What's really interesting to me about the whole situation regarding Twitter is the way that it seemed like most people kind of just... accepted that Twitter would always be there? It's only sixteen years old (if it were a person it wouldn't even have graduated high school here in the U.S.) but pretty much everyone I know regarded it as a fact of life. It really is weird to think about how young social media is compared to how much of a stranglehold it's gotten on the modern world. And yet despite this stranglehold, it's incredibly fragile. It's only been a matter of days for Elon to break Twitter to bits.
Among whatever takeaways people have from the Twitter situation, I really hope one of them is that the internet is not as permanent as people think. These things we accept as part of the modern world could very well be gone tomorrow. I think this is especially important to remember as more and more people are turning to the internet for careers. Which is not to say you shouldn't use the internet as a platform for your career (hell, the internet is most likely gonna be where a lot of my career lives), but you just have to keep in mind as you do it that these systems we rely on are much more flimsy than we've been led to believe.
(I was talking about this with a friend and she mentioned the interesting contrast between my view and the conventional wisdom of "be careful what you post on the internet because it's super super permanent." We determined that those are two viewpoints that can and should coexist! Websites are temporary but the pictures you post on them will last for much longer.)
