Twitter

There's a joke about a guy who gets anxious on airplanes. The passenger next to him, trying to be helpful, suggests ways he might relax. A drink? A Xanax? A movie, or a nice nap? The anxious man shakes his head, annoyed. He can't relax. He can't lose focus. He can only sit, gripping the arm rests, staring straight ahead in a state of white-knuckled, sphincter clenching terror. Why? Because his terror is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. This notion of anxious acting-out as our sole line of defense against chaos — call it the Control Freak’s Fallacy — isn’t new, but it is certainly having a moment in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In ancient Athens, the great lawmaker Solon passed a law banning ‘laceration of the flesh by mourners’, ‘the sacrifice of an ox at the grave’, and other ‘unmanly and effeminate extravagances of sorrow’.Cockburn has come to appreciate the wisdom of Solon. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday night caused an instant outpouring of...well, mourning isn’t exactly the right word. It was a hysterical outburst, an explosion of mass delirium: greater exhibitions of neurosis were taken as proof of greater commitment to the cause. So great was the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you would think that Ginsburg’s death has caused all Planned Parenthoods to close, and birth control pills to lose their contraceptive powers. https://twitter.

No one will deny that 2020 has been a rollercoaster, but one fun thing Cockburn discovered this year is that you can now live forever via your social media accounts. Facebook has long given family members the option to turn their deceased loved one’s page into a memorial, but something far more bizarre is happening on Twitter. Family members and staffers grab the keys to the account and fire off tweet after tweet under the late user’s name with little indication of who is the one resurrecting the dead. Charlie Daniels’s account, for example, lived on by posting quotes from the late country music singer and links to charity for veterans and police officers.

Dear Twitter,The other day I spotted an elderly man not wearing a mask in the pharmacy. He had a badge pinned to his shirt which proclaimed him to have COPD, absolving him of his responsibility to do the decent thing. At first glance everything looked legit, but to my keen eyes, the kerning on his medical exemption badge was all wrong. A friend of mine is doing a graphic design course and after discreetly WhatsApping them a close-up, they confirmed to me it was indeed a clever forgery. I immediately opened my Twitter app so that I could broadcast me shaming him to my 128,000 followers, but my plan was abruptly scuppered. I tapped the familiar icon and was confronted with a message telling me that my account, MY account had been suspended! SUSPENDED! Can you imagine that?

Welcome back to the Red Room, Democrats. On Thursday morning President Trump fired off a stream of consciousness tweet tinkering with the idea of delaying the election. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1288818160389558273 Imagine how your typical online Democrat seizes on that garbled statement. It’s a chance to release all her tension, under the guise of fighting a big bad tyrant. She feigns rage publicly — but deep down she is truly titillated. The President has created a class of masochists, and she is one of them. ‘Please daddy, don’t delay my election,’ she thinks, biting her lower lip as she taps out ‘#OrangeManBad’ on her keyboard and prepares to max out her donation to the Amy McGrath Senate campaign.

Is that a face mask — or a gag? The President’s son, Donald Trump Jr, has had the functionality of his Twitter account restricted after sharing a video which supposedly breaches the site’s COVID misinformation policy. Jack Dorsey slapped Don Jr on the wrist for posting footage of the America’s Frontline Doctors Press Conference, which was held outside the Supreme Court on Monday. In the video, doctors from the newly-formed group claim that masks are unnecessary to prevent the spread of the virus, and that there is a cure to COVID-19. The President himself also retweeted the footage. As he told Dave Portnoy last week, ‘It’s the retweets that get you into trouble.

Recently I had one of those dreams. I woke up wanting to forget it immediately, like most dreams. But it reached out from the depths of my subconscious with a message that rippled and reverberated through my waking day. You know those dreams? They’re sticky. In my dream, I’m sitting at the bedside of an older woman. She looks familiar. I can’t place how I know her — she isn’t my mother or an aunt — but I can’t shake the feeling that we are related. The woman holds my hand. She is dying. ‘Bridget,’ she asks, ‘how do you feel about the time you spend on Twitter?’ What a weird question for a woman on her deathbed to be asking, I think. Nonetheless, her question makes me defensive.

After two months, the 'mostly peaceful' label for the riots gripping American cities is wearing a touch thin. That’s not just because it fails to satisfy conservatives and moderates, who puzzle over how 'mostly peaceful' demonstrations leave so many downtowns torched. It also fails to satisfy the actual rioters. They insist their demonstrations are very violent, courtesy of brutal tactics from the police officers they want abolished.'Proof' of such violence went viral on Wednesday. The video was first shared by Twitter user @Andy_Resist, but was swiftly magnified by a different Andy. This one bore Twitter’s hallowed blue checkmark and enough followers to populate a small city, or a few dozen 'mostly peaceful' protests. https://twitter.

Nearly three months into lockdown, 40 million Americans were unemployed. Kids lost out on three months of schooling. Businesses shuttered, many never to open again. Mental health suffered. People lost their homes. Tens of thousands died alone in hospitals, family members were prevented from holding the hands of their loved ones in their final days, and in many cases they weren’t allowed to bury them or hold a funeral. Parents struggled to balance distance learning and work. Teachers worried that their most vulnerable students weren’t logging in to class. People couldn’t receive medical treatment or attend birthdays and graduations. But humans are creative, resilient creatures, and it didn’t take long before we adjusted to living online.

If you are on the internet you have no doubt heard of ‘Karens’. ‘Karens’ are middle-aged white women who have a fondness for reporting people, especially black people, to the authorities. ‘The archetypal “Karen”,’ says Vox in one of its invaluable explainers, ‘Is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer.’ She ‘has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it.’In practice, calling someone a ‘Karen’ is generally an excuse to abuse a middle-aged white woman and make it seem woke.