It’s not like me to feel inspired by technology, but today is a special anniversary in my life, and so I wrote a eulogy to the old Twitter machine and the way it used work before a billionaire with a shriveled heart the size of a raisin (no offense to raisins) decided to smash his brand new toy to stifle global news, discourse, and justice movements.
Two hugely significant events in my life both happened on Nov. 22. First, it’s the day I became a mom. Second, five years ago today I got an accidental education about how exactly news used to go viral on Twitter.
Today is five years since “Coal Knew, Too” completely altered the way I see the world, and now today I can also say loud and proud that I finally grabbed all my data from X and fully deactivated my account. X is now ex.
Apart from the terrible doom scroll, one good thing the functional Twitter gave me was access to humanitarian and climate thought leadership, reporting, science, organizing, policy, authors, and it’s where I found the All We can Save Movement that inspired climate optimism in the face of so much bad news. It also helped me as a mom find more solidarity with younger generations during a time when conspiracy disinfo was picking up speed. (I wondered why anyone would need some random conspiracy to explain reality when there’s so much juicy history about real climate disinfo campaign, but that’s another story.)
I only opened the account in the run-up to publication because the HuffPost editor asked for my handle and said that she would tag me when they posted it. (The other account I had on there felt tainted from my days in PR.) What I remember most was that on the morning of publication, the story was posted at 5:45 am on the HuffPost website, and then a more senior editor to the one I worked with shared it on Twitter with the Tweet: “Good morning. Coal knew, too.”
The “too” is a reference to the previous reporting that Exxon knew about the catastrophic impacts of climate change in the 80s, which investigative journalists had pieced together from ExxonMobile’s scientists’ archives. The Exxon Knew story was published in 2015, but I was chasing a toddler around then, and I missed it. I felt really out of touch and guilty that I didn’t know that story thread until my source filled me in.
The morning it was published, a short while after the senior editor posted it to Twitter, my editor shared it and tagged me, and then pretty much instantly I started to realize that I had had NO concept of how important that headline really was to the climate community. (It was my brilliant editor’s headline, not mine.) I had not yet fixed Twitter’s notification settings on my phone, and it started buzzing and didn’t stop for a week.
Then things started to die down, or I thought they had, but there was a second wave of constant buzzing before my phone was mine again. The peak of it for me was when I was hosting a birthday party at a skating rink and my then-hero, then-presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders Tweeted the story.
Materially it was nothing, but that was a moment for me, in part because I had overcome so much fear to get the story across the finish line. I’m not an investigative journalist, so even asking Peabody Coal to comment was terrifying. Ha!
Then, two nights before publication I had the thought that I might end up in a body bag.
When I slowed down to examine my fear more rationally, I realized that it was not likely to happen because we have press freedoms in the US.
Today I’m reminded of what exactly it was that helped me overcome that particular fear enough to call it irrational. It probably should have been lawyers, but it was in fact the voices for justice and democracy and the dogged work of other journalists that called me into courage and safety that kept the fearmongers of the world from renting free space in my head.
Post-election, many like-minded citizens are grappling with various degrees of fear and uncertainty about life in the US and around the world under a neo-fascist administration. I wish it were some surreal game show on TV, but it’s real life.
We know there will be some who flee, some who stay, some who tune out, some who activate, some who abandon hope (hopefully not for good), some who burn out (hopefully not for good), some who lean into community care and mutual aid, and some who discover a new home for them within political and community organizing and movement building or who run for office.
Fear can be useful, but not when it forces you to hand over your power, especially prematurely.
I spent some of the last three years overcoming my fear of public speaking. That may not be useful in this new world we’re heading into, but it definitely made me feel less afraid, and that is certainly useful to me. I’m not talented at extemporaneous speaking or oratory by any stretch, but I don’t have a fear of microphones in crowded rooms anymore, and I’m proud of that. I’m inspired by a line in a song by Tift Merritt: “Only get this one time ‘round, better speak up straight, better speak up proud.”
For those who are searching for their next move, it may feel like whatever you do will not be enough. It might feel like you’re too small and that the work before you is possibly not worth it, but that’s also part of the lie that neo-fascists peddle. They want you to feel lonely, weak, small, and ineffective.
Don’t give them that victory.
Élan Young 