Twitter attracts the humorless like flypaper; they migrate in droves and once they arrive, they are stuck. They beat their wings impotently and make quite a din with their buzzing. The best thing about these specimens is not their exertion to escape, which is perfunctory, but their exertion to appear to be funny. One of them has gone and liquidated a great deal of his fortune, apparently for little more than the guarantee that none of his many strained attempts at humor will get him removed.
The “bird app” has since been abuzz with speculations. I had thought, when the deal first became a possibility, that its new owner would simply try to juice the ads a bit, in the predictable manner that publishers try to do in digital advertising, and quickly grow bored when he learned there was simply no way to make his money back. A week in, I began to think he was simply going to break the thing; indeed, I still think it’s quite possible he will. His haters think he’s going to unleash a tidal wave of hate and harassment. His fans think he is going to humiliate their enemies and somehow turn a profit on the whole thing while doing so.
Who can say? But amid these humorless prognostications, amid the sober threads and the defensive replyguys, a certain appreciation for the spectacle has begun to set in. And in appreciating this one, big spectacle—perhaps Twitter’s last, perhaps not—we’ve come to see how much we’ve loved the spectacle of Twitter itself, all along. And how those humorless flies have buzzed so hilariously for us.
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