Preface
This book is an attempt to capture the essence of my 15 years as an active twitter user (I'm going to use the lowercase spelling except when referring to named subcultures within twitter), under the handle @vgr, in a form that does not entirely murder the spirit of the live experience of being there, enmeshed in hundreds of live-wire conversations unfolding over years, through an era when the platform was the place the narrative of our world unfolded. In the chapters that follow, you'll find a compendium of a few hundred of my best single tweets (Chapter 1), and 101 of my best threads (Chapters 2-102). That's a small fraction of the 150k+ tweets I posted through the years this book covers, but hopefully it's an interesting distillation. I'm still on there, though I mostly only browse the feed. I no longer post actively except for the rare boost of stuff I, or friends, are up to elsewhere.
Through 2007-22, twitter was neither the biggest social media site, nor the most representative. But it was the most consequential place, not just on the internet, but arguably the planet. Entire political regimes rose and fell, careers were made and destroyed, vast cultural movements arose and died down. Other platforms may have featured more aggregate activity, and accumulated orders of magnitude more social dark matter, but twitter was where events broke into the main currents of history. The suburbs of reddit may have accumulated deep intelligence, but twitter was where some were promoted to historic consequentiality. Facebook ads and groups may have shaped elections, but twitter was where we collectively decided what it all meant. YouTube might have been where endless warrens of conspiratorial imaginaries were constructed, but twitter was where we determined which ones were going to shape the almighty Discourse. 4chan might have produced many world-changing memes, but twitter was where that world-changing actually played out.
But twitter was more than a distribution zone for culture manufactured elsewhere. Increasingly, it became the site of cultural production. As a blogger who initially signed up to promote my posts on Ribbonfarm, I initially thought of it as a successor to RSS. Dumb pipes, just stochastic rather than deterministic. But it quickly became clear that was an absurdly bad mental model. Twitter was the tail that would come to wag the rest of the social-media dog. You can read my very early 2007-era understanding of twitter in this old blog post, The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography. Now, nearly 20 years later, that mental model feels, not wrong per se (it was sophisticated for its time), but charmingly naive. What we thought was a low-stakes global office watercooler turned out to be the site of future epistemic world wars, in which the fates of civilizations would be decided.
Speaking of the Discourse, that's what we inveterate, degenerate, Very Online people were there for. Hopelessly addicted to the almighty feed, and the dopamine hits of likes and retweets from our parasocial boos and senpais. And atop that milieu, the grand narrative of history could play out as powerfully as it did because the company's management through those critical years exhibited exactly the right level of public-sector style benign neglect and managerial ineptitude to allow unfettered and imaginative social intercourse to flourish. Twitter became the de facto town square of the world through those years because it was too big to properly manage except through benign neglect as a commons, even as it remained too small to turn a profit. In theory a small, haphazardly managed private corporation. In practice, a large public commons. The very strategic errors that prevented the company from realizing its obvious potential as a profit-making entity provided the affordances that made it such a wonderful space for a true public Discourse to take root.
My early twitter years, approximately 2007-2013 or so, were rather unremarkable (and you'll note that there isn't much content from that period -- I've included a few of my earliest tweets as a prehistory section in Chatper 1, but they are clearly only of historical interest). During those years, the platform was sporadically the site of world-changing events (#iranelection being a prominent early example), but not home to the grand narrative of the world in any sense. Familiar features like @ replies and quote tweets were not yet officially supported. But by 2013 or so, the platform was nearly fully baked. Just in time for mainstream arrival with the American culture war in 2013, featuring such notable events as Gamergate, and the events in Ferguson, which led to movements like BLM and NRx leveling up politically. It was also during that period that various sectoral "twitters" took root. We had VC Twitter, EconTwitter, Black Twitter, and so forth.
By 2015, the platform had become a variegated landscape of well-defined subcultures. Importantly, however, the platform remained what my old buddy Xianhang Zhang dubbed a plaza rather than a warren. The subncultural fragmentation did not acquire legible organization or destroy the one-big-public-square feel. This allowed thousands of illegible subcultures to flourish, such as Weird Sun twitter, and the mischievously vaguecronymed "UST" that grew around my old blogging comarade-in-arms on Ribbonfarm, Sarah Perry (UST supposedly stood for Unaffiliated Sloth Twitter, but nobody knows). Sarah was also the instigating figure around what came to be known as postrat twitter. Personally, I consciously stayed on the margins of these lively communities. During these middle years (roughly 2014-18), my blog Ribbonfarm was something like a insider's landmark for some of these subcultures. Many people I first met on twitter during these years went on to contribute to ribbonfarm, and participated in the meetups and annual event (Refactor Camp) I used to run during these years. By the time the late period began (roughly 2018 or so), however, the subcultural ferment had largely settled. Ossified, if still illegible, boundaries emerged. One notable and notorious subculture (partly a descendant of postrat twitter) that emerged towards the end of the middle years was tpot ("this part of twitter"). Ribbonfarm. primarily thanks to my long-time co-blogger Sarah Perry, became somewhat awkwardly retconned into the founding mythos of this subculture. I personally had (and have) many friends within tpot, but never saw myself as part of it. Largely because I felt I was a generation removed, as well as politically a world away. I suppose I was a sort of distant uncle to the scene.
These middle years also saw the more legible and well-lit parts of twitter become increasingly prominent in the mainstream culture, as politicians, journalists, and business leaders realized that twitter was where the public first response to everything of consequence unfolded, generally days to weeks before it happened anywhere else. The part I was most associated with was probably Silicon Valley and VC/startup twitter. One event that radically altered my experience of twitter was briefly working with Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) during 2014-2015 at a16z (a gig I landed via Chris Dixon, @cdixon, via twitter). The influence was twofold. First, there was the direct influence. Being visibly associated with a huge account, through public banter, rapidly 3x-ed my following. I used to refer to the phenomenon as a "gravity assist." Second, Marc was responsible for perhaps the most consequential innovation on twitter during those years: the notorious tweetstorm,, which was the colorful term for what later got domesticated as the threading feature. When Marc first started tweetstorming, it was at once hugely entertaining and radically annoying at the same time, because his tweets would swamp and murder everybody's feeds. The platform quickly adapted and began to support a more usable threading UX, but for a while there, it was anarchy, as hundreds of others jumped into the tweetstorming game, myself included. Threading was a beautiful thing, allowing people to workshop complex arguments in real-time with a lively audience, in an unbundled form suitable for spawning rich comment threads and quote-and-fork side trails. I quickly became a huge fan of the format, despite its potential for being annoying. Not only did I start doing a lot of threads on twitter, I used the thread format in my newsletter for a while, and adapted it to serialized blogging in a format I called blogchains. Though Marc and I have since diverged politically, we remain on cordial terms at a personal level. And regardless of what you might think of him, history will definitely remember him for at least two remarkable inventions -- the browser, and the tweetstorm.
No mention of threading culture is complete without a hat-tip to Visakan Veeraswamy, (@visakanv) of course. Visa took the basic linear threading idea pioneered by Marc and turned it into a dizzying artform, turning his account into a tangled, densely interlinked, quote-linked, promiscuously forking Lovecraftian monstrosity of a twitter hyperobject. I came up with a term for it: threadthulhu (my main contribution to culture through the twitter years was coming up with names for things). My own threadthulu was only middling crazy. Orderly enough that I was able to index all my good threads in a meta-thread over the years, and slaughter it relatively cleanly to create the raw material for this book. I doubt Visa's insane threadthulu can be killed at all, let alone properly butchered into a book-like echo like this one. I vibecoded the pipeline that created this book, but it will probably take AGI to similarly tame Visa's threadthulu. I kid of course. AGI is conceptual nonsense. Visa's threadthulu will remain forever untamed. If X dies, it will ascend into the latent spaces of various LLMs as an eternal monster.
Threading culture reached its apogee with an event I had a hand in instigating, called Threadapalooza, in December 2019, where we all egged each other on to post 100-tweet monster threads. I think I got the idea because I was tired of seeing people complaining about long threads, and twitter being the transgressive place it was, the obvious thing to do was to annoy them more by instigating so many huge threads, you could drown out their whining. The event was huge fun, and went through a couple more annual iterations. It was one of the last times I truly had fun on twitter. Sadly, threading culture was later superseded by the significantly inferior screenshot essay form (no way to quote bite-sized fragments for dunking commentary or reply to a specific part of the idea easily), and eventually killed off entirely in favor of long posts by paying customers of Elon Musk's pay-to-play X. But before we get to that, perhaps a word or two on the cultural evolution of twitter up the change of ownership.
The long arc of twitter's history as the site of the Discourse, roughly 2014-22, could be divided into 3 chapters:
- 2013-2016: Hypomanic culture-chaos with a side of culture war -- a phase that ended with the death of Harambe.
- 2016-2020: Internet of Beefs -- which began with the rise of Trump and ended with Covid.
- 2020-2022: Covid era -- which had very special characteristics and ended with the acquisition by Musk.
During the Internet of Beefs years, twitter gradually became less fun and more consequential. More and more people simply retreated, unable to handle the toxicity. One of my threads, included in this book, Against Waldenponding, captured my own arguments against retreating. That argument proved to be quite popular, and I think what happened next demonstrated why it was in fact correct. When Covid hit, in early 2020 (shortly after the first Threadapalooza iirc), it was twitter's time to absolutely shine. Twitter figured Covid out faster and better than any other public place on the planet, online or offline. And saved countless lives I suspect. I myself was able to react weeks ahead of most people in my non-twitter life. While some individuals, like Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) played individually influential roles in triggering the effective early response, the truly impressive part was the way the wisdom of the crowds served as an accelerant. Every aspect of the pandemic got swarmed and figured out faster and better than anywhere else, so long as you were plugged into the right subcultures. Of course, there were also plenty of dumb subcultures getting things wildly wrong. I look back on twitter through the Covid years as humanity at its best in many ways. Though there was a great deal of toxicity and awfulness, there was also a remarkable amount of unprecedented positive power on display.
At the same time, there was no denying that the large-scale retreat was very real, and consequential. Whether or not I advocated staying plugged into the heady drug that was twitter, more and more of the most interesting people were choosing not to, and going dark. I first flagged this in a tweet of course:
Eff it, Yolo, I'm not waiting to see how Gen Z actually shapes up to tag them. Where's the fun in data-driven hindsight. I'm calling it early based on early markers and portents
If Millennials are Premium Mediocre...
Gen Z is gonna be Domestic Cozy
Yeah you heard it here first
I theorized and speculated about this trend more throughout 2019, on my blog and in newsletter, which also spawned one of my last major viral memes before the era of viral memes basically ended: the cozyweb
. The idea of the cozyweb later got incorporated into The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet. Just before Covid hit, Tank magazine did a whole issue on the "cosy" turn, featuring an interview with me. In some ways, I think that interview marks the beginning of the end of my twitter journey. There's no point preaching against waldenponding when the entire zeitgeist decides to head in that direction. I think, if Covid hadn't interrupted, allowing twitter to enjoy an extended swan song final chapter, I suspect it would have degenerated into a boring backwater public square ignored by the Dark Forest era. Of course, that didn't happen. Covid did hit. It did radicalize a lot of moderates. And that radicalization did lead to what I dubbed the Muskening.I decided to quit twitter pretty much the moment it became clear that the high farce of Elon Musk's acquisition bid would actually turn into reality. I documented my thinking and decision in a two-part essay series in my newsletter (Part 1, Part 2), so I won't bother rehashing that story here. Suffice it to say that things unfolded exactly as I expected, and I'm happy I went dark when I did. Some have since told me they think I was prescient in making a clean break and moving on so early, but there was no prescience involved. The writing on the wall was crystal clear to anyone willing to read it. I think what really made it an agonizing decision for many was leaving behind large followings and rich networks. Personally, I suffered zero agonies. Indifference to sunk costs is one of my core operating principles in life, and I've never had any regrets about walking away from seemingly priceless stores of social capital. I've walked away from many milieus, online and offline, and I'm sure I'll walk away from many more in the future. To the extent a ghost of twitter still exists, buried beneath the superficially familiar, but radically different beast that is X, I hang out enough as a silent reader to keep up with a few things (particularly robotics and AI news). But I have no desire to become an active part of the conversation or milieu there anymore, and largely tune it out. To Musk's credit, lately the For You feed appears to have picked up on my preferences and mostly shows me robotics tweets instead of ragebait. Maybe there's a slim chance of redemption yet, and those of you pining for the old twitter might yet see your hopes fulfilled. I have, frankly, moved on.
For some of you, this may be the first you're hearing from me in years. I think at least a few people on twitter have assumed I'm dead or retired. When I search for "@vgr"" or "ribbonfarm," which I do periodically (I have my little vanities), the results are mildly hilarious, like being at my own interminably extended funeral. An agonizingly drawn-out social death that I'm fortunately not there to actually suffer. These days, I mostly hang out on Substack Notes and Farcaster as far as public feeds go (I'm also on Bluesky, but not particularly active). But at 51, I find my appetite for the intensity of the public short-form game is slowly declining. So much of my attention and social energy now flows through a couple of Discords and Slacks, and a bunch of group chats. I don't think digital public spaces of the sort twitter represented for a few years are ever coming back. But while it existed, twitter was a once-in-history zone of pure magic. I'm glad I got to be part of it. No book-like artifact can ever capture even a fraction of that live magic, but I hope this one at least gives you some sense of what it was like for me, living, blogging and shitposting through those years.