Twitter and the End of the Social Internet
The next step for the internet is away from personal connectivity
“The end of twitter is taking forever did tolkien write this,” Twitter user @PleaseBeGneiss (its avatar an illustrated rock) posted Tuesday. The joke garnered around 90,000 likes. (In a follow-up the account’s owner tweeted “a ton of people saying it’s actually george rr martin but have you considered i didn’t think of that”.) Indeed, the death of Twitter — heralded and expected from the moment Elon Musk walked into its headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink (ie. let that sink in) — hasn’t happened. Though things like two-factor identification seem broken and parts of the site itself are now a bit janky, overall, service has continued normally. For all the weird decisions Musk has made since taking over, including significant layoffs to critical staffing areas, Twitter lives on.
But, Twitter should die. If for no other reason than that it represents an outdated, flawed version of the internet — one that we need to move beyond, even if we’re not sure where to go next.
The promise of the social internet, or Web 2.0, was simple: connection. This was what the platforms said they’d do for us. And the possibilities created by connection were seemingly as endless as the relationships we could form either online…
