In a lot of ways, I relate to Elon Musk. But in plenty of other ways, he is, of course, totally unrelatable. He is a billionaire; I have a bad credit score. He is an uggo; I am hot. He is really bad at posting on Twitter; I am good at posting on Twitter (a useless skill). But, like Elon, I, too, approach all situations thinking, “I can improve this! I can make things better! You know who can make this better? Me! Because I am very smart and important”, and subsequently, without exception make things exponentially, catastrophically worse. I was planning on tweeting that joke, but there’s no point really, because Elon has wrecked Twitter and now it’s going to die.
Of course, there have been false alarms in the past. But this time, it seems like death is truly coming, at least, if first-hand accounts from inside Twitter HQ are to be believed. Those reports say that the company currently has less than 1,000 employees after mass layoffs and walkouts accumulated as a result of Elon’s deranged pledge to make the place less woke and force staff to end remote working. Following his “let’s go hardcore” Kendall Roy-esque pledge, around 75% of the company’s remaining 3,700ish employees simply chose not to stay. In a video meeting yesterday, The New York Times reports, several employees simply hung up in the middle of their new CEO essentially begging them to stay.
Like all drawn-out demises, we are already mourning the loss before it comes to pass. We are waiting for death to come, and it is sad and weird. Twitter is our elderly family dog, and we are taking it to the beach today, feeding it steak, letting it sit in the front of the car, knowing, later on, we will say goodbye. And like, obviously we will be sad, because it’s our dog and we love that dog, we’ve had some good times with that dog, but, also, it will be nice not to have to deal with having to look at the dog all sad and old and dying in front of us, reminding us of our own mortality. Like all impending deaths, the sadness and panic comes not from grief itself, but from the realisation that we too will one day die, and that we have spent a worrying amount of time in our lives typing things like “you’re telling me a shrimp fried this rice” for one like and three RTs.
And as with all periods of turmoil, people have begun to act out. They are posting their nudes to the TL. They are posting their Instagram handles to the TL (arguably more revealing, definitely more debasing). They are openly admitting to the strangers on the TL that they had good times together here, that they will miss Twitter, despite regularly logging on to say things like “another day on the hellsite”. They are openly admitting that they met people they like through Twitter, that they had sex with people through Twitter. These admissions are apparently not being made under duress. They are being revealed freely! But perhaps people deserve some grace. Loss makes us act out of character. This is why people laugh and fight at funerals and, now it seems, tell the world they fucked someone they met off of the world’s least sexy site.
And perhaps also, they deserve grace for being open with the fact that there are some things about Twitter that we will genuinely mourn if it goes. Imagine a seismic global event with no Twitter memes. Cancellations just won’t hit the same on Instagram, with the barely constrained glee that came from a good and honest Twitter pile-on. Nobody is going to live-react to a Love Island Casa Amor betrayal on TikTok. WhatsApps won’t be leaked on Facebook.
The death of Twitter is hitting us so hard because it’s the first of its kind: a platform ubiquitous enough to be a part of our day-to-day lives that we can watch being destroyed in real-time. When you think about the others we’ve buried along the march of progress — MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Vine — they weren’t spectacular explosions like we’re seeing with Twitter. We simply… stopped using them. We got bored, so we moved on. And although its death is the first of its kind, Twitter itself is the last of its kind too. It is, as Sarah Manavis points out in the New Statesman, one of the last platforms we have that is predominantly text-based. It doesn’t require us to perform to camera in the same way that social media, led by TikTok and Instagram Reels, increasingly expects. It feels like we’re losing not just a social networking app, where jokes aside, we did actually speak to each other (even if it was in a deeply negative way) but approaching the end of an era.
But as with all endings, we should make time for a period of reflection here too. It’s easy to look back with rose-coloured glasses and remember the good times and only the good times: the funny tweets, the dopamine reward that comes from a viral moment. But in hindsight, we’ll see there’s plenty to not miss about Twitter, if and when it does finally breathe its last. It lead the way for making discourse more reactionary and more toxic than ever before. It cemented the echo chambers we all live in, where we never have to see another opinion we disagree with, and we can decide without impunity to hate other people for no real reason. Twitter introduced the ‘main character for the day’ mode of internet, where people were introduced to a figure of derision for sometimes laughably innocuous reasons and encouraged to pour bile on them for 24 hours before immediately forgetting they existed. Remember that woman who had the gall to say she enjoyed having a coffee in the garden with her husband? Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if we had a bit of space to exist offline to — borrowing an extremely online expression — touch some grass.
Of course, that won’t happen. The death of Twitter won’t mean the death of social media itself. Nor will it mean the death of the endless discourse. We’ll find something else to scream into the void with. We always do. But it might not be as fun. Eulogies are usually finished with poignant goodbyes and heartfelt tributes to the deceased. So here is ours: Rest easy Twitter. It lived, it served cunt, it died.
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