I’ve been on Twitter since 2008. That sucks. That’s a bad sentence to type and I’m certain it’s not particularly enjoyable to read either. But it’s true. I was seventeen years old when I signed up which means that I have been on Twitter for my entire adult life. Again, not ideal!
In that time, I’ve seen Twitter “die” many times. Whether it was due to the increase in character count or the site’s longtime inability to ban Donald Trump, there was always a cohort of Twitter users fully prepared to pronounce the platform dead and move to whatever the scrappy upstart du jour happened to be. Ello, Google+, BeReal, all were considered the solution to all our problems at one time or another and still Twitter sits on a throne woven from their bones.
Life experience isn’t some divine knowledge imparted from on high, it’s really just a matter of having seen something play out enough times that you’re able to predict the outcome with relative accuracy. This way, when an opportunity to chase your own tail presents itself, you can run the odds in your head before you look like a dingus in front of your friends. This is all to say that fourteen years on Twitter had more or less made me immune to “Twitter is dying!!” discourse. I fell for it one of the first times it happened, returned to Twitter with my tail between my legs and didn’t repeat my mistake. At least until this past week.
Like most of its users, I’d been reading the news about Twitter and had gotten a little anxious. The platform that has helped me land nearly every job I’ve ever worked had been bought and promptly run directly into the ground by, a man who seems to be dead-set on living out some sort of modern parable about greed and loneliness.
I’ve already spilled a lot of ink talking about what a huge loser Musk is but hey, it’s fun so let’s spill more. He’s a man so bumbling, so visibly unhappy, that he simultaneously vindicates all who see him from their aspirations of ultra-wealth and of any existing notions of meritocracy. If someone were to find him trapped in a ravine, an investigation would need to be launched to figure out whether he hurled himself there to impress internet strangers or was simply driven off a cliff by one his own self-driving cars. His only saving grace is that his complete lack of imagination will all but assure his omittance from big-picture historical accounts of our time.
The richest man in the world spent 44 billion dollars on a website and in under a month he’s all but destroyed it. Mass layoffs led to media leaks purporting that the site was severely understaffed and could go down at any time. Users left in droves, their sites set on Twitter replacements new and old. So despite all my instincts telling me that Twitter would weather the storm, I felt compelled to eulogize it.
In true Twitter fashion, someone with a bee allergy informed me that using this simile was ableist. It felt like a perfect sendoff for a deeply flawed but important thing.
But then the next day, the site was still there. It was there the day after as well. And it’s still there now. “See??” people said, “You all were overreacting!” and in a lot of ways, we were. It seems that Twitter is likely to survive, in some form or another, until someone inevitably buys it from Elon for pennies on the dollar. However, something has changed. It’s not just that thousands of people have left, it’s that the magic is gone. At least for now, Twitter has become a shambling husk of its former self. Once a place to discuss the discourse of the day, no matter how asinine, Twitter now seems to be primarily a place where you go to talk about Twitter. And if you get tired of that, you can read posts from one of the many openly genocidal right wing pundits who’ve been reinstated. Turns out, Twitter can survive anything. It’s just that there are worse things in store for Twitter than death.
When you look at the meandering purgatory the site has become, it feels like in some way, the eulogies were an act of hope. We all hoped that maybe we could experience the end of something big together, in one climactic moment where it all falls apart, sending the whole user base to the Fail Whale in a final procession. But if there’s anything that the last few years have taught us, it’s that change is most likely to present itself in its most boring possible iteration. We’re not living in the days of great, climactic endings. This is the era of slow decline, of things that work just slightly worse than they did yesterday.
The thing to mourn isn’t the end of Twitter, it’s the end that could’ve been. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I always thought that if Twitter went away, it would be because we didn’t need it anymore. It would be because things had improved, or at least changed, enough where we as a society had moved onto something bigger, better, and more interesting. I’d hoped the future would be brighter. But now I know, for next time.
New Subscribers: Welcome to Brain Worms! This is my periodic newsletter about internet culture. I’m no journalist, this is just a place for me to string some pretty words together about what it’s like to be alive online. The newsletter just recently doubled in size, so I’m likely to increase the scope of that writing for the sake of more frequent output and having a less depressing beat to cover.
Next week will be a look at what comes next, a breakdown of all the would-be Twitter successors and their insanely dumb names.
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