The Arrogant Impotence of the Generic Twitter Avatar Brigade

This morning I woke up and logged onto Twitter and saw a Nike post featuring controversial soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe and wife Sue Bird. 

As you might imagine, the tweet brought out the crazies in droves. All manner of indignant “patriots” angrily insisted that due to Nike’s support of treasonous America-haters they would never again buy one of their products. 

It’s funny how the people who complain the loudest about the cruelty and randomness of Cancel Culture are also looking to cancel people and institutions whose political beliefs they disagree with. 

What struck me about this particular post was that a number of the folks vowing never to buy basketball shoes from Nike had the default Twitter avatar, which used to be a cute little egg and now is a weird grey blob vaguely resembling a human being. 

This default avatar is supposed to be replaced by something more personal and specific very early in a Twitterer’s online existence, whether in the form of an obscenely flattering, possibly decades-old photograph, a cute animal, or, in the case of Trump supporters, American flags, bald eagles and various sports teams, professional and collegiate. 

Yet there’s a stubborn subsection of Twitter users who hold onto their default avatar years into their online lives. Apparently sometimes this is a deliberate tactic by people who want the freedom from accountability and consequences that comes with complete anonymity, with being just a ghostly avatar, a dumb screen name and a lot of opinions and anger. 

Yet there are also folks who never bothered replacing the default Twitter avatar with something less generic for less strategic and calculating reasons. 

Even when you agree with them, it’s damn near impossible to take the opinions of someone with a default Twitter avatar seriously. After all, if they can’t figure out something as basic as pressing a button to add a non-generic image to their Twitter account then why should we assume that they’ve figured out the science of COVID 19 or the merits of Critical Race Theory or any of the other subjects people are continually popping off about on the internet about. 

The deceptive promise of social media was that it would become a democratizing force in our culture, that it would even the playing fields by allowing a snot-nosed college kid to reply directly to the President of the United States. 

Instead social media has proven as rigidly hierarchal as every other aspect of American society. At the very tippy top are verified blue check big timers with millions of followers. 

How do you get to be at the tippy top of the Twitter hierarchy? By being at the tippy top of the hierarchy outside of social media, of course.

It’s much easier to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. All you need is a generic avatar and a handful of followers. 

If you have three followers you have next to nothing in the way of social currency, even in a realm as fundamentally unimportant and irrelevant as social media. 

Yet that somehow does not keep people like the folks indignant about Nike associating with athletes with political views they do not share from huffily threatening to use ALL of their non-existent power to punish the massive, global corporation. 

In that respect the generic avatar brigade represent something that has seemingly always been a part of American culture: people who very aggressively do not know what they’re doing yet feel the need to be heard all the same, preferably at the most deafening volume imaginable. 

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