The lost thread

Tomb Chapel of Raemkai, False Door on West Wall, ca. 2446–2389 B.C.

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  An indus­tri­al­ist might soon pur­chase Twit­ter, Inc. His sub­stan­tial suc­cess launch­ing reusable space­ships does noth­ing to pre­pare him for the chal­lenge of build­ing social spaces. The lat­ter calls on every lib­eral art at once, while the for­mer is just rocket science.

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  Arguing about the future of Twit­ter is a loser’s game; a dead end. The plat­form’s only con­clu­sion can be abandonment: an over­due MySpace-ification.

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  Features come and go, lit­tle embroi­deries and fascinations, but the time­line remains, Twit­ter’s deep­est warp. It has been there from the start, its logic invisible, inescapable, non-negotiable. (Fleets were different, weren’t they? Yes — and their quick demise had the feel­ing of an immune response.)

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  "Warp" as in struc­tural thread; "warp" as in distortion.

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  There are so many ways peo­ple might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and con­vivi­al­ity might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liq­uid potential! What a colos­sal bum­mer that Twit­ter eked out a local maximum; that its net­work effect still (!) con­sumes the fuel for other pos­si­bil­i­ties, other explorations.

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  I’m not here to say you should quit Twitter, or that no enjoy­ment remains in cavort­ing through the net­work. I’m only here to say, Twit­ter has no future, so please, enjoy it only and exactly for what it is — every decline is surfable — and do not dis­re­gard the alter­na­tives to its time­line, when and if they appear.

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  Yeah, I’m work­ing on one!

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  The amount that Twit­ter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social plat­form, it is indif­fer­ent to huge swaths of human expe­ri­ence and endeavor. I invite you to imag­ine this omit­ted con­tent as a vast, bustling city. Scratch­ing at your time­line, you are hud­dled in a sin­gle small tav­ern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

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  As a writer, looking for evi­dence of read­er­ship and engage­ment on Twit­ter makes you into the drunk look­ing for your lost keys under the street light.

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  Many peo­ple don’t want to quit because they worry: with­out my Twitter account, who will lis­ten to me? In what way will I matter to the world beyond my apartment, my office, my family? I believe these hes­i­ta­tions reveal some­thing totally unre­lated to Twit­ter. I don’t have words for it, exactly, but if you find yourself fret­ting in this way, I will gen­tly sug­gest that it’s worth quest­ing a bit inside your­self to dis­cover what you’re really worried about.

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  The speed with which Twit­ter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the plat­form melts like mist when that invi­ta­tion is rescinded.

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  I’ll repeat myself. Twit­ter’s only con­clu­sion can be abandonment: an over­due MySpace-ification. I am totally con­fi­dent about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified. The only question, then, is how many more pos­si­bil­i­ties will go unexplored? How much more time will be wasted?

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  Wishful descrip­tions of Twit­ter as "the de facto pub­lic town square" or "the clos­est thing we have to a global consciousness" sound, to me, like Peter Pan beg­ging the audi­ence to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell.

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  You don’t have to clap.

April 2022, Oakland