Quick one today…I hope.
Yesterday it emerged that new Twitter owner/boss Elon Musk had issued an ultimatum to employees. He wants only those who are truly committed to helping him build “Twitter 2.0” to stay. In his words, it would be “hardcore” and require long hours in the office, sleeping under desks and working in the office (unless your manager was willing to put their job on the line by approving your working from home). The alternative was three-months’ severance and a nice good bye. And every employee had to choose by 5 P.M. EST.
Unsurprisingly, enough of a majority took the option where they got paid to not work in Musk’s digital coal mine that, within hours of the 5 P.M. deadline, upper management met and chose to lock out all employees from Twitter HQ in San Francisco until Monday. A choice predicated on the fear that any disgruntled employee could “sabotage” the code on the app and cause something to crash they could not fix. With so many leaving, finding out who could do what was apparently impossible to determine.
Also unsurprising, when it all came out via tech media, the natural dirge hit every user on Twitter and the response was about what you would expect: panic, frustration, anger, sardonic wit, dismissal. The whole breadth of human emotions packed into a few hours of people laughing at Musk, bemoaning the end of the site and trying to figure where and how to stay in touch with their online connections made and kept through the years.
Will I be sad when Twitter goes? Yeah. Absolutely. I have, thanks to that hellsite, met some of my best friends. People I hang out with all the time. People I talk to on a regular basis, who I’ve partied with, house sat for, seen kids grow, etc. Likewise, there are so many nights where major events from the historic to the idiotic happened that could only really be experienced on Twitter. The night bin Laden’s death was announced, Election Night in 2016 and 2020, the Oscars this year, the various “Tweeting of the Courts”, World Series games, etc. From local to global, Twitter allowed people to engage with others for good and bad in many different moments and ways.
At the same time, I cannot deny that Twitter has been both a positive and a negative in our social discourse. It has given journalists and people around the globe a platform to break through governmental obstructions to speak to the world. It has allowed the dissemination of fringe ideas and beliefs to the point that it has influenced government and policy decisions. It has allowed people who feel alone to find the like-minded — in both the good ways and the bad. This is something you really cannot do on Facebook or Instagram.
So yeah, I am going to miss Twitter when it inevitably collapses. And signs are that it will. With reports of up to 88% of Twitter’s staff either fired, severed or dismissed, it won’t be long before stuff starts breaking that no one left knows how to fix. I’ve come to know that a sign of a bad manager is undervaluing internal knowledge i.e. not considering how much time and money it costs to train a new person to do what the person who’s been there for 5 years already knows. And Elon is showing that characteristic to a T.
We’ll see how it all shakes out. In the meantime, party until the Fail Whale turns up.
