We all know my his­tory with Twit­ter — I hate it. Unre­lent­ingly. But I leave it alone, it leaves me alone and we’re quite happy ignor­ing each other. Occa­sion­ally I use it to to shout at this man as he is an old acquaint­ance I don’t get much of a chance to talk to any­more. On the whole I am aware of the dangers of Twit­ter and am happy to leave them the hell alone.

Not so for one Mr Trent Reznor, lead singer of Nine Inch Nails who has recently taken his huffy little ball and stomped all the way home. You see Trent Reznor does not under­stand the most import­ant thing about the inter­net in that it is much like the abyss — when you stare at it, it is star­ing right on back.

Now I’m not a Trent Reznor afi­cion­ado. Apart from know­ing that he is pretty short (5 foot 7 and 1/2 accord­ing to Yahoo answers) and that a guy I knew once whored him­self out to a fat chick for tick­ets to one of his shows I am pretty clue­less as to gen­eral Reznor facts. Which is why I have had to do some appro­pri­ate research before tak­ing the time to write this art­icle and what I deem appro­pri­ate is around 5 minutes scan­ning his Wiki­pe­dia art­icle and check­ing out his now fam­ous Twit­ter.

The first is a selec­tion of facts and dubi­ous accol­ades span­ning his long career (25th best metal vocal­ist out of a poll of 100, an album released on the inter­net, pla­cing 46th on a list of 100 people rein­vent­ing Amer­ica, engaged to a real life lady) and the second is an illu­min­at­ing insight into the mind of a man who takes cri­ti­cism rather badly.

Trent Reznor is, if you will, some­thing of a baby man. Regard­less of the fact that his music career has been ongo­ing for longer than my own life on earth he seems to be awfully eas­ily riled. This could be due to a num­ber of factors — like his height or the fact that he was last rel­ev­ant around 1994 no mat­ter how des­per­ately he tries to prove oth­er­wise. I don’t know. I have never met the man and am etern­ally grate­ful for this fact.

What I do know how­ever is that Trent Reznor needs to calm down. It’s just the inter­net. It can’t actu­ally hurt you unless you let it. You can always put people on ignore. You don’t have to rage quit social net­work­ing — after-all a man who claims to want to con­nect with his fans in order to re-invent the way music is con­cep­tu­al­ised and received might find social net­work­ing use­ful in the long run.

You do not have to post long rants on your per­sonal forum detail­ing why the inter­net is ruled by idi­ots and that is why the people on it can’t have nice things, like your dream forum filled with car­di­olo­gists and magical wish ponies. You do not have to link those posts on your Twit­ter for all the HATERS to read.

You do not have to be a massive drama whore whose sign off reads:

With all of that said, I have busi­ness in the real world to attend to includ­ing wrap­ping up the live ver­sion of NIN, DOING some cool new shit and spend­ing as much time as pos­sible with the most amaz­ing woman in the world.

Because on the inter­net there is already a man who does these things. A man who when not eat­ing all the food takes pic­tures of Super­man doing his wife.

What I’m say­ing Trent is that you need to dial it back now before you pull a Kevin Smith.

Trent Reznor kiss­ing his real life girl­friend which he totally has. I wish I was as cool as him.