Katie Archibald column: Turbo versus social media #thestruggleisreal

I've heard there's software that will go through all your tweets and tell you if you should delete some of them. It searches for words and phrases that might indicate naughtiness (naughtiness like, you know, being a bigot) and collects all these bad tweets up so you can go through hitting delete and hiding what a horrible person you were five years ago.

I suppose the motivation to selectively delete your past self from the internet, rather than going full tilt and deleting everything as soon as it becomes, say, two years out of date and the prejudices you hold have moved on, is so as to not seem suspicious. If a person can find no online content for you at all, do they assume something worse than if they were to find out you once used #vivelavulva? Almost definitely. If I can't find someone's Twitter account I assume they're in prison for murder.

Not that I'm as hooked on Twitter as I once was (I previously had no need for the "what you've missed" feature because I never missed anything). My bad habit at the moment is going on WhatsApp during the rest periods of turbo sessions. The problem is you can't turn it off. I used to uninstall Instagram from my phone as an easy way to stop myself aimlessly scrolling through nonsense, but you can't do that with people's main way of contacting you.

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And I'm super-weak. As soon as a rest period hits in my turbo session, even though I know it'll get me distracted and agitated, into my back pocket I go rummaging for my phone.

The reason it's in my back pocket in the first place is because I use it for music, and that's how I'm going to fix this. I've bought a music player I can download my Spotify playlists onto, so I can use that on the turbo and hide my phone away in another room. No will power required, hurrah! Rest periods will still be furiously sweaty trying to type out gossip in WhatsApp before my timer runs down.