Posting through it one last time

I've been on Twitter for my entire adult life. The @Luke_Winkie account was created in 2009, during a languid computer lab session in high school, burnished with a profile picture snapped with the Photo Booth app on a prehistoric iMac. (I believe I used the sepia filter.) I do not know what my inaugural posts were, but I do distinctly remember talking a lot about how much I loved Inception and how angry I was that Conan O'Brien lost The Tonight Show — a brief flirtation with Normie Tweeting before many, many years of brain sickness. Everything changed when my juvenile interest in digital media bloomed into a genuine career aspiration, and I found myself quickly seduced by the many professional opportunities entwined with the platform. It did not take long for me to establish a psychic link between Twitter clout and publishing relevance — like a caveman discovering a bone could be used as a tool — which is to say that I've spent the last decade thinking, on a daily basis, about how I might gain more followers.

I'm sure that is an excruciatingly embarrassing sentence to read; trust me when I say it feels even worse to write. But it's true! It's true for all of us sickos. I don't know exactly where the neediness came from, or why it grew into such a pervasive albatross, but I do know that whenever I catch a glimpse of the disorienting fullness in which Twitter has alloyed with both my personal and professional life, I'm brought to my knees in shame. I can recall a whole history of tacky parasocial feuds from my college that have been sparked, entirely, by the baffling way the platform manages to infuse anodyne statements with paranoid, self-projected ill intent. I have absolutely wondered if someone is mad at me because they've been absent from my Notifications tab for a few cycles, only to be blissfully soothed when they finally reappear. When a piece I'm proud of hits the internet, I'll keep the URL pinned to my search bar — refreshing every couple of minutes to see if someone famous or important has taken notice, in search of one of those life-changing retweets I've heard so much about. Becca and I have exchanged maybe nine texts across the breadth of our relationship; the totality of our correspondence occurs over Twitter DMs, where we trade grocery lists, restaurant menus, apartment addresses, and the occasional mutual horror that Twitter — of all things! — has mounted such a central role in our partnership. 

It is safe to say that if the app is spirited away to the afterlife, my life will be fundamentally destabilized. The bleakness of that reality conjures up all sorts of distinct affections; melancholy, displacement, a flash of bitter humor, and lately, more than anything else, an overwhelming sense of relief. 

What I'm trying to say is that I've never experienced a high quite like the death throes of Twitter. No drug, or God, or $9,000 Taylor Swift floor seat could ever match this rapture. We've been teetering on the brink since last week, when reports trickled out of the site's headquarters that the end was nigh. You probably already know the story if you're subscribed to this newsletter. Elon Musk — an emerald mine heritor who has structured the entirety of his financial portfolio around fat government contracts — presented an increasingly beleaguered Twitter staff with a bizarrely confrontational ultimatum. They could stay on the payroll and work "long hours" at "high intensity" in pursuit of a vague arcadia Musk had dubbed "Twitter 2.0," or they could leave with three months severance and take their expertise somewhere else. This would be a brash move for any incoming CEO, and when you consider Musk's pedigree during his month-long stint as Twitter's chairman — tyrannical mass layoffs, thin-skinned rebukes to subordinates, and the sustained mercurial unseriousness of a man who is annoyed that he paid $44 billion for a social media that has never been profitable — the choice was a no-brainer. 

Droves of Twitter employees took the buyout and abandoned their posts, shrinking the already enfeebled headcount by a third. On Thursday evening, The Verge reported that several linchpin systems crucial to the platform's machinery had been left unmanned, which essentially guaranteed some sort of protracted server blackout in the future. As the dire realities of the fracas became apparent, and Twitter's DEFCON ticked towards doom, my timeline erupted in a starburst of confused emotion. The meteor was on its way, and it was up to us how we leveraged the last few tweets left in the barrel. 

Some promoted their Instagram handles or *ahem* their Substack homepages, like a message in a bottle floating in a tidal wave — Jesse and Céline promising that they'll see each other again at the end of Before Sunrise. Others attempted to get a few more jokes off, gaming the algorithm one final time, wielding a distinctly Twitter-ish diction that, for all we knew, was about to become a dead language. But my favorite tributes were from those who found the faculty to be earnest on the internet, maybe for the first time in their lives, on a platform that has historically empowered our meanest instincts. The most calloused posters of my generation admitted that, despite all of the bitter dunks and poisonous discourse, they really did love looking at this app every day. It was a great dismantling of the platform's social contract; an airing of pent-up guilelessness. You get to be as cringe as you like during an extinction event. If this was to be the end of Twitter, it left us with an enduring, existential truth: Nobody here is as bad as they seem.

Of course, the world woke up the following day to discover that the rumors of Twitter's demise were greatly exaggerated. My phone billowed up with a familiar tableau of posts, all of which possessed the fragile tone of a repentant lucidity after an apocalyptic end-of-a-relationship fight — everyone taking a mulligan on the regrettable score-settling, grievance-airing, or grand displays of romantic vulnerability that they may have let loose in a fit of psychedelic passion. We shouldn't have been surprised, really. Twitter is not going to detonate like a supernova. Elon will need to make up the $44 billion to his creditors somehow, and nobody in the boardroom has any incentive to watch their investment deteriorate into ash. Instead, I reckon that the platform's decline will be more glacial in texture; imperceptibly losing its paramount position in society — or at least the media — as its various components turn black and fall off under Musk's austerity measures. (It's never a good sign if @realdonaldtrump is spurning you.) I could be wrong about this, but I think Twitter's primary demographic is aligned in that vision. We're ready to turn the page and see what's next. After all, I've already read your eulogies.

I have about 5,000 followers, which means I'm finishing up my run on Twitter with about half the accumulated metrics necessary to be sought out to write GQ cover stories by name recognition alone. If there was a missing piece that would put me over the top — a perfect post, a viral essay, a wildly successful newsletter, an unreachable echelon of writing talent — then it will likely elude me for good. This caused me a lot of angst until I considered the bright side; a timeline where I never thought about my Twitter followers ever again. I've been waiting for this moment ever since I stopped making Inception posts — all it took was a vengeful billionaire to pull out the rug from under us, proving, definitively, that clout is inherently transient and low-value. We're always seconds away from starting over from zero, and three cheers to that. You will not find me on Mastodon, or Hive, or Truth Social, or any Twitter knockoffs when the lights flicker out. It would do us posters some good to embrace obscurity. At last, we’re cured.