Séamas O'Reilly: My life would be unrecognisable without Twitter

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Four years ago, I quit my last job to write full-time. It wasn’t exactly a stab in the dark since, by that time, I’d already been writing a weekly column for an Irish paper for over a year. 

It’s just that — and make sure you’re sitting down when you read this — the pay for those columns was meagre enough that quitting my job had never really been an option. And so, I continued to traipse into an office near Oxford Circus to eat Tesco Meal Deals as I stared at spreadsheets, chatted over teas, and signed cards at a rate that suggested at least half of my colleagues had six birthdays a year.

This was my fifth or sixth desk job in London, all pretty much the same; toiling in drab offices where many people came and went, since the work was never exactly joyous and management were always unsentimental about getting rid of people, making the turnover rate quite high. 

In fact, having just written this down, I’ve realised that many of those times I scribbled “Happy Birthday”, it must have been on leaving cards, so I apologise to everyone who’s non-renewed contract I made worse by wishing them such happy returns.

Then, also on company time, I told a story on Twitter about meeting Mary McAleese on ketamine (me, not her), and everything changed. I gained about 30,000 followers overnight, and got an offer to write a weekly column about parenting, and a book about my childhood. Shortly afterwards, I handed in my notice and walked out of that building for the last time, feeling footloose and fancy-free. I’ve not worked a day job since.

Got my days wrong and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine. https://t.co/gSjPY8WjKL

— The author, Séamas O'Reilly (@shockproofbeats) May 3, 2018

I’ve thought about this a lot over the last week, as people have shared their disquiet, ambivalence or even glee, at the prospect that Twitter might be spiralling down the internet’s tubes. Because, as strange — and, in fact, mortifying — as it is to admit, my entire life would be completely unrecognisable without the place.

Put simply, the platform afforded to me by Twitter is unlikely to have happened through any other means. Whether you use Twitter or not, this column would not exist and neither would most of my work, in its current form. The same could likely be said for a handful of other people in this newspaper, and most others.

As an Irish person in London without the necessary ‘financial means’ (a euphemism we use in the UK writing business for “parents who have money”) to do an unpaid internship in my twenties it was, if not quite impossible, then extremely unlikely I would be hired at a national broadsheet ahead of the hundreds who had. 

I’m glad I’ve been able to build an audience of 95,000 followers without ever having been famous or on TV, and delighted that so many of those people seemed willing to read my columns or buy my book and say nice things to me about them once they did. Those of us who don’t have any family members with their own Wikipedia page, have a grudging appreciation for the fact that Twitter’s openness and ease of use offered us a shop window that had never before existed, and now, might never exist again.

Twitter social media app showing Elon Musk running on a mobile phone.

Twitter is not some precious, holy object and if its time has come to end, well, I don’t want to eulogise it as if I’m mourning the death of the last white tiger in the wild. I have my own ambivalences about the site – in fact, in that very same ketamine tweet thread I’ve been lionising, I referred to it as “a Nazi-riddled microblogging platform” and I stand by that assessment.

But, there is something senseless about throwing out the baby – my nice site where people are nice to me and give me work – with the bath water – all the bits Elon Musk wants people to pay for – without even attempting to get rid of the site’s actual problems – like its poor search
functionality and, I dunno, the Nazis.

It remains to be seen what Musk’s recommendations for the platform will amount to, given that he’s U-turned on payment plans, moderation, verification and free speech so much it seems almost as if he’s an idle billionaire who’s bought the world’s most popular text-based social media platform out of spite and is making up the rest as he goes along.

It is in this aspect of the saga that I take most consolation. Firstly, I am optimistic that at least some of his more insane ideas are unlikely to bear fruit on a grander scale, as they would be practically and financially ruinous to a degree that outstrips even his hubris. But, should they come to pass, I also take comfort in the fact that he will have turned his acquisition of Twitter into a perfect, personal hell of his own making.

As a thin-skinned, paranoid egotist, Musk has all but bankrupted himself to acquire a nest of vipers who have dedicated most of the last week to mocking him mercilessly. I forget who it was – Twitter really need to improve that search function, after all – but whoever called Musk “a narcissist who bought the insult factory” got it right. 

His subsequent crackdown on people imitating him was not merely hilarious, but also demonstrated, once and for all, the inch-deep conviction of his belief in free speech, before you even start reckoning with his conception that ‘free’ means $8 p/mo. I take heart from this, since I’ve no idea what the place I’ve made jokes, and friends, and a career out of will look like in a year’s time, or whether it’ll even be a place I can stomach by then.

In any case, there are many more important things going on now, I know. When I finish writing this, I’ll go back to reading about them on Twitter, while I can afford to.