Grab your beverage or cocktail of choice and pull up a chair. This is one wild ride.
Let’s talk about the Twitter meltdown, because that shit is hilarious. A whole goddamned platform with millions of users, creators, communities, and businesses on the verge of total collapse, and for what? Because some billionaire decided the whole thing would be better with him in charge?
Fucking grand. I’ve seen some online trolls in my time, but this is a whole new level of fuckery.
What makes this whole fiasco even better is how absolutely dramatic everyone’s being about it. And I don’t mean the small businesses, creators, and artists that stand to lose big big—they have every reason to be concerned; I mean everyone else. I’ve seen so many tweets in the past few hours stating some variation on the “if Twitter implodes, follow me on IG, Mastadon, Tik Tok, Snapchat, fuckin’ … SoundCloud, MixCloud, Xbox, PSN, Goodreads, Game Center, Twitch, etc.,” theme.
I get it. I’m not hating on that effort. This isn’t like MySpace that just kind of got supplanted by Facebook, or Facebook when we realized it was all boomers and corpos, or tumblr when Verizon acquired it through their Yahoo acquisition and said “no more porn!” We may be watching something that hasn’t happened before: a complete and total collapse of one of the most prominent, popular, and powerful social media platforms to exist in web2.
Terror-in-Chief Dude Bro paid $44 billion for it. That’s gotta mean something, right?
And maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it’s good that a platform of this size and scope get knocked down a few notches. Or all the notches. Maybe. The simple truth is, I haz no clue. I’m just a simple plebeian who enjoys using Twitter as much as the next enthusiastic Twitter user.
Regardless of whether or not an untimely Twitter collapse is good for society, this whole scenario has been exceptionally entertaining. Who knew one person could burn an entire platform to the ground in less than a month since he took over?
It’s honestly impressive.
And it’s also a massive argument in favor of web3 and decentralization, but that’s a whole other blog post for another day.
Ultimately, it’s the content being produced by passengers on this sinking ship, about the sinking ship, that’s making this absolutely worthwhile to watch. From the Lincoln Project’s inquiry as to whether Musk “tried turning it off and turning it back on,” along with their suggestion that Musk immerse Twitter in rice, to a video going up of Twitter employees roasting the fuck out of Musk and projecting it on the exterior of Twitter HQ, there is no shortage of shenanigans happening on Twitter to celebrate the demise of Twitter in true Twitter fashion. And I think that’s just so damn beautiful.
“The ship’s going down, I’ve got a lot of jokes about the ship going down, and I still have plenty of time to post them and for others to read them before the ship’s done sinking.”
Fucking spectacular.
Some more notable tweets:
Last minute crush discovery, with Titanic reference
This fucking thread of bizarre Twitter highlights
Long Live Twitter! Miraculously
That one song that’s oddly relevant here
A One Man argument for communism
And so many more.
I think it speaks volumes to the resiliency of humans to laugh in the face of a death rattle.
Just kidding. This isn’t about resiliency. This is about absolute and total irreverence. We love Twitter, but we don’t need Twitter. We don’t want to see it burn to the ground, but if it’s gonna happen, we’re here for it with blankets, snacks, and weed. In the end, who gives a fuck? We survived Facebook overtaking MySpace. We migrated to Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok when Facebook fell out of favor. We’ll congregate elsewhere if Twitter ultimately collapses.
It’s not the end of the world, just the end of an era, and one that may plausibly be worth celebrating.
