When the Bluebird dies…

DALL·E + Me | prompt: death of a bluebird in a cage in realistic 3D style

The MIT futurists are sounding the alarm that Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history, warning that we’re going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.

When the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground, a significant portion of humanity’s history and knowledge went up in smoke. Some claim this single incident slowed the progress of civilization by at least a century, as most of the original manuscripts the library housed were unique and irreplaceable. Just imagine where we could be today if someone didn’t bring a faulty torch to the world’s first largest papyrus storage facility.

We can speculate endlessly on what was lost in the Alexandria library fire. But half a million ancient papyri found at the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt at the end of the 19th century may give us a clue. Only five thousand documents from that treasure trove have been published to date, representing less than two percent of the total. And what amazing long-lost knowledge has been revealed thus far?! Here is a papyrus written in the first century:

Translation of this papyrus note found at the Oxyrhynchus: “Apion and Epimas say to their very dear Epaphroditus: If you let us bugger you and it’s OK with you, we shall stop thrashing you — if you let us bugger you. Keep well! Keep well!”

The translation of the note reads as follows: “Apion and Epimas say to their very dear Epaphroditus: If you let us bugger you and it’s OK with you, we shall stop thrashing you — if you let us bugger you. Keep well! Keep well!”

Now let’s compare our friendly papyrus note to a contemporary sample illustrating the majority of obscure knowledge floating in the vast Bluebird archive that clocks 7.1 billion visits a month:

This tweet was identified as the most representative sample of Twitter’s content. It emerged as the result of algorithmic content analysis of Twitter’s entire archive to date conducted in secret by dissenting Twitter analytics staff opting to remain anonymous in fear of reprisals from sleeper muskrats. /j

At 12:53PM on October 3, 2015, Pat Tobin of Taste Factory filed an openly public note using his iPhone access to the Bluebird archive:

YANKEE DOODLE: *sticks feather in his cap* This is called macaroni

YANKEE DOODLE’S FRIEND: Ok, cool. Listen man, everybody’s worried about u

And a thousand years from now the most prominent scholars attending The Futurological Congress (most of whom will be quantum algorithmic entities) might be debating how could their present shape their future had certain @elonmusk not brought a sink to the Bluebird archive.

After Googol number of quantum calculations, they will conclude with high probabilistic confidence that their existence would have emerged much earlier; especially should their understanding of the Bluebird archive be extrapolated from this single, most-likely-to-survive-all-others, tweet:

Social media is the fertilizer of our collective intellectual heritage (as almost everything else that has ever been published to date, to be fair). While you are deciding whether to agree with this argument, you should recognize that thinking is a fermentation-based process resulting from the decay of ingested material. The results of this process vary significantly depending on the quality rather than the quantity of the material that fuels it. And good luck to you all attempting to extract nourishment directly from the fertilizer.

As we might be approaching the moment when the bluebird can sing no longer, before lamenting its departure, let us remember the effects of firecrackers on long-term accumulation and haphazard storage of fertilizer.

Only time will tell whether we all just got #muskrolled.