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Occupy Twitter

September 13, 2016

It’s increasingly obvious that Twitter as we know it will stop existing before long. Maybe Facebook will buy and dismantle it; maybe it will successfully turn itself into the profitable ad-friendly platform that all of its users dread (it won’t); or maybe it will just disappear, bleeding away its remaining users as it’s already been doing until there’s nothing left but bots and clueless self-promoters and hateful egg avatars with ten followers each.

Twitter has already embraced the algorithmic feed, which is as shitty as expected, and it will further relax the 140-character tweet limit next week. Having shed its two definitive features, Twitter will become a worse Facebook timeline, recognizable only by its inability to curtail trolls and harassment.

flint-demo.jpg

  The traditional shrinking city (source)

I wrote in February that Twitter was a shrinking city but now it’s a city in full collapse. The parallels abound: a growing presence of unchecked dysfunction; an exodus of permanent citizens along with their economic contributions; the creeping presence of opportunists who hope to buy up its valuable parts and trash the rest; the sense that it was a better place back in the day.

One way or another, you (if you still user Twitter) and I will probably have to leave Twitter eventually. This is a true tragedy—many of us only talk to one another on Twitter and could never have formed certain communities without it. Like every collapsing community, Twitter is sure to further debase itself before finally forcing us all out, ensuring a messy exodus.

We should all keep in touch. Let’s decide now where we’re meeting up after Twitter dies. I suggest we meet in Zuccotti Park. If we’re lucky @dril will show up.

We should meet in Zuccotti Park because the internet isn’t the free outlet or the escape from physical constraints that it once was. Occupy Wall Street celebrates its fifth anniversary this week, and five years is a long time. In 2011, Twitter was cool—cool enough that it could function as a support system for a movement like Occupy. Now, Twitter is dying because it can’t survive in an ecosystem that requires it to grow profitably, and the internet is no longer a mainstream outlet for overprogrammed, corporate urban space, but more and more a mirror of that space, which forces out the weird and the unmonetized.

Now, more than five years ago, a place like the Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street feels like a haven from the internet’s panopticon, maybe still a place to make a noise, but not a noise that the internet would reliably amplify. If Twitter continues its decline, there will be few digital spaces left that do what it did in its prime, but maybe physical space can again.