Odd this day
At 12.50pm, Pacific Standard Time, on this day Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first ever tweet.
He defined the form as “a short burst of inconsequential information”, and did little to dispel this idea by choosing the words “just setting up my twttr” as the first example to fly free into the world.
Over the following 16 years, remarkable things happened on the site. Relationships formed, presidential campaigns unfolded, and the people of Britain spent an entire day not getting any work done, because we were too busy telling each other jokes and making memes to celebrate our Prime Minister sticking his penis into the mouth of a dead pig. God knows what this unofficial bank holiday did to our GDP. (The story was entirely fabricated, of course, the most likely candidate for its invention being a man who improbably went on to be Prime Minister himself despite being congenitally incapable of telling the truth. These were interesting times.)
Mocking politicians seemed to be one of the primary purposes of the site — even when they were just kindly, blameless men making profound statements about human nature.
We knew it was wrong to mock these fellows of principle, but we did it anyway — such as, for example, when someone who wasn’t That Nice Man George Galloway started the hashtag #AskGeorgeGalloway, causing the man in the hat to be bombarded with foolish questions for days. He blocked many, many people that week — and rightly so. What sort of person takes childish advantage of something like that?
Some people became ‘Twitter famous’. One man, for example, wrote three books. Another wrote one, but was forced to employ the block button with some frequency when he turned out also to be the author of a truly horrific sex blog he’d forgotten the password to and thus couldn’t delete. His commitment to social change through ‘humour’ was somewhat undermined by phrases such as
If I’ve done my job, you’ll be shaking, panting and almost crying by the time it’s over
…and by his paean to the exact location of the g-spot
It’s around 2.3 knuckles deep. It’s that precise.
What an awful pity. I do feel sorry for him.
And then there was the shitposting. So very much joyously stupid shitposting. Here’s just one example.
Oh, all right then. Here’s another:
Maybe just one more…
Memes, cats, idiocy, jokes. All human life was there — to the extent that a site criticised (and not inaccurately) for its banality and cruelty had undiluted goodness on it, too. Some of us had the luck to ‘meet’ a man called Simon, for example, described by Ian Martin as:
An astonishing comet of kindness blazing across social media’s dark night skies, indiscriminately brightening the lives of everyone
…and who left the site, and us, much diminished when he died aged only 50. If you didn’t ‘know’ him, here’s a glimpse into who he was:
I never met him, but I can’t get through that intact.
And now, the site itself — sold to one of the richest, stupidest and most awful people alive — needs a eulogy.
And here is its most fitting memorial: one day, the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange company (snake oil salesman, to use the technical term) paid a huge sum of money for a non-fungible token (snake oil) of that first tweet, giving rise to the unimprovable headline:
So, the world is imperfect, and nothing lasts forever, but you know what?
We’ll always have schadenfreude.
