Twitter is now X, and The Engineer’s Newsletter is now Whispering into the Void. In other words, I’m basically Twitter.
I remember when I heard about Twitter, I was utterly in love with the entire idea. I joined right away. I remember bringing lunch to my boyfriend who was working at my former place of employment, the Graduate Studies department at my alma mater. My boyfriend was an actual grad student at the time while I’d worked there as an undergrad.
When I think about the early days of Twitter, my brain pulls out images of the Grad Studies office and Mcdonald's French fries. I don’t exactly remember what bringing my boyfriend lunch and seeing my old coworkers had to do with Twitter, if he told me about Twitter, if I used one of the computers to sign up for Twitter, or if we talked about Twitter. For some reason, these memories are attached.
Something about the constraint of the character limit and being able to simply shove thoughts out there into the ether of the internet really intrigued me. I’ve been posting things online—whispering into the void, as it were—since middle school. I couldn’t tell you what’s behind my drive to be a void whisperer. Something about needing to say something, even if the void doesn’t whisper back.
When I moved to DC, dropped out of grad school, and broke up with my boyfriend, Twitter gave me an outlet for frustrations I had with being an adult and navigating a career, and with living in a standoffish city. Twitter helped me stay in contact with friends from high school and online. My 15 minutes of internet fame boosted my follower count into the upper 100s, and I felt like I was, for once, speaking conversationally into the void.
Then Twitter, like everything, focused on monetization and suddenly my feed was full of various likes and things the algorithm thought I might be interested in. It went from being a place where I talked to my friends to a place where I scrolled through the content of people I didn’t know and felt slightly worse about myself. I didn’t cancel my account, but I removed it from my phone and never looked back. The modern internet is here to sell you things to help you sell things, and so is Twitter, regardless of the name. A marketing platform by any other name is still a marketing platform.
Originally I named this “The Engineer’s Newsletter” because I thought I might want to write about engineering-related topics from time to time, but right now I want to write about parenting, cats, and how much better the internet used to be.
Thank you for being a part of the void.
I remember when I first was when I created my Twitter: Cal Poly Humboldt’s cafeteria. It friggin blew my mind that I could do microblog posting through SMS messages on a flip phone.
Twitter was “the” platform when I was in college. My original Twitter handle was @cory, seriously. I changed it to something dumb that I thought it was funny. A poor decision.
I haven’t been on Twitter in ages but I too have fond memories talking with people on it before it sold out.
Congratulations on the name change. I’m excited to read what you have planned.