’s “technological considerations need to be made alongside pedagogical ones because ultimately the learner experience cannot extricate one from another,” but then I’ve never found myself accused of constructing my own thought-terminating clichés.

The short answer to why I haven’t written is grief. Obviously, I guess. Lately, grief has felt a bit like a large box in the middle of the room that I keep meaning to move but never get around to addressing, so instead I stub my toes on it ten times a day. It’s there, it’s lurking, it’s present. But it’s also my own lack of direct address that makes it so.

In some ways, the last month has been the easy mode of grief. When my dad died, I was on a plane within twelve hours of receiving the news, child in tow. We spent a month at home, and I looked after my mum as best I could and parented my kiddo as best I could and tried to knock things off the enormous post-death checklist as best I could and checked in occasionally at work as best I could. In short, I distracted myself.

After an epic 25-hour travel day (thanks, global pandemic), I got home to this home — do other adult humans refer to more than one space as home, or is that just me? — and I handed off kiddo to my husband and they went off for an afternoon adventure of haircuts and dance class and suddenly I was faced with the horrifying reality that, no longer distracted, I would have to feel my feelings.

Absolute bullshit.

I can feel myself beginning to unravel, and I think the truth of the last week is that I am not so emotionally stunted that I didn’t know this was eventually coming. I’ve been tired, and I’ve been intentionally tiring myself out to keep from having to grieve too profoundly, too deeply. And writing taps into all the same introspective parts of the self. So too tired to grieve was also too tired to write. And here we are.

I am back at my desk today in a formal capacity; back to writing and thinking and trying to do brain work. But I also recognize that I need to not use that as another form of distraction and escape. What is the balance?

I’ve recently apparently become a Person Who Orders Books About Grief after a lifetime of eschewing self-help as a genre (I once quit a book club because they made us read Untamed by Glennon Doyle and everyone loved it and I hated its story of wealthy white lady problems so profoundly that I knew these could never be my people), so I guess it’s new frontiers all around. I am currently reading It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand by Megan Devine and The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss by George A. Bonanno. Will report back.

I actually planned out this whole month of blogging ages ago and so I have lots of topics that aren’t my dead dad to talk about. I really hope to get to them. But I’m also grateful for this space to process and reflect. And grieve. It’s so hard to grieve. No one tells you that part: just the feeling of feelings, the space for sadness, is so hard to allow yourself to undertake. I think, for me, this part starts now.

I’m (very slowly) reading a new book about scientology even though I am pretty sure I know everything there is to know about scientology at this point. Update: still fucked up.

Yesterday, someone asked when I thought things would start to get back to normal for me and I’m still mad about it. To be clear, the answer to that question is: never. Normal is my dad being here. Everything else is not-normal.

It’s the golden age of streaming and I am currently watching the third season of a show called High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. They’re at summer camp this season and I genuinely don’t understand multiple significant plot points. For a show called High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Someone in this relationship is an idiot. It’s great when they burst into song, though.

This evening’s drug of choice is Cadbury Mini Eggs.

Today, I took a thank you card and a chocolate cake to the paramedics. My gratitude for them is infinite. And also, I almost said, “Thanks for saving my dad; it didn’t stick.” You can’t say things like that out loud but I increasingly think my after-Dad life will be organized around maximizing time with people I can say things like that to.

The thing about this High School Musical show is that I’m very invested in the drama of the main actors, who were in a relationship but now are not, and who are basically children. But I don’t have the resolve to read about it for any length of time. So I’m invested but not very committed, and I can’t keep track of the details, but I still try to explain it to other people.

My kiddo is obsessed with Pokémon and I don’t know anything about them except that there are so many Pokémon. My secret mom hack is that if you ask a kid to invent a new Pokémon they will talk for the next ten-to-twelve minutes without needing any additional input from their caregiver.

The dog says I have to go to bed. Tomorrow, we’ll aim for a coherent narrative. I promise.

As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, my grandfather was studying the cutting-edge technology of radar. One day, he was disrupted in his lab by an agent of the Government of Canada, informing him that he was being loaned to the British Navy. And that was that.

The most bookish and introverted in a family of four siblings, my grandfather was not someone who sought out excitement. While his brothers would volunteer for service in the Air Force and Army — one brother became a spitfire pilot — my grandfather didn’t choose service. One day he was working diligently on this new technology and the next he was training for war. And that was that. He would end up as the radar officer on the King George V on the morning that it sank the Bismarck, assuring a place in military history for a man who didn’t go looking for it.

I learned almost none of this story from my grandfather himself. When I was a child, PBS aired a documentary about British Navy life in WWII, and in it you can see about five seconds of my grandfather — smiling, looking slightly nerdy even in his uniform — walking with his shipmates in the mess as the boat rolls under him. My grandfather ordered the VHS of that documentary and showed us the clip of himself a handful of times (more than anything, for a man of his age to have access to a video of himself in his youth was a remarkable thing, I suspect). Otherwise, I mostly had my dad’s memory of the story to go by, occasionally augmented by other family members. The details are pretty sketchy for me. When my spouse joined the Reserves, my grandfather shared some stories with him.

But Grandpa only ever told me one story about the war, about a year before he died. He told me that when the Bismarck sank, it was mid-morning, and for a moment of eerie calm he stood on the deck and watched the ship go under. Due to the U-Boats in the area, any attempt to rescue survivors was called off, and he watched the Bismarck crew drown. He told me he had nightmares of that image for the rest of his life.

As an adult, I now know that there were 2200 crew on the Bismarck and only 114 survived.

My grandfather lived with those images a very long time; he was in his 80s when he died. I can also tell you that he was a lifelong socialist and that he donated his money to peace and environmental causes. He did not continue research into radar; he moved into nuclear science and worked as a researcher for the Canadian government for the rest of his career. And he didn’t talk much about the war.

I know far more about the psychological toll of the war on my grandfather than I do about what he did day-to-day. And that has always coloured my understanding of what this day is for: every member of my family who served, on the Home Front or on the Front Lines, returned with trauma. There’s no version of this day that glorifies war for me. It’s always been about the critical importance of Never Again.

Two. Kids these days are [fill in the blank here]. No they aren’t, you just got old, and if we’re lucky that’s what happens to the best of us. It would be nice if people tasked with educating the next generation didn’t fall into the same thought-terminating clichés as the last generation of garbage teachers adopted, but here we are.

Three. I don’t have time to teach [writing, grammar, study skills, etc]; my content is very important. If you evaluate for it, you have to teach it. That’s the rule. Otherwise, your course becomes an opaque mess of a game of “guess what’s in the professor’s head” and that’s not actually learning. Stop it. Oh, and when you outsource this work to your colleagues, recognize the specific skillset you are tapping into and stop treating so-called service departments like they are departments filled with your own literal servants.

Four. Accommodations are a workload issue / impinge on my academic freedom. I have empathy for the former — institutions download work onto those least able to resist, it’s true, and I don’t know of a single Accessibility Services office that would say, “Hey, we have enough money to do everything we need to do.” But access is a value and a commitment, and often by the time we get to the point of accommodations, there are changes in practice that would benefit the whole classroom (and, often, the instructor). The idea that accommodations are an academic freedom issue is a load of horseshit.

Five. Ranting about my students is a necessary catharsis. That’s an argument for talking about your rough day with your close friend or spouse, not for your anonymous social media account with 15.7M followers where you post excerpts of student writing, you absolute soggy Rice Krispie of a person. Students are humans who you should treat with respect. Why is that controversial.

Today is three weeks. On a podcast I was listening to the other day, one of the hosts said that the thing he has noticed about experiences of grief is that somewhere around the three-to-four weeks point, people stop asking about the grief thing. There’s a sense that it’s time to talk about other things or to get back to some kind of normal. And if there’s one thing that the pandemic taught me, it’s how many people I share a society with who love an ill-advised and premature return to normal.

I do not feel normal. I barely feel human.

It’s true though, about the need for normal creeping back in and the people starting to fall away. By the week three point, the meals and visits have abated and the steady flow of cards has reduced somewhat and at first, to be honest, it’s a bit of a relief, because all those things are really, truly difficult to process and engage with in a way that feels meaningful. But then it sinks in that people on the outer circles of your life are kind of done with the grieving thing, and it feels a bit like the circles are going to keep falling away from here on out until it’s just, you know. You.

A few days after Dad’s death, someone called and asked how I was and when I reflexively said, “I’m okay,” they said, “No. You’re not. How can you be?” And that is both true and also, whew, a whole lot to come back at someone with when they’re emotionally unstable. Sometimes an “okay” is less an “okay” and more a finger in the emotional dam, just trying to hold back the floods, you know? Let me repress in peace.

When people ask how I’m doing now I mostly just tell them that everything sucks, but then I kind of laugh, like, “Everything sucks but what can you do, I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable.” Today I went to a bunch of meetings for the first time with people who largely don’t already know, and I didn’t tell them, and the whole thing made me feel dissociated and weird. But also it feels like a weird piece of news to bring to the cold intros on a Teams call, you know? “Fun fact about me: my dad is dead and I’m not keeping it together. Now who is going to screen share today?”

The physicality of grief is not new to me, but it’s different. My most recent experiences of grief came from a series of miscarriages, so the physicality of that grief was not a surprise; it’s wrapped up in the physical experience itself. But this grief is very physical too. I’m tired, but it’s more than that — I am tired in my bones. Existentially tired. My brain wanders; focus is difficult. Sometimes I’m not hungry and other times I feel like I can never eat enough. All the places I carry stress — my lower back, my shoulders — are screaming. There is not enough sleep in the history of consciousness, and also I wake up every hour just because I do.

Three weeks.

I am in no rush to get to normalcy. The idea of it ever feeling normal for my dad to not be here makes me wince. The world will come for me and I am trying to re-engage with the world. But none of it feels fair or right or reasonable. None of it feels normal.

How are you?

Pretty shitty.

Hope that’s okay.

It makes me think about a lot of EdTech, honestly — these feature rollouts for more and more and more and more surveillance that no one actually asked for. Great, I get to know what time my learner usually opens their word processor. I never asked for this, and no one is teaching me how to use this data. Sure, it’s not a VR helmet that kills you, but it opens the door to potential bias. And again, much like the opportunity (?) to die inside a game, it’s not something anyone actually asked for.

Meta just got legs and this guy wants to take your head off.

Virtual Reality has been the “next big thing” in Educational Technologies for as long as I’ve been in the discipline and longer, and most of it is really bad. Like, the number of times I have seen the most straight-ahead lecture replicated, but I don’t know, we’re in space now, and we’re all supposed to pretend its innovative. If I could VR my way into a Magic-School-Bus-style fieldtrip, you could probably talk me into it. But investing in a VR headset so some guy can lecture at me, but from a cloud? Nah.

It feels like the educational equivalent of making fetch happen.

I actually kind of want to channel my inner Audrey Watters here to reflect on how positively Skinnerian this whole thing sounds. Someone somewhere is building a VR headset that shocks a kid if they close their eyes for too long. You know I’m right.

Anyway, while Joe Oculus there was explaining why I should pay him money to very literally explode my brain for me, I got to thinking about how much power we give technology entrepreneurs in education when they are walking around saying ideas like this with their whole chests. Like. I don’t understand why we don’t look at stories like this and laugh these folks out of the room when they offer us engagement clickers that also take attendance (I didn’t ask) or a productivity score for every student (I didn’t ask) or an AI-graded essay tool (why am I asking students to write an essay I don’t want to read, exactly?). Over and over again, the pitches show that there are never any educators in the room.

Get these doofuses out of the room where we’re trying to do the teaching and learning.

No one wants to die in real life if they die in the game. Literally no one asked for this.

Honestly, I already do. I haven’t seen a lot of follower haemorrhaging thus far, but I am feeling the tweaks to the algorithm. I have a small but very engaged community on Twitter, but since sometime late Friday I’m lucky to get a single like on any tweet, and the analytics data seems to show a big drop in how many people are seeing my content. Turns out, shouting into the void is actually no fun; people have got to shout alongside you. I have to assume this is related to the changes to prioritize verified users in everyone’s feeds, and since that man would have to pry my last eight dollars out of my cold, dead hands, I guess it just rolls this way.

I’m sad about losing Twitter because it has been a big part of my professional life ever since I joined as a graduate student in the late-2000s; when I ended up in a department where there wasn’t a lot of support for the work I wanted to do, my handful of pals in my department helped me see Twitter as a place to build a larger community. When I started blogging, I found an audience for my ideas on Twitter and found challenges to those same ideas there, too. And when I found myself in a brand new discipline as an educational technologist, I found the professional network that would see me through the challenges of the first year of the pandemic. Among those folks, I would find good friends.

Twitter as it once was was a social media that made sense to me; I’m not cool enough for TikTok, not hot enough for Instagram, not patient (or maybe just angry) enough for Facebook. I never really used MySpace and I don’t know what Friendster was and I remember thinking FourSquare was cool until the internet reminded me that it’s a harrowing place to share personal data. But Twitter and I always clicked well: the text-based medium, the tonal balance of hope and cynicism, the general preference for sharing failings and grievances over successes. These are things that speak to me.

I became confident in my public scholarship on Twitter; I was invited to publish in collections because of Twitter; and almost all of my keynote invitations have come first as Twitter DMs. It’s a critical space for my career. Or at least it was. It’s hard to get external links and non-retweets seen right now if you’re an unverified user, and that’s sad, because I don’t know who I would be as a scholar without the critical conversations and corrections that helped me find my voice. I did really silly things on Twitter like a live-blogging of the reading experience of Ian McEwan’s terrible novel about a sentient fetus or a multi-day debate with Norm MacDonald about the state of Canadian Literature or the weird time I was on the BBC because of a viral tweet about Jon Stewart’s retirement.

The weirdness of Twitter was always in the possibility of this kind of thing happening. That doesn’t seem possible to me under a regime where anyone can pay $8 / month to have their voice amplified and everyone else can get buried by them. But what do I know.

The think about Twitter that I find hard to replicate elsewhere is the happenstance of a space shared collectively by so many people who, once upon a time, anyway, were often flattened to share equal weight. This obviously (1) is shaped by subject position, because for some marginalized folks Twitter has always been a hellscape and (2) turned out to be a flattening that from about 2016 on pretty much ruined the world. And I get that, I do. But the pre-2015 days, when Twitter really did feel (to me, anyway) like a Town Square? No other existing tool comes close to tapping into that feeling. Because it was never an echo chamber to me — it was always a place where I could find scholars and writers and experts with all kinds of different perspectives and read them alongside each other. That had a great deal of value to me.

Maybe Twitter will survive all of this. Seems unlikely, but who expected Facebook to still be around after we abandoned it to our parents? But even if it does, it’s hard to imagine it gets back to the silly, strange place it was when we were all a little sillier and more naive, and before the presence of misinformation and flattened expertise was so obviously deadly.

I guess that’s the question: will I miss Twitter, or do I already miss the person I was in those years, before grief and pandemic life and disappointment and existential dread reframed how I understand the world? I can’t really know that, I suppose.

But I can keep hoping I make it to the end of Twitter without ever being the main character. So far, so good.