When my old boo introduced me to Twitter, I did not get it.
So I’m just supposed to tweet into the ether? Who’s listening? What do I talk about?
Baby, I sat in that confusion for about a year. I would log in now and then, but I was staring into the abyss. When I graduated and received my first iPhone as a gift, I started Twitterin’ forreal. The chuckles I’ve let out over the past decade were a big part of why I’ve stuck around.
I’ve sat through multiple presidential elections and debates over dinner plates and costly dates. I remember the N-word Navy and the Super Power Solstice. I kinda sorta helped popularize Hotep memes. (Sorry.)
I’ve also gotten suspended, been roasted, had stories, hot takes, and uplifting messages go viral, and been hacked. (Been off, been on, been back, what you know about that?). I’ve deactivated and quietly returned. Again, I’ve seen and experienced a lot on Twitter. Maybe too much. Ha.
Twitter’s potential flop era has made me anxious. Over the past seven years, I’ve been able to connect with writers, editors, story sources and people who became my co-workers. Now that I think about it, I actually found my first writing internship on Twitter. The site has been invaluable to my career.
I hate the idea of Twitter no longer being a sister circle, a way to get real-time news, and both a source and expression of Black joy. I also preemptively mourn the communal support Twitter has made space for and deeply consider the marginalized people grieving the platform. Watching it alter so drastically has been hard to digest.
In my discomfort, I’ve chiseled crevices of happiness. I’m talking about the kind of happiness that’s had me scream-laughing for the past day. On Thursday, I tweeted about witnessing the “Twitter rapture” and not long after, I came across a funeral program designed by @OkSoMik. Since the spiritual and secular had already met, I thought about what a homegoing service for our good sis Twitter would look like. The most pressing question I had was what we’d wear.
I like to bring comedy to moments that, at their core, are not funny. There’s nothing hilarious about the Black community building a cultural cornerstone and then being charged $8 if they want the algorithm to acknowledge their commentary. Still, I lean into what bell hooks described as “Play.”
Hooks breaks down the idea of capital “p” Play in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, a series of conversations between the Black feminist luminary and Cornel West. Her outlook on the necessity of levity has colored how I approach life as a Black woman existing in an anti-Black, misogynistic world.
“I think there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress and pain of constant exploitation and oppression,” hooks says. “Play, in a sense, becomes a balm; in religious terms, we say there is a Balm in Gilead. Black folks release the stress and tensions in their lives through constructive Play, and I’ve tried to keep that element alive in my life.”
I want to laugh. I have to laugh. Laughter is the difference between getting all worked up and going to sleep with a smiling soul.
With this Twitter homegoing moment, I’ve also given into hyperbole. Am I making a grand personal announcement about leaving Twitter? No, and all respect to those that have. Is Twitter as we know it going away? Well, that’s a bit trickier, but there isn’t a foretold, Y2K-style shutdown happening this very second.
Twitter is breaking but it’s not broken just yet. So feel free to keep jumping on the bed. I know I will.
All that to say, eulogizing Twitter in the face of change is distinctly Black. We have a habit of blowing things out for comedic effect. In Onwuchekwa Jemie’s introductory essay for Yo Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes for Urban Black America, she talks about the purpose of Black hyperbole, specifically as it pertains to comedy. “The language of hyperbole amplifies reality by carrying us beyond the boundaries of rational thought, past the limits of the real into the surreal…,” she writes. “The images it brings back from that universe are literally far-fetched, unexpected, wild, extraordinary. The impact is surprise, a function of their freshness and power.”
I’m sure people were surprised to see Black women lowering Twitter’s casket in this distinct way. That’s probably the fuel of it going viral—shock and the comedic dramatization of it all. The very concept of a #TwitterHomegoingService is a delicious sliver of ridiculousness. It’s where a real-world tradition meets digitally communicated, yet still very real, sadness.
What Twitter is going through is a multi-layered shame and I wish it wasn’t happening. I don’t know where people will migrate to, or if there’s another platform that’ll capture Black experiences the way Twitter does. We’ve used it as a tool to tell stories, connect, cry, learn and grow. Being the head of fashion for the faux-funeral is an honor, but I think we’re still up against some sort of ending. At the same time, there’s so much I don’t know about the future of Twitter.
However, what I do know is that whatever happens, I’ll be somewhere crying laughing. The glee will guide me.