What comes after Techno Twitter?
The power that online activists once held over institutions and artists is fading – with strange consequences.
Hey everyone,
I’m republishing an essay that first appeared in No Tags: Conversations on Underground Culture at the end of 2024. I thought now would be a good time to revisit an era of being online that already feels distant and impossible to fathom, and whose long-term effects are beginning to come into view.
Over the years, I’ve been scathing to friends about online activists—single-issue posters accusing a person or institution, in a screeching register, of moral murder—and I’ve always wanted to draw a line under that period without myself being dragged into the reputational whirlpool.
But campaigners are not wholly to blame for this toxic smog. Too many nightlife workers sincerely believe that what they do is of monumental importance. Twenty years ago, DJing was a nerdy hobby for shut-ins. It is now unblinkingly described as a “practice,” like medicine or architecture, or as an inherently political act.
This is an under-discussed source of the anxiety that underpinned peak Techno Twitter. When you’re under the illusion that gigging around the States three times a week amounts to NGO work, a resentful poster who’s skimmed some therapyspeak and French post-structuralism is uniquely capable of paralysing the guilty liberal mind.
In a previous Microplastics I said, as a joke, that I felt sorry for DJs, but in this case I actually do. They take way more flak than is deserved. The logic of online activism is such that “accountability” is sought from public figures who seem most reachable—a tactic that suits the people who actually make things happen.
This atmosphere of hyperaccountability has strange consequences. Artists, perhaps feeling the need to always “speak out,” are beginning to attach current affairs with conspiratorial significance to an ever-growing, all-encompassing theory of power, one that must be resisted.
But I’m not sure how normal people, by which I mean anyone not gorging on Instagram content in airport lounges, are supposed to confront—what was it?—the “Zio-Australian-Epstein empire.” On Instagram, an even bigger DJ posted, then deleted, a long-winded, QAnon-adjacent spiel about Epstein. On the grid!
Call me a chopped unc or whatever, but child trafficking isn’t really on the nightlife community to solve. We’re being driven to distraction by awful events over which we have negligible power. In our corner of the world, perhaps the most powerful thing we can do is to bring people together for a few hours to forget that.
Why are we still tuning into Techno Twitter?
—first published in No Tags, 2024
In the opening pages of “Tyll” by Daniel Kehlman, the novel’s jester performs to a crowd of villagers somewhere in middle Europe. After singing, dancing, acting and ropewalking to the throng, Tyll goads the audience into taking part, first by daring them to toss their shoes, then insulting them—”you crumb heads”—for their bovine obedience. Using the Musk app is not unlike the experience of those townsfolk, where I am by turns entertained and berated by shitposters I barely know. Yet there I remain, gawping peasantly at the circus.
People often wonder why The Discourse has become so toilet. A few have already written great essays about this; P.E. Moskowitz refers to the “secular puritanism” espoused by those who habitually assume moral superiority over others. For me, one overlooked aspect of the televangelising that prevails on X is the way in which the speculative hyperbole and outrage of tabloid newspapers and right-wing talk radio neatly traces the apparent instincts of users who’d sooner self-immolate than be seen reading The Sun or watching Fox News.
What’s this got to do with tunes? Well, exactly. We just used to, like, talk about them—specifically, in messageboards like Dubstep Forum and I Love Music. For the last few years those conversations have migrated to a place we sometimes call “Techno Twitter.” But it’s long been clear that the chat about music there is about as essential as a lobotomy. One memorable shocker, from a producer I won’t name, was the suggestion that noughties dance music was “bleeaaakkkk”; I, for one, will not tolerate bad language in this microhouse.
Techno Twitter has its uses. On a good day it speaks truth to power. And as an ersatz Freudian superego, it probably keeps the industry’s lowlifes on edge. But too often the public conversation about sensitive issues—those that require not only “nuance” (bleurgh) but, more broadly, adult behaviour—is hijacked by eggy accounts or self-elected local cancellers with no special expertise or intel to speak of. It’s also difficult to take a poster seriously when the lingua franca is therapyspeak and the Twitter handle is Dildo Baggins.
Not that messageboards were the apex of human achievement. An authority acquired through logging 10,000 hours on Discogs should be held lightly. And, as anyone who spent the noughties hanging out in the Slam forum will tell you, messageboards were themselves awash with bad vibes. But if Charlie Brooker’s right and Twitter is basically a video game, playing it well means adopting an aggy Darwinian posting style concerned less with sharing knowledge with like minds than presenting the illusion of it to no one in particular.
When I was in the Slack channels at RA a colleague had opened a thread called “shitstorm.” It had been set up for senior editors to talk through social media drama and consider how to respond, if at all. For a time it was an essential sounding board. But, gradually, it became a twitchy alert system for any negative tweet about RA, mostly from the same few accounts. I said at the time that I wasn’t sure it was healthy to be so consumed by posters whose goal was not to offer constructive criticism but to scold the magazine to death.
I thought about that period when I came across a recent study in Psychological Science, which aimed to explain an element of political polarisation in the States. By comparing the responses of X users and members of the public to the tweets of US senators, researchers found an odd discrepancy: while the general public preferred bipartisan tweets, they admitted that they’d be more likely to fall in line with prolific X users’ bias for what researchers call “dismissing” tweets when using the platform.
It’s easy to imagine how that’s shaped Techno Twitter’s tunelessly combative style; even DJ friends of mine who know better slip all too comfortably into “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but.” But whatever X’s effect on its users, it remains detached from reality. What’s more, too many ostensibly professional people—worst of all, shiftless editors who commission stories based on views sourced exclusively from X—have lost sight of where the village ends and the carnival begins. A simple solution comes to mind: shall we try another tent?
The Microplastics Digest
What I’ve been paying attention to lately.
READING
The world’s worst journalist – Hannah Gold [Harper’s]
God, ULEZ and Emmanuel Frimpong – James Sharp [The Fence]
How politics went hyper – Anton Jäger [The New Statesman]
A messy evening with Bassvictim – Kieran Press-Reynolds [Pitchfork]
How Russian brainrot became a hit for children [The Economist]
LISTENING
Kinshasa In Action – KINACT [Nyege Nyege Tapes]
Yoyi – Grupo Los Yoyi [Mr Bongo]
Unreleased Works ‘94 – ‘97 – Susumu Yokota [Transmigration]
Mirrors – DJ Sundae [EPSM Institute]
Marty Supreme OST – Daniel Lopatin [A24]