chronically online

growing to 14k followers in five months

It’s been a while since I wrote on Substack. In the last few months, my X following has increased wildly—in May, I think I had less than a thousand followers, and now as the last remnants of September fade away, my account has grown to 14.3K.

This has seeped into my offline life in odd ways. During the first few weeks of the semester, I was sitting in the Banana Lounge (a common space brimming with free bananas) and working on my laptop when someone came up to me. “Are you Twitter Person?” she inquired. Not a Twitter person, but just Twitter Person, as if that’s a widely-accepted job position.

It wasn’t a title I was ready to accept. “I’m Rona, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said.

She seemed satisfied with that response and left. It wasn’t clear to me why she had approached me, or what she got out of that interaction.

There have been similar moments—recently, I walked into a gathering at Harvard hosted by a venture capitalist, and at least four people recognized me from Twitter. I’m not sure how to feel about all this. It’s immensely useful to have an online space that says, hey, this is who I am, and I’ve gotten to meet some awesome people. When I went viral over the summer and spoke with major news outlets like WSJ and NPR, I thought the attention was net-positive—it drove public dialogue about racial bias in AI—but it also meant fielding thousands of comments about how I was using AI wrong or trying to stir up controversy or something.

I suppose the way I think of this is similar to how I think about writing. Once a story is out in the world, it is no longer my own, and it instead exists in conversation with the reader. I don’t see my online presence as me, but as some entity that I have created that is available for public consumption. That sounds so drearily capitalistic, but I don’t necessarily mean consumption in a monetary sense. More like, here is this art piece you can observe, and the art piece is titled 10,000 @ronawang posts.

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Why? Why do I spend hours each week on the website formerly known as Twitter? Is it simply the dopamine machine dispensing likes that keeps me hooked? I certainly am susceptible to the sneaky tricks of social media companies, but it isn’t only that. Even if I personally never posted, I would probably scroll through Twitter often. I suppose it’s one of the only places where I can peer into the brains of total strangers. A lot of discourse is hot garbage, but the insights can be so illuminating, too.

At MIT, I’ve found that opinions are somewhat homogeneous—if I had to guess why, I’d say that ambitious, academic overachievers fresh out of high school have overlapping life experiences and arrive at similar conclusions about the world. But on X, people argue and argue and argue. Ad hominem attacks fly from all directions, yes. Political trolls and NFT grifters spew nonsense. But there are plenty of witty observations, philosophical takes, personal updates. I’ve always found people fascinating, and there are few places where I can find out what they’re truly thinking.

I don’t know if I want to be chronically online forever. I’ve considered quitting Twitter—it takes up time and energy, and I want to focus on grad school, enjoying my twenties. But my revealed preferences show that I have much more fun on Twitter than I do at a club or a bar. Sometimes, I feel uneasy about this—is there something wrong with me? Why don’t I like drinking or partying?—but I’ve learned to accept myself. If this is what I enjoy doing for fun, then so be it.