I had promised myself I would deactivate my Twitter X profile after the election to take a break from frantically cycling through the same four or five political pundits’ accounts since early summer. The date to re-activate my account (to avoid it being deleted) came and went without me wanting to do so. And just like that, there went nearly 20,000 followers accrued over the span of 14 years.
I did create a Bluesky account around mid-November, but that place annoyed me to no end, both because of the lack of engagement there (as it turns out, what I liked about Twitter X is also what I hated about it: its algorithm) and because it ended up being a left-wing version of Twitter X, and so I deleted that account, too. That same day, I also deleted my Reddit account. All I use now is Instagram (it’s light-hearted and I use it pretty much only for music-related stuff) and LinkedIn (it helps keeping in touch with acquaintances whose email address I don’t have, and because who the hell wants to “engage” on LinkedIn anyway?)
As a result, I find myself with a lot more time on my hands, which is great: I have a lot more time to read, exercise, practice guitar, and spend time with family and friends.
I also have a lot more time to think, and to think more deeply. Which brings me to the point of this post: Rather than express (too many) thoughts in 280 characters or fewer, I’m hoping to use this space in 2025 to express fewer thoughts at more length, but also hopefully at much more depth.
I wrote in Doing Economics that social media was the modern-day, public equivalent of the private epistolary correspondence between scientists of yore. I no longer think that’s true, both because over the past few years, social media has tended to reproduce virtually the same bogus hierarchies found in the real world (so between someone with a harvard.edu email and someone with a, say, uark.edu email who both say the same thing, the former automatically gets a lot more attention and followers) and because social media not only turns everyone at best into caricatures of themselves and at worst into pundits, it also just isn’t the place for the subtlety that scientific discourse requires.
With that, happy holidays! Here’s to a return to long-form writing in 2025. For anyone who cares to engage, email is the best way to do so.