The weird sorrow of losing Twitter

On the evening of November 17, news reports swept across Twitter that the platform had lost so many employees it likely no longer had the people behind it to keep its most vital services running. To commemorate the occasion — not unlike violins on the Titanic — longtime internet culture reporters Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick hosted a massive Twitter space to discuss the demise of the service.

At publish time, Twitter had yet to splutter to a stop, and it’s not a given that it will shut down. Still, the changes made by new owner Elon Musk — both structural (like firing thousands of employees) and cultural (like breaking the verification system, reinstating banned users, and reinstating former President Donald Trump) — have contributed to a feeling that something has fundamentally changed.

At one point in the discussion, a speaker confessed that he was “ashamed” to feel as angry as he did toward Musk for decimating Twitter. The implication was that the “cursed bird site,” as it’s so often called, was just a place for shitposting and internet drama — not a place you’re supposed to feel devastated about.

Then again, human nature just doesn’t work that way. Yes, people loved to hate Twitter, and hated loving it, but the love was real, nonetheless. Telling ourselves it’s dumb to feel bad about Twitter belies the human impulse to build bonds and connection — which Twitter users spent years doing. We’re a species that forms unhealthy levels of emotional attachments to robots. Did we really think we weren’t gonna feel absolutely wrecked about the apparent abrupt destruction of a social media platform that has been a digital home to millions of people for more than a decade?