The writing is pretty much on the wall. Twitter’s going down the drain quickly. On Thursday, a bunch of actually-important executives (three words I never thought I’d string together) quit the site, and the Chief Shit, Elon Musk, told all the remaining employees in a meeting that bankruptcy was likely. I’ve heard many theories and possible reasons why Musk is so deadset on tearing Twitter down in short order; any number of them could be both true and accurate. They all mean one thing, though: Twitter as most of its users have known it for 16 years is basically done.
The energy on the site right now has been described as having “final hours of a dying MMO energy,” and I can’t think of a more accurate way to describe it. People are waxing nostalgic over their favorite posts and posters, recalling iconic moments in site history, and saying goodbye while they can to their friends and mutuals. For my small part, I’ve been sitting here tearing up thinking about nonsense that happened on the site well over a decade ago. It’s fucking embarrassing lmao.
Twitter was a hellsite. If you used the site for longer than six months you knew this truth to be self-evident. Every day for probably ten years has given twitter users new cause to jump ship and find somewhere else to shitpost. And yet, most of us have remained up until now. Out of this banal fuckery grew a kind of ironic, exhausted solidarity. The culture of the site quickly grew to employ gallows humor most of the time. It never got less draining, but even when shit got real bad, at least the dunks never stopped being funny (mostly).
Twitter also had incredible radical potential. Some of my formative moments – moments that solidified that a bunch of people all working towards a common goal could actually change the direction society was headed in, in a positive way – happened in part on Twitter. Twitter was more than just a place to shitpost; it was a conduit through which a largely alienated high school kid in Oklahoma could reach out and interact with kids protesting police brutality, college students walking out on their universities for raising tuition, activists protesting the G20 summits in two North American cities – to say nothing of massive mobilizations in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere during the so-called Arab Spring. Twitter was how I kept up with the rapid developments at Occupy Wall Street encampments around the country as a young college journalist.
I never used Twitter responsibly. I thought I’d be posting bullshit on there for a few more years at least. I’ll miss it, even if I never miss what that shithead Elon does with the place.
And so we sail away from an island isolated in the internet’s vast ocean, only to discover that the island was in fact part of a grand, vast and strange archipelago of websites, connected to each other by gossamer fibers as strong as steel and as forgiving as a kiss. May we all safely find our new homes, and may all billionaires burn alive in the wreckages of the digital cultures they couldn’t afford to control.
Response
Rest in piss