You may have heard the news that Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter and take the public company private. He has made noises about making it a "free speech" market, which many interpret to mean a place for trolls, even more than it is currently. And that he will mine its users and their data for his own purposes to monetize it.
The response of a lot of users, currently, is that they will leave Twitter. I don't know if that will happen or not. Whether I will leave or not. As readers of this blog know, I spend way too much time there. But this news has made me think about how it has changed during the 13 years I've spent there.
I joined Twitter in February 2009 and felt like I was late to it, even then. It's hard to remember what it was like at first or at various points along the way. I recall that it was a ghost town on Saturdays, which was nice. You got a day off from the fire hose. I'm not sure when that ended; probably around 2015.
I can't remember everyone I've met or learned about from it. For me, it has been a net positive, since I have a small number of followers and I haven't been harassed.
I've found Twitter particularly good for letting me eavesdrop (in a positive way) on Black feminists without wasting their time, since they were already talking. I've learned so much from them.
I've connected with Saint Paul and Minneapolis climate and transportation activists (how will I be able to lurk around your edges without Twitter?), and learned about those topics on a national and international scale.
I get news faster than anyone I know — both local and national — on a wide range of topics. Which is both a blessing and a curse, I realize.
If it goes away or changes in a major way, I think the people I will most miss seeing without having to look for them are (not ranked):
- Brent Toderian
- Dave Roberts
- Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Cory Doctorow
- Michael Hobbes
- Mikki Kendall / Karnythia
- happifydesign
- Genevieve Guenther
- Sarah Taber
- Lyz Lenz
- Eric Holthaus
- Bill Lindeke
- Mary Heglar
- Naomi Kritzer
- Alfie Kohn
- David Perry / Lollardfish
- Alec Karakatsanis
- Nikole Hannah Jones / Ida Bae Wells
There are so many other people who used to be there and have gone, or are usually gone, or who I don't pay as much attention to as I used to for various reasons:
- Free Public Transit
- Anthea Butler
- Saladin Ahmed (just back but barely)
- Bree Newsom
- Diane Ravitch
- Brittney Cooper
- Sisyphus38
- Linda Sarsour
- Christina Greer
- Matt Bruenig
- Nikhil Goyal
I refound or reconnected with some people from my graduate school days:
- Langdon Winner
- Jennifer Daryl Slack
- Mary Morse Marti
I know I'm forgetting a lot of people I value or have valued along the way, because that's the nature of Twitter. It's a constant, overwhelming flow of the present that wipes out your memory of the past. As I've said, each monthly round-up I've created since 2014 provides a shocking glimpse of what's happened in just 30 or so days.
No wonder I can't remember what took place during 13 years.
Will I miss it? Hell yes. Will I better off? Probably. Maybe. Not sure.
Different.
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