A Tweet Before Dying

It's a good way to think about the last message. It's possible that Donald Trump will push the big button on the Resolute desk in 2025, when he'll be the new president. It could happen in a few months, when Musk realises that human despair has no upside, regrets plowing his electric clown car into a social media goat rodeo, and shuts the whole thing down with a single "lol" It's a good way to own the books. What will happen next? We will all move over to Mastodon and ruin that too. It's really sad.

It seems like the last one could come any day. The entire tech industry is in decline because of the cluster of companies that sell code-empowered products. Meta has to come up with more creative ways to ruin society because the Zuckerverse has everything but users. The stock charts of Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies look similar to the falls. A barrel has $3 trillion in it. When your brand is growing so fast investors don't want to see failure. It is now possible to imagine the day when Facebook is only a multi-exabyte ZIP file in archival storage or when the internet is an interactive exhibit.

At the scale of social media platforms, religions, and nation-states, things don't die. They deflate, get soft at the corners, and sometimes wake you up to pump them. AT&T and the Soviet Union seemed to have given up the ghost when I was a child. There was joy as a million new innovative companies were able to thrive. Democracy will spread around the world. Both were stripped for parts and reassembled into new, enormous forms, like beads of mercury on a plate. AT&T bought a lot of things, including Time Warner, which gave it control of both the piping and the content. Even if the consequences are terrible, there is always someone with a desire to get the band together again.

I have been looking at the changing world and it is pretty rough to see. The recession, authoritarianism, nuclear posturing, and weirding climate all show up in the feed. The Fracture, The Fraying Knot, Hope Undone, Leviathan Triumphant, A Web Unwoven, and other titles are likely to be written by future historians. They could go with The Gathering Storm. They will include the last one. The end of the web content revolution is supposed to be demarcated.

I would start with the House of Windsor. The web came into its own after Princess Diana's death. Online news began to feel real and relevant despite the fact that cable TV was the main source of news. It felt like the big leagues for an early web enthusiast when the tragedy happened. The part of the internet that played when Diana's mother-in-law died felt predictable after 25 years. We were aware of the anti-colonialism and the anti-colonialism. We knew that the horses would be euthanized. The takes, hot takes, cancellation, and dunks were covered in our vocabulary. We uploaded it.

Social media platforms, religions, nation-states aren't really dead. Like air mattresses, they deflate.

The internet was launched in 1997. I feel a bit sad over here. The metaverse might be ridiculous, but life must go on. When I am in despair, I always remember the three letters that make me feel better: PDF. When I can, I dig. Gato, a new artificially intelligent agent that can caption images and play games, or the mathematics underlying misinformation, is a simulation of real-world things like cities that consulting firms seem able to sell. PDF's from the 18th century can be found on Scholar. Archive.org. It makes me feel better to look for this stuff instead of waiting for it to be discovered.

The original function of the web was to send learned texts to those looking for them. Humans have been sending information for thousands of years, which is how historians are able to quote Pliny. People should explore and not just feed. The deflating giants are not hidden. There is a PDF with titles like "A New Platform for Communication" or "Machine Learning Applications for Community Organization." We ended up with a billionaire telling us to wear a helmet while the rising seas lap our toes, even though the tech industry said we had it all figured out. We have to attempt another attempt. We're going to try again.

Postlight is a digital product studio founded by Paul Ford.

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