You know that feeling you get when you discover an old newspaper from a hundred years ago? Ok, maybe that isn’t very common, but imagine, for a moment, what that might be like. You’re holding a document that represents a century-old snapshot of the world. You’re holding a sort of window into the past in your hands. This happened to me a few times when I helped renovate or clean, and it happened to me in a very different setting as well:

Imagine opening the door to a storage unit or the basement and finding an old computer. Maybe from the 1970s? It still boots, and there are some old drives. You can look at the old files on this old computer and see them the same way the people saw them who made them. You might feel a bit like an archaeologist or an explorer, and — for me, at least — such an experience makes the past feel more real, more tangible. It also confirms that the past really was in black and white!

When I look at Twitter these days, I can’t help but think that it won’t be accidentally discovered by someone cleaning out a basement in a few decades after it is gone. Sure, we’ll have some record of its existence, and it will likely summarize this chapter of Twitter into one or two sentences like this:

After buying Twitter Inc, he walked into the headquarters building holding a sink and posted a video of this stunt with the words “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” to his Twitter account. Shortly after that, he sunk the company. After multiple rounds of layoffs of most of the company’s 7,500 employees, shuttering offices and data centers to cut costs, the website became increasingly unreliable until it went offline for the first time on [date].

But nobody will accidentally run into a working version of Twitter and truly experience what it was like. And with that in mind, I decided to take a screenshot today to document one of his futile attempts to make Twitter profitable:

The screenshot above is supposed to convince users that paying for a monthly subscription of USD 8/month is worth the money. It advertises features yet to be released (just like another company selling supposedly full-self-driving capable cars) and features that come for free on other platforms, like editing your posts after posting them. Also worth noting, the subscription fees are unlikely to ever be enough to cover the interest payments on the debt he had to take on to buy Twitter.

I grew up using Twitter, and I made my first account when I was 16 or 17 years old. Luckily most of the tweets my teenage brain came up with are long since deleted. Still, tweeting was a big part of my personality for about 15 years. In the first few weeks of Musk’s Twitter, I felt like someone bulldozed my favorite playground from my childhood. I will never be able to go back there again, but I found a new and better place: Mastodon.

⌞w⌝