but there's a lot of nuance there. here's one:
Twitter has everyone in the same place, but that alone isn't enough. I'm going to go into an example thats sort of a huge tangent.
(eggbug ate the first post of this, apologies, I'm doing this one from memory)
Part I: Gravity
So, when you jump up and down, you're exerting gravity on the earth.
You're doing it when standing, but that's less intuitive. In fact, you're exerting gravity on everything (there's a limit but it's irrelivant here). Everything with mass, that is, everything that's a physical¹ object.
Every object effects each other, to varying extents.
The moon pulls the water up, causing tides. The earth pulls the moon down, causing it to orbit in something resembling a circle due to centripetal force². Everything, in some way, pulls in subtle ways on this (there are limits to the 'range' ofc)
Part II: A Quickstart Guide to Orbital Mechanics
Orbits are finicky. Many small things can make huge changes
because of the distances involved and how angles have more and more difference in legs the further out you go. You don't need much to bend things -- tiny pulls in the right place can cause it to catch a planet's gravity just right and bend it far away from it's initial trajectory.
The lagrange points are sort of the opposite of this.
They're points in space where the orbits line up just right, allowing an object in space to remain relatively stationary in relation to two bodies. It's not perfect, so often spacecraft follow halo orbits -- that is, they're essentially orbiting the barycenter -- the part in space that's between the n bodies' gravities, that they all orbit around as if it were the sun in our solarsystem³. This part might be more wrong than the rest -- it's been awhile since I cared about space, thanks elon.
Part III: Extinction event (Asteroid)
Asteroids are big. Really, really big.
There are some small ones, but they don't matter for this. Sometimes those asteroids are big enough that if they were to hit the earth, they would cause an extinction event for most forms of life. Fortunately not many of those are actually aimed at earth. But! They might be. We can only see so much.
So we, as a society, make plans
There are a lot of them. I'm not going to go over them.
So, one way to deflect an asteroid, is to launch a spacecraft at it
You're probably imagining like, a missile with some solar panels on it. Maybe nuclear. But the problem with that is that if you just shatter the asteroid, now you have more than one problem, and the lead time on these missions is multiple years -- you might not be able to correct it.
One of the proposed solutions is to just, have the ship orbit the asteroid.
You use it's relatively miniscule gravity to nudge the asteroid to a different enough trajectory that the earth misses -- remember, small changes have big effects because of the distances traveled.
So you orbit the asteroid, Now what. You're not going to do much just rotating there like a shape in someone's head.
Instead, you pick a direction, and boost in pulses to keep your orbit further out in that part -- the asteroid tries to pull you back into a circle, slowly, and you try to pull the asteroid to you, even slower. But you've got years to do this.
You're moving the barycenter between the spacecraft and the asteroid, micrometer by agonizing micrometer.
Part IV: Wait. I walked away and lost my place. When I came back I saw the title and remembered this is about twitter. What the hell happened here.
You hate it when your tweets are decontextualized after only a few retweets
but I'm going to posit that's actually a side effect of the most important part of twitter. More than anything else. More than the professional networking, more than the communities, more than the social movements.
You can't have those without this.
Wait no come back.
I'm talking about retweets. Except, not really.
The magic of twitter is that my trans followers learn about abuses and exploitation in the tech industry. It means my tech followers learn about trans issues. It means my straight followers live in fear of the chaos gay, while being unable to ignore the plight of trans people without being cut off from my jokes. It means funny tweets are next to my issues navigating the medical bureaucracy as someone with 3 disorders that each make bureaucracy even more inhumane. It means the socialiists learn about trans people and tech issues, and the trans and tech people learn about socialism. it means anyone who comes for anything learns about labor organizing
But they don't matter
No, they're already partially on your side. But some of the people who are partially on their side, are not really on your side. they're undecided, have unexamined bigotries-due-to-ignorance, but aren't actively hostile outside of what society taught. Or, maybe that's only fully true a couple of retweets out. But retweets mean you span gaps, and followers become educational vectors. The chain of trust ends up undermining bigotries (or causing them, when used for evil purposes. They can lie and we can't, which means the right has an edge here).
Twitter enables cross-pollination of not just ideas, but narratives and experiences
and you can't get that anywhere else. Because the secret to twitter was and always has been that due to network effect pulling everyone in, we're all trapped in the same place. But the key thing to discern, the one thing everyone misses, the way you sharpen that point into a weapon unconsciously because tool use is written into your genes, is to realize that that's the wrong locus of control.
You aren't trapped in there same as everyone.
You're not trapped in there with them.
they're trapped in there with us.
Footnotes:
[1]: colloquial sense
[2]: ibid.
[3]: Our sun is strong enough to have this centered on the sun, but in systems with two or more suns, or more massy planets, these can be offset.