I found it a good philosophical exercise to imagine the last tweet. It could come centuries later, when one cryptocurrency offers a regretful goodbye to another, or in 2025, when Donald Trump, the new president for life, takes office. press the large Electromagnetic Pulse button on the Resolute table. Or it could happen in a few months, when Elon Musk realizes that synthetic human despair is of no use, regretting his plowing. electric clown car into one rodeo goat social network, and turn everything off with a single “lol”. (How to get libs.) Then what? We’ll all turn to some Twitter alternative like mastodons, hundreds of millions of us, and spoil that too? Sigh.
Lately, it looks like the last tweet could appear on any given day. The entire tech industry – I mean the cluster of companies that sell code-empowered products to billions of people – is in serious decline. Zuckerverse has everything but users, which means Meta must think of ever more creative ways to destroy Instagram and/or society. Microsoft, Amazon, Google—their stock charts look like Niagara Falls when viewed from the side. At least $3 trillion has passed cataracts in a barrel. When your brand grows indefinitely, investors don’t want to see failure. Imagine not just the last tweet, but the day that Facebook exists only as a multi-exabyte ZIP file in the archive, or when Google is an interactive exhibit at the Museum of Internet History.
Of course, the really big stuff—at the scale of social media platforms, religions, and countries—don’t really die. They deflate like air mattresses, soften in the corners and wake you up from time to time to inflate them. The entities that dominated my childhood, AT&T and the Soviet Union, seemed to have given up on specter at some point. There was jubilation: Now a million new innovative companies can thrive! Now democracy will spread everywhere! Both are stripped of parts—and those parts eventually coalesce into new, enormous forms, like mercury particles found together on a plate. A reinvented AT&T ended up buying a lot of things, including Time Warner, giving it control of both the pipeline and the content. The former Soviet Union, well… There’s always someone who fantasizes about bringing the band back together, even if the consequences are dire.
I imagine like many of you, I’ve looked into this changing world and noticed the changes are quite subtle. Recession, authoritarianism, nuclear posture, weird climate—these things appear unwanted on the feed, just like when Apple put U2’s Innocent song on everyone’s iTunes without asking. When future historians write books about this era, I feel fairly certain that they will choose titles like Fracture, The Fraying Knot, hope undo, Leviathan wins, An unwoven website, stuff like that. (If they are Q-storian, they can go with storm gathers.) They will obviously include the last tweet, whatever it is. How else do they delineate the end of the glorious web content revolution?
Personally, I’d like to start and end that history with the House of Windsor. When Princess Diana died in 1997, the web was just starting to work. Cable television prevailed, but online news—the association of articles, the arrangement of stories on the homepage, the richly colored GIFs—suddenly began to feel real and Fit. The tragedy was urgent, shocking, and unwritten, and to an early web geek, it felt like a big tournament. But when Diana’s former mother-in-law died, a quarter of a century later, the role of the Internet seemed predictable. We know to expect anti-colonial and anti-colonial tweets. We tacitly understood that mourning horses would be made memes. We already have a vocabulary of spins, hot spins, cancellations and tricks. We posted through it.
rip off the revolutionary house internet, 1997–2022. I’m grieving a bit here. But life has to go on, no matter who wins the midterm elections in America, who owns Twitter and how ridiculous the supermarket can be. That’s why every morning, sometimes before breakfast, when I’m desperate, I think of three letters that always give me solace: PDF. And then, when I can, I go dig. I was reading about Gato, a new artificial intelligence agent that can annotate images and play games, or the math underlying misinformation, aka “digital twins,” are simulations of real-world things like cities that consulting firms seem to be able to sell these days. One site, Scholar.archive.org, has PDFs from the 18th century. I have a right to search for these instead of waiting for it to be discovered and crammed into my brain by society.
This was the original function of the web—transmitting learned texts to those searching for them. Of course, humans have been transmitting for millennia, which is how historians can quote Pliny’s last tweet (“Something happened to Vesuvius, brb”). But the search is also important; People should explore, not simply feed. Anything that will push society forward is not hidden within deflationary giants. It comes in some pitiful PDF form, with titles like “New Platforms for Communication” or “Machine Learning Applications for Community Organization.” The tech industry says we figured it all out, but we ended up getting a billionaire asking us to put on helmets (space or VR) while rising seas hit their toes I. So now we have to try again. Now we pick to try again.
PaulFord (@ftrain) is an award-winning programmer, essayist, and co-founder of Postlight, a digital product studio.
This article appeared in the December 2022/January 2023 issue. Follow now.
