I was trying to find something for my newspost on Friday, some ancient snip of gabriana, and Twitter said that there was no such thing as a Gabe. Certainly we have our disagreements from time to time on matters of import, and also… condiments, but nothing to cast him into the void over. If I get a vote, he should continue to exist. But he made that account a billion years ago in Internet terms, and now it's gone.

Link rot is absolutely a thing. A lot of the Internet has just evaporated, the Angel's Share I guess, though I don't know if it is constrained to one percent. This feels different! It's not about losing a URL on some WHOIS shit or something - it's an active withdrawal. A lot of people already left Twitter, or were gonna, or changed their name to be their account on another service, which seems bad.  I already thought it was a Blood Pit, a hateful place of battle, but kept on there to let people know what we were doing and also to be mad at the naked and monstrous state of the world on occasion. That's still the plan; I still get something out of it.  Namely, other people.  But there is nothing about an exodus that doesn't make sense.

He'd already decided not to hang out there; as a visual person Instagram is just more his speed broadly. But Twitter just feels ill to him - sick. Like, the service itself is sick, or that it's in the process of revealing something diseased about people. That's how it feels to me, too. We done talked 'bout it a mess o' times. I can't make sense of what is going on there. People's ability to perceive irony - ever a fraught scenario online - has phased right through the floor, interred in the Earth's bosom. You'd have to rent an excavator to get it back. There's a lot of conversations about Media Literacy going on right now, by people who think fiction is real. I can't even tell if a person is winding me up or if they're engaged in a performance they believe or the service itself is algorithmically farming engagement via automated agents or what.

Even not participating started feeling to him like participation if everything was still there, just a weird ghost puppet, a psychopomp. Mork downloaded all his shit off there just in case Twitter ever gets not run by the guy who is running it now, which isn't a crazy concept honestly, and then nuked it from orbit. It was, as they say, the only way to be sure.

(CW)TB out.