Originally written for Garbage Day.

‍It can be hard to keep up with the daily machinations of Musk Twitter, but as of today, here’s where we stand: Musk has fired half the staff, gutted thousands of important contractors, has purged employees who were writing negative messages about him in Slack, is publicly firing engineers who correct him when he’s wrong and/or lying about the app’s basic infrastructure, and last night sent an email out to the remaining employees asking them to opt in to “hardcore” Twitter by clicking yes on a form. Those who don’t will be fired. All remaining services on the app now seem to be run by Gary (jk).

‍As author Gabrielle Moss wrote, “Twitter is like a husband that I hate and then I found out he had 10 days to live and it made me feel sweet and sentimental and now we are on day 11 and I am just looming over his sleeping body with a pillow in my hands.”

‍I went into this expecting Twitter’s death to be slow and drawn out and, frankly, boring. I’ve been thinking about this in terms of months, not days, largely because that’s how this kind of thing has played out in the past with sites like Digg, MySpace, and even Vine, which did “die” on a single day, but after it already felt very dead, following months of decay.

‍But Twitter is actively falling apart now. “If you have any apps or sites you log into connected to your Twitter account via OAuth, I STRONGLY recommend changing that right now while you still can,” computer security specialist Ian Coldwater warned this week. “Don't want to take me seriously? That's fine. Good luck.”

‍And Erica Joy, the chief technology officer for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was even more direct: “There is strong chance twitter has a major outage in the next few days. get your backup comms channels situated if you haven’t already.”

‍There are, of course, glitches all over the site, but Musk, in behavior eerily similar to when I took apart the family computer at age 12 and broke it while trying to put it back together, is blindly removing important services from the app. One of these is related to two-factor authentication. (It seems like Gary is running that too now.)

‍I use two-factor authentication for Twitter because I’m a fairly big target for hacks and other kinds of abuse from the internet’s various ghouls and goblins. Musk appears to have disabled the text message that sends the code needed to activate two-factor authentication. There are ways of getting around this, but there were reports this week of bewildered users logging out of their accounts and not being able to get back in.

‍As I wrote above, this is a fairly unprecedented thing to consider. Twitter is not a large website, but it’s an important one. If the internet was an iceberg, with Facebook and Pinterest and 4chan at the bottom with James Cameron’s personal submarine and the fish have lights on their heads, then Twitter would be the tip. It has, over the last decade, become the way we process the internet and that extends to all forms of culture and looks different in every country.

‍For instance, there’s a great piece in the Guardian’s Pushing Buttons newsletter this week looking at what a sudden Twitter death outage might mean for the games industry, which argued, “It’s also full of developers sharing clips and screenshots from games they’re working on, showing off their art, posting job opportunities when a big studio closes, sharing knowledge and boosting each others’ work.” And I’d say this is true for most creative industries, but also politics and, more recently, business and finance.

‍If you’ll allow me to get incredibly galaxy brain’d here for a second. I’ve often thought of Twitter like a power grid. In a simple power grid irl, you have a power plant generating energy which is then sent out to various transformers. Those transformers then send that energy to transmission lines and substations, which then connect to people’s homes and businesses and make the lights work, etc. With Twitter, I think of it like a power plant that’s using retweets, likes, and quote tweets to generate viral energy. That energy is organized by verified and/or branded accounts, curated, and then sent out into the cultural zeitgeist. Over the last decade, we’ve watched each major section of society start to hook themselves up to this grid. These industries, political spheres, and social sectors get attention and virality and use it to transform themselves into something new and different. It’s not always good, of course. The Trump campaign, Gamergate, the crypto boom, and the current state of the YA fiction industry are all good examples (I am not saying these things are all equal, please don’t yell at me). But, in the same way, you can easily burn your house down if you drop a toaster in a bathtub.

‍This is, to give Musk as much credit as I’m willing to give him, why he wanted Twitter in the first place. He thought he was buying a power grid for the world. I’ve seen all kinds of conspiracy theories arguing something else—he’s working for Putin and Peter Thiel to crush liberal democracy, he’s trying to dump Tesla stock, he’s trying to go bankrupt to avoid going to jail for possibly manipulating stock prices, or, the most plausible one, from Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, maybe he’s trying to buy acquisition debt from the bank at a bargain. But I also think he can just be bad at this. I find it much more plausible that Musk is a smart enough guy to realize the potential of a site like Twitter, but also be someone who is so surrounded by sycophants, yes men, lackeys, and opportunistic dark enlightenment VC creeps that he just can’t function properly anymore.

‍And so now he’s panicking, desperately pulling apart the power grid, trying to figure out where the electricity is and how he can make more of it. But it was the grid, as a system, that made everything work (as imperfectly as it did). Which means, going forward, I am now operating under the assumption that there might just be a day where the site goes down and doesn’t ever come back up again. See you all in the wasteland after the fall.