The Little Bird in Freefall

I love Twitter. I want to say that upfront before any of this gets going. I love it the way you love a bar that’s always a little too loud and full of people you don’t quite trust—because that’s exactly where you want to be sometimes. The problem is that most people don’t feel that way. Most people are perfectly happy if they can navigate Facebook without accidentally posting a selfie to their boss. Twitter is a niche obsession, and we’re a peculiar minority: journalists, ADHD YouTubers, and—yes—a handful of Nazis cosplaying as eggs.

Which is part of why it didn’t exactly shock me when news broke that Twitter was closing its Berlin office by end of year, consolidating its German operations in Hamburg as the company continued to bleed money with no credible plan to stop. "Twitter is closing its Berlin location as part of a restructuring," wrote Christian Erxleben. "Further European locations could follow."

The math here isn’t complicated. You strip out costs until the balance sheet looks presentable enough to hand off, then you sell. The options, as I see them: Twitter goes bankrupt, which is bad because I love Twitter. Or Twitter gets acquired—by Facebook, by Yahoo, by some petroleum billionaire who thinks engagement metrics are a personality—which is also bad, because then it ends like Tumblr ended, or StudiVZ, or MySpace. Turns into a ghost town with slightly nicer typography. Hurra.