The Linkdump Years Are Over
At some point—gradually, then completely—the public Twitter presence for this journal became a machine that moved links from one place to another. Post goes up, link goes out, nobody talks about anything. The personality drained out of it so slowly I didn’t notice until it was already gone. What had been a place where something actually happened—arguments, jokes, the kind of back-and-forth that made early social media feel worth the trouble—had become infrastructure. A notification delivery system with excellent uptime.
Meanwhile I kept a private account where I was marginally more alive. Complaining in public, picking fights with people whose opinions deserved it, occasionally saying something I actually believed rather than something useful to the blog. But even that corroded. A private account with nowhere to direct its energy becomes a closed loop of bad moods, and eventually I stopped posting there too. Two dead accounts and nothing to show for it except a vague shame about how good it used to be.
I remember specific tweets from the earlier period with a disproportionate clarity. One from a particular night in Munich with a girl whose name I won’t write here—something went wrong, or something went very right, and we were documenting it in real time at 3am with the whole city somehow in the text. One where we said something a little too honest for people who liked their irony pre-diluted and got loudly told off for it. One where we defended a way of living I still think was worth defending, even if I don’t quite live it that way anymore. All of it deleted. Probably correct. The archive of early Twitter is mostly a record of who you were before you knew you were being recorded, and good riddance to most of it.
What I don’t want to lose is the impulse behind it—the idea that an account should have a voice that belongs to a person, with actual preferences and bad opinions and the occasional lapse in judgment. So I killed the private account and pointed everything back into one place. The linkdump model is finished. I’d rather be embarrassing than professional.