The downfall of the Twitter brand last week is one of those online imponderables. Elon Musk pulled the plug on Twitter and its blue bird on July 23 2023. He bought both in October 2022 for a staggering USD $44 billion and they’ve lost him billions since.

He called the rebranded Twitter, “X”. He changed the facade at Twitter’s head office, forgot that he didn’t own the trademark for X, forgot that the multitude private and commercial websites that used a “share” button would still use the blue bird and the Twitter name in their links, and he forgot that individual iOS users could bypass the X app logo by shortcutting it back to the blue bird. X was a marketing failure out of the gate.

What worries Twitter users most, is that their carefully curated thoughts and timelines, established over a decade by many, are now on their last legs.

Musk has never known how to monetise Twitter and still can’t. Ads that pop-up in feeds are often tawdry. Racism is rampant. Twitter’s unique once up-to-the-second citizen journalism is broken. Indeed, social media apps have come and gone since the early 00s, but Twitter is something different. Twitter is a record of 21st Century history, society and thought.

In 2014 I wrote an essay that I’ve adapted below. It predicted the fickleness of our digital times. Its catalyst was a visit to the Smithsonian during a vacation in Washington DC. It coincided with an article I published in the mainstream on the float of Facebook happening at that time in 2012.

Legacy in the Digital Age

Originally published 2014, adapted here.

When I turned up for a meeting the other day the security guard at the big corporate offered to call my party for me. “Their phone says it’s disconnected,” he said. I explained to him that the day prior two of the country’s largest cell providers had major issues with their networks and that was likely the reason. “Wow,” he said, “did you know that Facebook went down yesterday too?” I did.

We can’t escape that we live in a digital age at the apogee of promises made possible by code borne by microscopic electrons buzzing and flitting around.

As a Gen Xer I’ll never forget that feeling the first time I chose a CD track to play or the night I spent with an iPod in my pocket realising that right there could sit my entire CD collection, that moment I first clicked a brick of a cellular battery into a Motorola MicroTAC that shone orange and green, or the night my wife phoned her parents on their cell phone who answered, “How did you know where we were?”

Then came the day when my iPod kicked me out due to some corruption I’d made on my iTunes account, and Metallica sued Napster for some corruption scientists had made in the realm of copyright. It got me thinking: How tenuous as a species have we become in our digital personas? Are we at risk of leaving nothing tangible behind? Could the great peoples of the past offer any lessons for us?

Well, the world’s first civilization the Sumerians took pride in record keeping. Big stone tablets sat on their coffee tables. Some were used as coffee tables. Popular publishing started in Sumer.

As did the hernia.

Mightily copious were the Sumerians at note taking that from the enormity of their efforts and breadth of their culture, mainly fragments remain today though lots of them. To their chagrin the Sumerians discovered that stone crumbled when dropped, but let me tell you those coffee tables must have been big, for one of the tablets we have today, towers seven feet tall.

The Egyptians had a chuckle over this, they were also the world’s first greenies. While they ran a slave trade rivalling the sweatshops of present-day Shanghai the Egyptian coffee table eventually gave way to the refinement of the magazine folio. Papyrus and the stylus were their vehicles for scribbling.

They wrote at a frenetic pace too. Reams and reams of the stuff poured into storage huts. Their work bestowed humankind with the Luxor Hotel, and the concept of U-Haul.

Yet, have you seen much of their papyrus flying around? So much pictorial effort and all biodegradable. We’re instead, going nuts ransacking tombs to find out what went on back then.

Ah, the Hebrews. They were a lot better at record keeping. Learning from all this, they had the Almighty himself carve two stone tablets from sapphire for an entire code of law: much more portable and durable than the Sumerian ones. They even sought divine instruction for the manufacture of a build-it-yourself ark to house them in. In this way, the Hebrews were the precursors to Ikea.

What could be safer than the omnipresence of divine stone housed within an ornate holy ark? Until they misplaced it all.

What this all boils down to of course, is the question of posterity, and today, given the failures of our ancestors who lived in the tangible world, it takes on a much more pressing focus in ours of bits and bytes.

We’ve become a society owning nothing, creating wealth from nothing, forgoing the physical for the digital—also known as “nothing”. Should we worry?

Maybe. Unlike our forebears we’re at peril of losing our heritage within our own lifetimes. Digital storage, e-storage, cloud storage, thermal ink, electricity, operating systems, corporate guardians, digital downloads, face books, texts, amazons, apples. Some technologies we’ve only come to know for the past two decades.

Is this hubris? Is it an over-reliance on trust, or maybe a blind faith-type of apathy? Maybe it’s a good thing if in a hundred years or so, nothing about our way of life survives given the way we’ve progressed as a world. Could that be “The Divine Plan” after all?

Get by with what you’ve got. Do the best you can. And let the next lot carry on with the leftovers.

Still what a shame for the appreciators of history—the romantics among us who believe in the mysteries of life and seek lessons from which to grow.

How long will these very words hang around?

They’re digital too. They rely on electricity to power them, an operating system to translate them, and a corporate entity to keep them alive.

On this point, I’m not too concerned. These words exist to touch a string of sorts. If the universe is comprised of superstrings as some hypothesize maybe, just maybe, they’ll pop up somewhere in a galaxy far away or in a different dimension in time.

Where on a disc they’ll likely be used as a coaster on a coffee table.

The next time you’re in Washington DC take a visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. There, in a glass display case you’ll catch a glimpse of a legacy for our times.

Not the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

A Sony Walkman.

© 2014, 2023 Adam Parker. 

Picture credit: © 2014 Adam Parker. Smithsonian wonders, author’s picture.