I keep thinking about my now-abandoned Twitter account and the destructive stupidity of Elon Musk. I know a lot of people who have not just left, but nuked their accounts.
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Initially, I had no plans to do that largely because it sounded like work and I hate work. But then I got to thinking about how goddamn MUCH of our public lives and history have been shoved onto Twitter in the last 15 years.
It became the primary repository for the moment-to-moment, recorded truth of culture and history and how people talked and felt and thought, for over a decade. A record. Chaotic, but still an archive. You could harvest tweets for a documentary.
Of course like anything on the internet it's subject to information decay and link rot and all the usual bugaboos, but now with people leaving and deleting in massive numbers, giant holes are getting punched in our first-party account of What Those Times Were Like.
And I thought, damn, that's bad, maybe aside from laziness it's a good thing to leave my piece of that archive untouched. Eternal. People can go back later and find my couple of viral threads.
That's still not a solid decision because... as much as Twitter is de-facto dead as what it used to be, it's still lurching around at Musk's behest. It's still THERE. And it's very clear he doesn't consider it an archive of the world. He sees it as HIS data.
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But.
And somehow here we are again, a century later, burning our own precious resources so the fucking Nazis can't use them.