ejected myself from a twitter addiction just a few months ago and this resonated. i think people read the “zombie” comparison as metaphor; IME, it’s pretty lit

ejected myself from a twitter addiction just a few months ago and this resonated. i think people read the “zombie” comparison as metaphor; IME, it’s pretty literally accurate. the realization that snapped me out of it cold turkey was that my twitter “self” —- cultivated outside of my body, for an environment of pure text —- had accumulated far more status, meaning, friendship, etc than my physical self possibly could; and why wouldn’t it? the internet has no friction in comparison. so that weird external GPT-3-esque “self” quite literally reached primacy within me, with a huge margin over the original one unlucky enough to be constrained by physical reality & trained via physical human interaction: and as a result i was genuinely zombie-like for a while. perpetually a disoriented visitor to physical reality, to the people actually around me — only at home in text. and it was probably clear to anyone who knew me in person well. maybe annoyingly mystical for HN’s taste, but when this clicked for me, it felt like discovering i’d been possessed by a demon.