Professional Shitpoasting

Twitter was probably the first place where I got continuous access to a social world whose norms were not inherited from the congregation, school, or my family. It was also the worst possible environment in which to discover that I was undercalibrated about how other people infer intent. I would think a thought was interesting, funny, technically provocative, aesthetically funny, or simply TRUE, and then post it. The missing computation was: what model of me will a stranger construct if this is the only 280 characters they ever see?

I said a lot of unhinged shit. Some of it was actually good. Some was funny only to me. Some was needlessly inflammatory. Some makes me cringe now because I can see the audience model I failed to run. [embed representative posts, including ones I still endorse and ones I don't] I don't want to write this chapter as "young man learns professionalism" because professionalized self-censorship would have destroyed some of the upside too. The same willingness to post unfinished ideas connected me to founders, engineers, researchers and strange internet people I genuinely value. Public thinking created serendipity.

The problem was that attention has multiple semantics and the platform displays them through almost the same primitive. A like can mean agreement, amusement, attraction, social maintenance, mockery, acknowledgment, or literally nothing beyond thumb movement. A follow can mean "I think this person is brilliant" or "this account might produce entertaining disasters." A reply thread can feel like intimacy when it is actually just repeated co-presence in a public game. I had to learn embarrassingly late that being visible, interesting, respected, desired, liked, and loved are not adjacent points on one scalar. They are different variables.

My crush on Rona Wang belongs here partly because she represented this weird new social topology to me: someone could be a shitposting superstar, intellectually interesting, attractive, embedded in a social graph I wanted access to, and all of those impressions could collapse into a crush that was about a real person plus a public persona plus what the persona represented. [link/embed only public posts; redact private material as needed] I learned some status dynamics from that. I learned that proximity to somebody's output is not proximity to their life. I learned that the internet can make a person feel unusually available while withholding almost all of the information required for an actual relationship.

At the same time, shitposting produced real professional leverage. I could post a technical artifact and somebody important enough to alter my trajectory might simply see it. BSBR was one of those moments. [expand exact implementation/post] I implemented the thing, posted it, and got attention from a San Francisco startup CTO. That mattered far beyond the interaction itself because it supplied evidence that the weird technical structures in my head had exchange value outside school. I did not need a recruiter to certify me first. Build → publish → somebody interesting notices. Again, causality I could see.

This probably reinforced both good and bad habits. Good: make artifacts, expose them, let the world respond. Bad: overestimate the representativeness of highly online people, confuse engagement with durable opportunity, let public reaction modulate self-worth too much, and assume raw intelligence/novelty can substitute for social calibration. The internet rewards legibility and extremity differently from workplaces, friendships, and intimate relationships. I was learning all four simultaneously and transferring lessons between them that did not always commute.

I also said things without considering how permanent they could become. There is something funny about writing a hypermedia memoir now where old posts become primary sources. Younger me created the archive accidentally. He also created adversarial evidence against any later attempt to clean himself up. Good. I want that. If I write "I was always careful and nuanced," somebody should be able to click the embedded tweet directly below it and laugh.

[embed: selected tweets] [link: BSBR post / repo] [embed: interaction with SF CTO if public] [annotation: what I meant then vs what I think now]

The internet's biggest effect, though, was not career. It was contact. Non-Witness people stopped being an abstract category described by Witnesses and became actual people whose internal models I could inspect. And irritatingly, a lot of their models made sense.