I never meant to join Twitter. For that matter, I never meant to move to the Czech Republic. I never meant to spend my career writing about food and drink, either, and yet here we are.
With Twitter, all I meant to do was make it easier for a friend back in California to know where I was. He was tired of firing up Skype to see my status updates, he said, and couldn’t I just post those somewhere else? At the time, I was writing a string of travel articles and guidebook updates from places like Split, Dubrovnik, Belgrade, Vienna, and Munich, and in late 2007, changing your Skype status to your current city was a great way of keeping your people up to date. But it would be easier, he pointed out, to use this new platform for those updates. So I joined Twitter—as user number 9-million something—though it took me a while to start interacting with it in any meaningful way.
Eventually, however, it became quite meaningful indeed. Over the next few years, a lot of folks I knew from the beer blogging world also joined up. And eventually, there came to be something called Beer Twitter.
I enjoyed the hell out of Twitter and its various manifestations—Book Twitter, Travel Twitter, Politics Twitter, Beer Twitter—though I never really felt like a prime mover in any of those worlds. Living in Central Europe meant that I was always six hours ahead of the East Coast, nine hours ahead of my friends in California, so most of the jokes, revelations, and other happenings among Twitter’s U.S.-based users took place while I was asleep. For the past 15 years, checking Twitter has been part of my waking-up routine, and my relationship to it has often had the feeling of catching up on old news, like a new convert to a musical subgenre hearing stories about bands that had broken up years earlier.
A decade and a half is a long time, however, and at this point it is bizarre to imagine it not being there. And yet like a lot of people, I recently requested to download my entire Twitter history, which certainly means I’m clearly able to imagine something.
There are things I will not miss if it actually goes away and never comes back, of course. As I have aged, I have developed much less patience for drama, of which Beer Twitter had plenty. For that matter, there are plenty of things I wish I had done differently myself, both on Twitter and elsewhere. But every ending is a new beginning, and I guess that’s what we’re looking at now.
Twitter’s clearly untenable current status seems to have put many of us in a bizarre mood—at least for that platform—of patience, kindness, and gratitude, much like a wake in which we remember and celebrate a dead man we often vehemently complained about while he was alive. Instead of sniping, grousing, and drama, I’ve seen more and more people post things like “this was a great place for a while” or “I made some really good friends here.”
You can paint me with the same brush: There are many people I got to know on Twitter whom I consider real friends. Some I’ve met in real life, while others remain virtual pals, though pals they are, just the same. It’s been a great way to share interests and support one another, and I’m sorry that it seems to be going away.
What I keep thinking about is something from one of those friends, the writer Annalee Newitz, who served as editor for a few of my travel stories at the San Francisco Bay Guardian back in the day. Before she became a science-fiction powerhouse, she wrote a nonfiction book called “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.” I haven’t actually read that book—LOL and all that—which means that it’s just that title that stays with me, but in this case I think that’s enough. Many of us from Beer Twitter are scattering to Mastodon, Post, and other destinations, adapting our old ways to the new tech. Many of us will remember Beer Twitter fondly, I imagine, despite all the drama.
I hope we can come up with something better, and that a bit of our recent patience, kindness, and gratitude stays with us.
