Twits on Parade

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Thus Blaise Pascal, writing some four centuries ago.

But we’ve now a very different problem, one Pascal couldn’t have imagined. Now when we “sit quietly in a room alone”, we’re neither quiet nor alone. We’re online.

Worse, for hundreds of millions among us, to be outside one’s room now means doing things only so that they can later be posted online.

I will call this tribe twits.

Yeah I know, twit is an old word. But I’m going to dust it off, repurpose it.

The twit is the person who lives in order to post. Observation tells us that most twits are female, but there’s in fact an embarrassing number of male twits around.

That the twit lives to post has temporal implications, which often prove dangerous.

Consider: The twit performs actions in the real world thinking meanwhile of likes and shares in the digital world. This means the twit doesn’t pay due attention to the real world while he’s in it. He forgets the real world is real, that it has laws of its own, such as gravity, or bears bite, or things like that.

It happens all the time.

Here’s 2025 Twit of the Year so far. US Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) is in Ukraine, there to show his solidarity. While there, he apparently decided it was a good idea to have himself filmed on the front lines firing artillery against Russian positions.

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Chris Bray calls it the “dumbest and most dangerous political stunt in my lifetime”.

Hm. I don’t know how old Chris is, I’m guessing 40-something, but he may well be right.

Here’s a reaction on X that gets the gist:

And this guy Fitzpatrick is not only a lawyer, but a former FBI agent. (I know, I know, don’t say it.)

In brief narrative form, we have here a perfect instance of the grave danger of performative politics in the age of social media.

Or in other words: the danger of twits.

Because some people neither stay in their rooms, nor ever really leave social media. The world to them is social media.

I immediately thought of the lefty activist last year who shouted at her city council members that she’d find them and murder them. She didn’t realize her virtue-signaling was a crime, and that she’d be locked up for it.

This congressional twit from PA is riding the same performative high, fishing for likes and shares and votes, while meanwhile his yen for the viral has made him forget: "Oh yeah. I am a US government representative. Hm. So, World War III. Yeah, I get your point. I guess I got a bit too inspired by the moment."

No. The problem here is that he wasn’t inspired by the moment. He was inspired by the thought of his post going viral. In the moment, he was committing an insane act, likely a criminal act on various counts.

I wonder: If Trump is trying to do a reverse Kissinger, is this guy maybe doing a reverse Jane Fonda?

One commenter on Bray’s post suggests Fitzpatrick just stay in Ukraine, because if the Trump administration pursues this, he’s potentially guilty of treason.

I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. But this is what performative politics looks like. And the mayhem it causes cannot be overstated. Because increasingly, it happens at scale. It’d be worthwhile writing a book on this mimetic scourge and its real costs. Chris Bray would be the man to write it.

Twitting can range from literal criminal acts committed for likes and shares to the vast continents of online behavior that do nothing but illustrate Rob Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs. It can cover “gender-affirming” mutilation of children to systemic state attempts to turn LA into a huge ashtray. It’s all toxic, because it all ignores responsibility for the concrete effects one’s virtue signaling has on others. And meanwhile you just got new followers.

It’s not always political either. Reading about PA Twit of the Year, I was reminded of the sad recent case of the woman who was trying to get close-up photos of a shark swimming near her, something like dental close-up photos. She lost both hands.

“Oh yeah. A shark. I guess it’s not a digital shark I’m photographing here, but a real shark. So it’s not like copy/paste. Hm.”

Across the board our society suffers this psychotic blurring. The Instagram-tier forgetting that your post and the real world are not identical. A mass psychosis that sadly affects women more than men.

We’re all twits to some degree. But as for this "tough guy" representative, defying US policy and likely breaking more laws than he has fingers, all for a chance to go viral—what can one say?

You go, girl!