Disclaimer: I ripped the flash-forward with the son and the dad off from Bill Simmons' response to the Manny Ramirez suspension. I thank him for the style, and for my transgressions, will formally dedicate this piece to him and if he’s that pissed, then I’ll will buy him a beer.
The Date: June 13, 2029
I drive down to Cape Cod with my wife and my son to visit my parents for a summer cookout. I’ve been married for about 10 years or so and at this point my son is a little bit more that eight. He likes sports and gets a kick out of reading old Sports Illustrated articles and making fun of me because all the players that I liked when I was his age cheated and all the players he loves are scrappy and play hard. But most of all he loves to write. He’s a miniature Hemmingway. He’ll spit out simple observations about how moist smoke pours off a cedar fire and that pine splits and pops like a bastard if you throw that in, and I will smile at him approvingly. He won’t really understand the beauty in his simplicity, but I'd bet he'll remember that smile and I hope he'll keep on with that awe.
Just as I finish that little "tasters choice moment," my father will pop out of the basement with an old FM radio and a couple of beers. He’ll plug in the radio and turn on NPR, one of only three radio stations broadcasting in ’29—along with a country music station and sports talk radio. We’ll sip our beers and listen to my boy and the radio rattle on until a quick break skips to one of those mundane NPR talking heads, who introduces “On this Day in History.” The report goes on for a while without us paying much attention until, “In the year 2009, the Twitter Revolution swept through Iran in the aftermath of the electoral defeat of Mir-Hossein Mousavi by the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmandinejad.”
My son will look up, confused by that “Twitter” word, and ask, “Dad what’s Twitter’?” My father and I glance at each other, and I can tell he wants me to answer, “Well, it was sort of like email, but the message could only be 140 characters long.” “How could a 140 character message cause a revolution?” he asks. “Technically, it didn’t,” I stumble through my memory for a good answer, “but it allowed people to get organized and plan protests and rallies.”
“I thought people had political protests before Twitter’,” he says.
“Back in my day, we protested ‘Nam and organized with fliers and word of mouth and we didn’t need no goddamn Twitter,” my dad yells. “Not the point, Dad. The people in Iran were repressed and this was a way for them to get the world, and people in America, to realize that they wanted the same things we wanted. Freedom. Democracy.”
“Did it work? Did the Twitter win?” my son asks. “No, the Twitter did not win. In fact, it soon became fairly obvious that it didn’t matter who voted for whom, because Iran was ruled by a dictator and he pretty much did whatever he wanted.”
“That’s right, and then those kids stopped twitting each other and quit making all that noise, and I could watch my stories again!” yells Dad. “What!?” my son asks, “What happened to twitting for peace? Why did they stop that Dad?”
I explain to my son that grandpa did not explain himself well, and that eventually all of the protesters had to go back to work because they needed to make money to feed their families. Some people took longer than others to quit the protest, but the Shah made life very difficult for them. Some of them disappeared. Some stopped getting paid at work. Sooner or later the whole thing lost steam, and people sort of forgot about it. As for Twitter, most of the people that used Twitter did not use it for organizing political protests. They were mostly a bunch of lonely people, both the unknown and the famous, who just wanted every other lonely person they knew to constantly know what they were doing by themselves and what they thought about at any given moment. In reality, no one cared. This natural puttering out all fads experience combined with the evolution of smart phones and mobile computing devices, and enhanced consolidation of communications; such as the eventual combination between web-based streaming video and cable television, essentially made Twitter obsolete. Texting and email and Twitter sort of melted into one medium that could be as short or as long as it needed to be.
"You see boy," Dad pipes in, "Take a look at this." Dad pulls out a picture from his pocket that must have been from the 1970s, of him holding a can of beer with a straw in it up to a rock with these big, googly eyes. And he says, "All throughout history people have ideas, pretty stupid ideas, but that doesn't really matter, because there are a lot of stupid people out there in the world who think the stupid idea is a really good idea. They do what that idea guy says or buy what he's selling and he gets rich, and they get stupider. I bought that stupid fucking rock for $3.95 and so did about a million other people and that asshole made a million dollars!"
I guess my dad misses the point, but he sort of makes one too. I don't know what sort of useful function a pet rock ever had, but I see in my son's eyes that it makes sense. Simple associations make sense to him. And while flawed, I guess Twitter is like a pet rock or a pager or a Beanie Baby. While those fads never made the impact that Twitter might be making right now, this situation makes me think of Jeff Goldblum's character from Jurassic Park when he says in response to the possiblity of two females breeding, "No, I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way." Now I'm not trying to say the Twitter hasn't made a contribution, but if past revolutions taught us anything it is that the freedom tends to find a way to rear its head and it will take unpredictable, and sometimes violent, paths to get there. In this case that path happens to be some stupid fad that lonely people use to disseminate their most mundane thoughts to anyone who will listen, so let's not give the fad to much credit.
