In 2012, when A Karner blue butterfly in Indiana Dunes National Seashore Park suddenly died one summer due to an increasing climate disaster, said Gregor W. Schuurman, who was working as a conservation biologist at the time. , there is an epiphany. His refusal to accept the changing patterns of the planet was starting to feel wrong. It prompted Schuurman to join the National Park Service’s newly formed adaptation group as an ecologist, where, among a host of other duties, he was tasked with finding searching for breakthrough solutions — or, alternative futures, as I think among them — confronting a relentless climate reality: that everything, at some point, will come to an end.
The main goal of the adaptation team is to explore what possibilities might exist on the other side of extinction. Recently Schuurman and his colleagues have been keeping an eye on me. One of the popular stories about the news that Elon Musk bought Twitter — in one $44 billion cultural shock deal—And finally, in some form, came the pioneering social media site. The blue bird suffered the same fate as the Karner blue butterfly.
It’s too early to say how bad Twitter could be, or better, under Musk, but that hasn’t stopped users from speculating. The platform redefines instant communication and voice for generation-defining movements — one of the few places where niche online communities have proven necessary shelters even when harassment breaks out — it will end soon.
Exaggeration is instinctive on Twitter. So it’s no surprise to hear of a heralded apocalypse: that the eccentric and polarizing billionaire planned to turn the site into a trolls’ paradise under the guise of free speech (a with better tools and unchallenged by moderators), creating a domino effect that would spark a mass exodus of Twitter loyalists. Prognosticators have warned of an exodus of such impact that the site itself will lose what has made it an essential resource for countless communities of people.
But endings can also be a motivator. In fact, the back end is the main context in which the social web needs to be understood. Essentially, a social network is a collection of apps and websites where people openly and sometimes openly combine, practice identities, and troll strangers. In this online ecosystem, platforms are built, adopted, and abandoned or decommissioned with frequency; some 70% of startups does not last more than five years.
The digital exchange of which we are today benefactors has been completed from the loss. And it continues like that. Genius ideas created from the graveyard of what was already there. All modern platforms are created from, on top of, or in relation to the end of another. The brutality of that reality is also its beauty: Ending is an inevitable part of the social network’s lifecycle. And after what’s passed, what’s lost, or over, new platforms are built from pieces of old ones. There is no Facebook without MySpace (and no MySpace without Friendster). There is no Spotify without Napster. There is no Instagram without Tumblr. The life nature of a foundation is, in part, the product of what precedes it.
