I find it a good philosophical exercise to imagine the last tweet. It could come centuries hence, when a cryptobot offers a wistful adieu to another cryptobot, or in 2025, when Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated president for life, pushes the big ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE button on the Resolute desk. Or it could come in a few months, when Elon Musk realizes that aggregating 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." (Way to own the libs.) What then? We'll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.
Lately it feels like the last tweet could come any day. The whole tech industry-by which I mean the cluster of companies that sell code-empowered products to billions of humans-is in extraordinary decline. The Zuckerverse has everything but users, which means Meta must come up with ever more creative ways to ruin Instagram and/or society. Microsoft, Amazon, Google their stock charts look like Niagara Falls in profile. At least $3 trillion has ridden over the cataracts in a barrel. When your brand is infinite growth, investors don't like to see failure. It has become possible to imagine not just the last tweet but also the day when Facebook exists only as a multi-exabyte ZIP file in archival storage, or when Googling is an interactive exhibit at the Internet History Museum.
This story is from the December 2022 - January 2023 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the December 2022 - January 2023 edition of WIRED.
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