An Open Letter to Jack Dorsey of Twitter

And The Story of an (Almost?) Aborted Artwork

At first let me clarify that I am not someone especially qualified to speak on this topic — in fact, I’m no one at all. I’m a writer whose first published book has had little success, and since then I’ve made a few artworks that examine the net — and they have been just as ignored. Further, I have almost no experience with twitter at all. I opened an account back in 2012 when I was still in college, but only for novelty. I used it for hardly a week before deactivating it — and like that it had stayed till about a week ago. So I have really only been using Twitter for a week, and that too in a very specific way, but we’ll get to that later. Right now, before I begin, what I’m trying to make clear is that I am not an expert on this matter, not a guru — not even remotely. I just feel strongly about some of the things that have happened the past few days and this is my two cents.

Let me first give a little background of why I even joined twitter. As I said, I’ve been making these works (sounds pretentious but I really don’t know what to call them) in which I try to examine different aspects of our lives on the net, and present them for free viewing online. I call this Internet Art. Till now I’ve made a short film(kinda), and a playlist of videos. Recently I wrote an article on Medium itself, which was (predictably) called The Doctrine of Internet Art. In it I sought out to explain what I was doing and to urge all of us to look more closely at our consumption of material online. This article was rather well-received (thank you so much!), and it spurred me on to make my next work — which I decided I would make on twitter.

Let me add that in all probability you haven’t heard of me and the stuff I’ve been making, and as far as I know I haven’t seen anyone else who has been doing stuff like this— so I totally understand if your first question when you see it is “Why is this art?” Bear with me, please, and if you decide it is not, I promise to not argue at all.

The piece in question, my ‘twitter piece’, if you will, is called #iNeedHelp. In it I see aspects of Marina Abramovic’s performance art (only mine was to be an online performance — the way she uses her body, I was going to use my twitter profile). I also see a little of Ai Weiwei in its execution, and the message itself, of course, came from my experiences and thoughts. The text I used came from my life and discipline as a writer.

The idea was exceedingly simple. Let me ask you a question before I explain though.

What do you think is the hardest sentence in all of language? The most difficult thing of all to say?

I need help.

Three words, but not the ones you expect.

To ask for help — and not in a roundabout way, not by disguising it in any form — to stand raw, naked and say, “I need help” — that is the hardest thing of all.

It is a sentence we don’t say to anyone — not to strangers, not to friends, family — not even to our lover. In fact, it’s something we hardly ever admit to our own selves.

But we all need help — and this was the entire idea.

I figured I would ask people for help on twitter. No covert sales pitches, no I-think-you’ll-find-this-interesting nonsense, no disguises at all. I would tweet strangers, and say to them, “I need help.”

I planned to tweet as many people as I could — thousands (that’s as far as I’d thought). Now obviously, I expected very few people to respond. I expected silence. I expected four or five people to respond out of a thousand. But I thought that the results of this little experiment would be interesting — from many perspectives.

We all like to think we are nice people. If I was to suddenly ask you, if someone in need asked you for help, what would you do? — We all like to think we would help. But if I do this online, doesn’t it seem (and here we start getting to the point) spammy?

On the other hand, everyone who tweets at a famous person is looking for something, and only saying it in a roundabout way — they fake-gush over their newest project, everyone’s their greatest-fan-ever, everyone finds them inspiring. No one, I’m prepared to wager, has ever so blatantly asked them for help — just come out and said, “Hey, I need help.” The most difficult words to say are also the most disarming — that is the power of vulnerability. I wanted to see what would happen. So I fired up my old twitter account, wrote down the message I would send to people, and started tweeting away.

As I’ve said, I was prepared for silence. I expected pretty much no one to respond. I expected to get to a thousand tweets and not have one person respond.

What I didn’t expect was to get blocked by twitter. Around 60 tweets in, I got my account blocked. The reason I was given was that my my behaviour looked automated, and so they suspected I might be a spambot (always nice to hear). Now let me say straightaway that I understood how it did look that way. I was, after all, sending the same message to people one after the other. They asked me to verify with my phone, which I did, and in a while I was back in business.

I could’ve used talking to a moderator, or anyone, especially after the second time.

The next day the same thing happened again, only this time I only got to 30 tweets before they blocked me, for the same reason. Now mind you — I didn’t have any person I could contact to actually clarify the situation. They simply provide you with a link to the (now famous) twitter rules, and when you read further, there is a list of vague pointers as to what constitutes spam and what doesn’t. Pretty much anything could be regarded to be spam — or not. Like a typical legal document, it has enough subpoints that if pressed onto a case, one of the points is bound to apply. Further, it’s not like reddit’s moderation system where you can actually get in touch with anyone to clarify things — It’s just a brick wall, effectively. You stop doing whatever it is you’re doing — that’s the only option.

Now I can go on about how this opened up an entire layer of meaning for my #iNeedHelp piece, how it got me thinking about what is spam and what is not. I can write about how I actually saw this as just another form of institutionalised control — and what art doesn’t clash with that? Not only was I not shaken — I was actually glad — but then something else happened.

Her name was Rose Mcgowan. The first day of my tweets was October 10. And out of the void came Rose Mcgowan, doing what she did (the bravest of actions, I believe — and I cannot say this strongly enough), and the world, and twitter, and I stood still.

I read it in the news (two days later, I think), then looked it up on twitter. I saw the stories pour out — in what I can only call a benumbed horror. You hear of these things in conspiracy theories. You see isolated incidents, and try to do what you can. You know men are capable of despicable things — but this was like my face was suddenly thrust into the rotting carcass of some angel that my own kind had killed. To women everywhere — my mother, the woman that I love — I can only say this — I am so very sorry. You have no idea the shared agony we men feel at such things. It is heartbreaking, and there are no words to describe it. I shake in my bones. I feel shame. I feel afraid of my own self and kind —I look to my own hands, half-afraid of seeing claws, or worse, blood — these are approximate images.

I also read how her account had been blocked. This changed everything for me.

It literally stunned me. Now if I was to be honest here, and I cannot help but be — I don’t think anyone with half a mind thinks her account was blocked because of a phone number she shared. I told you — I’ve read the twitter rules — they are too vague — which opens the door for them to take arbitrary action in any case they choose. Which (let us not say why) they decided to do in this case.

Now what I had been doing was close to my heart. I know how cliché this sounds, but if you’ve ever created anything, art or otherwise— you will know it to be true when I say that any work you’re making feels like a part of your soul you’re giving to the world. That’s how it felt when I published my first book, and that is how even this felt, even though I was only beginning. But in comparison to what Rose, and so many women since then shared — my thing was, well, cute.

I had thought my getting blocked could incite an interesting conversation about what it reflects about a platform the basis of which is free speech, and sharing any message that you have for the world. But while I was only beginning, I saw a horrific instance of what censuring can mean in a much — infinitely more important and painful situation. My thing was art. Rose’s story is real life. It is absolutely inexcusable that an attempt was made to stifle her voice. There is no way we can call ourselves civilised if this sort of thing is allowed to happen.

And I’m sorry (and I now speak to Mr. Jack Dorsey), but “we need to be more transparent” is laughably little. And this isn’t a funny matter. You don’t need to be ‘more’ transparent. You don’t need to ‘try’. You need to change the way twitter sees people. Let me also say at the same time that every single response to the twitter silencing matter has been to blindly bash twitter (which I understand), but I find it sad that no more has been said.

This cycle of garbled rhetoric needs to stop. We as users need to say more than “fix this”. And CEOs need to do more than say “we need/should/will try to fix this”.

I don’t have any ill will towards you, Jack, nor towards your company. In fact I want to point this out to you — the #MeToo movement right after this fiasco happened on twitter itself. People turned to twitter again, despite the mistakes that were made — to express so much that was so important. You can see this as your site having ‘stickiness’ (that’s a startup-word, for people who don’t get the reference) — or you can see that as actual cultural value —that twitter has. These aren’t just tweets and retweets and hashtags — these are shifts of culture. And they happen on your site. It is moot of me to say that twitter is really important. And so, what twitter does now is very, very important. You can’t allow petty power-plays to stifle truth. Everyone else in the world gets to shirk responsibility by saying that they would if they could — if they had the power — but you do have the power.

Now I began this by saying I am no expert. So my suggestions might be naive, or even silly. But this conversation needs to be had — and it must not be closed within your own organisation. I say this again — look at how much people care, how much of a movement has sprung — on your very platform. This time the decision your company makes need to reflect the thoughts of these people as well, and not just of those inside your building.

One very simple change that I think can be made, for example, is the definition of spam needs to be made clear. Currently (and I know this by personal experience which I have recounted above), all your rules say is that because the nature of spam keeps changing, so do the rules — and I completely understand that. This is a dangerous time. Security is a major issue, and I’m sure it’s a huge concern for your team. However, the ‘rules regarding spam that keep changing’ — these must exist somewhere in a document, right? If there are any rules at all, they must be written somewhere in their current form, no matter how changeable and in flux. I ask that you share these rules as they are. If they change, then share the changed ones.

Surely that document can be made public. It would involve no work at all. It is simply the matter of sharing a document that already exists, and keeping it shared for all time. As it changes, people will see the changed rules as well.

This will in one simple, tiny action, radically lessen the ambiguity regarding your choices and lessen all these allegations that are I’m sure unfairly being made that your behaviour is arbitrary, erratic and at worst, partisan. This would make all those surely false allegations go away without involving any sort of new personnel required, any resource allocation — nothing. It is the simplest thing — and it would take no time. You can see how if there aren’t many rules shared, then it can seem to an agitated people as if there aren’t any rules codified in the first place — which is obviously not how twitter must be functioning.

Lastly to you I can only say that even in my example, if I had been able to contact anyone (or be contacted) regarding just what aspect of what I was doing was spam, I would have gladly changed that — I wasn’t intending to spam, you see, nor was Ms. Rose. We were both trying to say things we deemed important — is that not what twitter is for? Surely twitter does not want to block that, and if this is happening to others as well, then it is a mistake — one you intend to fix? (Again, my message had nowhere near the urgency of hers — I only list them to together to say that there are more cases than one — not to in any way correlate them — they can’t be. They were messages nonetheless.)

I believe many, if not most, of the cases being silenced by blocking might be people who are unwittingly, because of not knowing the rules (because they are vague) ending up creating spam. This problem would also be solved with the same move. What the correct way to tweet is — if that would be clearer, then all unwittingly made spam (which I fathom is a lot of it) would stop.

Let me also add that the supposed Russian accounts (a case of alleged malevolent spamming — when these people actually intended to misinform and spam) — these have still infiltrated your systems, by which I only mean to say that it’s not as if making the rules clearer would help actually malevolent people — those are cutting through anyway. Conversely, you can’t say that this ambiguity is keeping them away because apparently it isn’t. So again it seems a case of random traffic searches annoying innocent citizens while the smugglers always get away — and there can be no conclusion but that this is a systemic flaw.

Lastly, I wish you and everyone at Twitter success at making the changes that need to be made so that the importance your platform holds in modern society continues. Much luck and wishes to all of you.

Returning for a moment to the story of #iNeedHelp, (if you are still interested) — you may ask why I waited to write this letter. The storm has, as they say, pretty much blown past. And the answer is I got stuck. I got stuck and I got afraid.

When all of this happened, as I said, I was simply stunned. I watched the entire #MeToo thing unfold, I saw the backlash towards twitter. Any work of art related to twitter suddenly seemed facetious — enough questions in a much louder voice than mine were already being raised. I would look like a fool trying to cash in on the wave, which had never been my intention. So I didn’t tweet anyone as such, barring one or two sent in confusion.

I thought of writing this letter I’m writing right now — but again the same doubt crept up on me. This is a moment about so much, and no matter how you put it, there will be those that see your part as only that of someone trying to climb up using this as a ladder-rung. Do you really want that to be how they first see you?

In the end I am still here, writing this. I can’t let it go. I believe in the net. I believe it is the greatest invention of our age — and by far the most important in terms of how it is changing us — humanity. That is what Internet Art is about. I have already worked much on this. All I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I care about this stuff too much. I can’t not write it, and that, I have learnt, is the best reason to write anything.

As far as #iNeedHelp is concerned — I am still undecided. This letter is definitely much more important than it. And if this letter does what I hope it will, then there will be no need for #iNeedHelp. If this letter gets shared enough that twitter actually takes steps that need to be taken, then my work is done. If this letter does not spread, then I guess I will continue tweeting to different people, strangers — and ask them for help — for others. In case you want to know what I was asking them to help me with, it was to read and share The Doctrine of Internet Art, which in itself was a message about how we need to make the internet more than a place of business and entertainment and scandal and advertising and tracking to improve advertising — how we need to make it art (sounds crazy, I know). I was asking them to help me to help others, and if the others aren’t helped by this letter, then I will continue to ask.