A quick mechanical rundown of Twitter’s implosion: When Maye Musk’s son took over the world’s least successful mass social platform, he 1. fired everyone including the moderation team and 2. undid the authority of the blue checkmark via Twitter Blue, the new revenue program that lets anyone buy “verification” for $8 a month. So now there are a million spoof accounts making patently false claims under seemingly authoritative names (see THE BIG ONE that evidently tanked the stock of pharma giant Eli Lily).

Accordingly, flustered institutional handles have started getting out (farewell, Playbill) and the agencies are pulling their ad spend, which means the value of Twitter itself has also dropped big time.

There was a funny moment of earnest white men tweeting their righteousness about the takeover (notably still on Twitter — troops, stand your ground):

“He paid $44 billion for twitter a week ago. It’s currently worth $8 billion. Damn, what a savvy businessman.”

“Musk is doing us an incredible favor by demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no meritocracy and that wealth and power do not, in any way, denote talent or competence.”

“Maybe his plan is to dumpster fire this thing, crash the bids to <10¢ and then buy it all back to own the site free and clear. Or maybe there’s no plan at all.”

Who knows what will happen, Chris Sacca, but the vibe is that the plane is going down, and there isn’t a readily accessible rescue vehicle (Mastodon: complicated!). So, now what?

I don’t think I had a social event over the weekend that didn’t touch on people’s ~feelings~ about Twitter’s impending death (a window into who I spend my time with — welcome). A popular first line: Just let it be done already. It’s bad, the internet is bad, we’re all bad for being on it.

With that out of the way, though, the nostalgia would roll in. If you’ve been online enough over the past however many years, you’ve had the privilege of witnessing in real time 1. some incredible breaking news and 2. a deluge of top-fucking-notch comedy that falls off our cuffs when the earth shakes beneath us. The Queen’s death. Covfefe. Gold.

That’s what you get when you put a bunch of hungry thinkers together in a room, trying to one-up each other on the yes-and. Of course, that exclusivity has been The Problem with Twitter as a force in the world — it creates an echo chamber of decision makers who incubate a skewed view of what’s important. That’s also what makes it work as a platform.

Insufferable as it is, Twitter’s self-referential yes-yes-no quality is a marker of community; a crowd makes up its own conventions when they don’t have to explain themselves to everyone else.

That is a special part of the internet that we should probably try to proliferate rather than squashing The One With Too Much Power. What if we had a bunch of little pods where people could get together and speak the same language and all get a fair shot at contributing to the public discourse?

Silicon Valley doesn’t accommodate that vision, of course, because at least in the current model, there’s no way to massive profits without massive, centralized scale.

Mozilla, the Firefox company that actually seems to care about an ethical internet, is exploring an interesting plan where they run venture capital through their foundation so they can invest in function rather than profit at all costs. Maybe that lands us with a crop of new, tiny Twitters. Or maybe it goes south when some other megalomaniac storms the castle in five years.

In the meantime, where are all the media types going to go to find their friends?