Twitter is a medium in which people are inspired to instinctively fire off their dumbest thoughts. A few years ago I had the horrific realization that I started mine in college, when I was the dumbest and drunkest I’ll hopefully ever be. It hit me that anybody could dig back into my history, and find the poor, afflicted soul I’d been, back when the only way I could express my feelings was by tweeting Japandroids lyrics. So, I found one of those websites that deletes your Twitter history, and sandblasted several years worth of embarrassing bullshit so that I could only be judged by the embarrassing bullshit I say today, not because of something I don’t have any memory of ever thinking.
Thus, I’ve gone through my day without feeling any acute pangs of embarrassment over my past self. Earlier this afternoon, programmer Andy Baio tweeted out a link that, upon clicking, allows any user to see what their Twitter timeline would’ve looked like a decade ago, based on the people they follow today. It’s a charming window into the past; Twitter wasn’t so widely used a decade ago, nor was it so miserable, so much of the posts read as though they’re written in another language. My timeline, ten years ago, was mostly just people talking about their day, just as the website was originally intended to be used for. There were no irony jokes, no overused memes, no white nationalism, no president threatening nuclear war. It was really a nicer time.
Want to see what your Twitter timeline would've looked like 10 years ago today, if you followed all the same people you do now? https://t.co/41a6iQcYhc
��� Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 24, 2018
Mostly, though. Unfortunately, there is a downside. Aside from all the innocuous pleasantries found on the retro timeline, there’s also unflattering evidence of how someone used to be, when they had not lived so much, and — more importantly — not learned how to curate their thoughts when speaking to a wider audience. It’s charming to read someone’s “Time for packing” tweet from 2009; it’s less charming to read a man calling someone a pussy, as I did just now, years before he’d overcome such retrograde behavior. As I scroll down my past timeline, I do it almost fearfully, aware that at any moment the idea of someone as I know them today could be shattered by the violent reality of how they used to be.
They say the internet is forever, but that’s not exactly true. Much of what we’ve typed here has been resigned to the digital dustbin, as servers go dark and websites scrub their archives, with only the relatively unstable Wayback Machine left to preserve it all. Moreover, we have the ability to whitewash our own history as necessary, which is why those traces of my 2008 self are no longer available for you to see. But aside from the obvious charms of the look back, the past timeline is an unsettling reminder that that the person everyone used to be is never so far out of sight, even if he’s come a long way.
Is this banal fun worth the disruption of our present day? Is it, really? Turn back, I beseech you, before the fun curdles and you scroll down to find out your co-worker tweeted something like “I’m tooooo hiiiiiiiiigh” back when he was really too high, and thought nobody was looking.
