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Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) explores the moments when a universalised practice (for example, global capitalism) gets a grip on a local context (for example, in an Indonesian rain forest). When the slippery universal, which in some circles might be lauded as ‘frictionless’(as in ‘frictionless capitalism’), meets local contexts, frictions occur. Friction traces the move from the desire for frictionless ideals to its awkward and messy contact with situated realities. Friction is resistance, but it is also productive and necessary for any energetic system.

Taking up this idea, this paper traces the friction between Twitter and Twitter alternatives. In this sense, Twitter is situated as ‘universalised’(Koopman, 2013: 19), which is to say that it is now an idealised form of online communication. Twitter has established a format of online communication—microblogging—that is seen to simultaneously support free expression yet also is amenable to surveillance capitalism. As such, it has a significant impact on media politics; it is a site by which people socialise, promote themselves, make jokes, build brand identities, make tech investments (for example, purchase Twitter stock), or organise activists. Whereas its early history was marked by commentary on the oddities of 140-character communication and the banality of posting mundane moments of one’s day, Twitter is now second nature for billions of people worldwide as a part of daily life. The use of the octothorpe (#) in hashtags is now part of language, as when someone leaving a party says ‘hashtag I’m out’, evoking ‘# imout.’Although Twitter has not been universalised to the extent …