What I’ll Miss About Twitter
When it was good, it fulfilled the promise of the internet.
Since Elon Musk took over the company in November 2022, Twitter has been disintegrating in stages — and by “disintegrating” I mean “losing its integrity” as well as “falling apart.” The latest fragment to crumble has been the bluebird logo, replaced by Musk’s favorite letter, X. (See: SpaceX, Tesla’s model X, and the unpronounceable name of one of Musk’s children, X Æ A-Xii.) Very soon the Twitter name will follow the bird into the boneyard: the app’s corporate parent is now called X Corp. Tweets, says Musk, will be called X’s — by whom, though, remains unclear.
I name companies and products for a living, but what follows isn’t my professional take on the rebrand. (My unprofessional take: Dumb.) Instead, it’s a sort of requiem for the first social-media platform I enjoyed and embraced. That seemed perfectly suited to my interests and abilities. That made the internet personal, funny, enriching, and exciting.
MySpace had crested by the time I started paying attention. Facebook never appealed; the very term “friend request” still makes me cringe. Reddit was for cautious dips, not full immersion. LinkedIn was too corporate, too glossy, for an indie like me.
