I remember walking around the city on those days. Lotta hope. Feeling a bit cocky to be honest. But we thought we were gonna change the world.
Here’s the bad news: we did.
Twitter was built at the tail end of that era. Their goal was giving everyone a voice. They were so obsessed with giving everyone a voice that they never stopped to wonder what would happen when everyone got one. And they never asked themselves what everyone meant. That’s Twitter’s original sin. Like Oppenheimer, Twitter was so obsessed with splitting the atom they never stopped to think what we’d do with it.
Twitter, which was conceived and built by a room of privileged white boys (some of them my friends!), never considered the possibility that they were building a bomb. To this day, Jack Dorsey doesn’t realize the size of the bomb he’s sitting on. Or if he does, he believes it’s metaphorical. It’s not. He is utterly unprepared for the burden he’s found himself responsible for.
The power of Oppenheimer-wide destruction is in the hands of entitled men-children, cuddled runts, who aim not to enhance human communication, but to build themselves a digital substitute for physical contact with members of the species who were unlike them. And it should scare you.
On November 8, 2008 I watched Barack Obama win the presidency of the United States while I was sitting on Twitter’s office couch. I forget who invited me, but I was excited to be there because this felt like the first presidential election that the internet had an active part in. Whatever that meant. It felt like all of the tools the web community had spent the last ten years or more building had actually culminated in this moment. And I sat on that couch crying. I was getting to see this moment as a guest in the place that got all of these voices communicating. And all of those voices helped elect a president. In 2008 I thought Twitter helped elect a president.
I was off by eight years.
Alas, helping to elect presidents and taking credit for global movements isn’t enough to ensure company growth. From its inception, like most startups from the era, Twitter lacked a clearly defined business plan. Turns out changing the world isn’t a business plan. Now I am not a business expert. In fact, I know jack shit about business plans. So I won’t go into details about how or why or whatever else because I’d be making it up, and the internet is full of hot takes on this already. Some of them are written by smart people.
I will say this though: the goal of every venture-backed company is to increase usage by some metric end over end over end until the people who gave you that startup capital get their payday. This is the original sin of Silicon Valley. And Twitter had plateaued, and in the Valley plateauing is a thousand times worse than flaming out.
Twitter needed a spark. Twitter, not realizing they were sitting on a bomb, went looking for something to light the fuse. They were about to get it.