It's a corruption of "do something" in German: "Tu etwas" -> "Tu was" "Tu wat" -> tuwat and an allusion to a very early conference announcement in the German h

It's a corruption of "do something" in German: "Tu etwas" -> "Tu was" "Tu wat" -> tuwat and an allusion to a very early conference announcement in the German hacker scene with the headline "TUWAT.TXT". https://berlin.ccc.de/wiki/TUWAT.TXT https://berlin.ccc.de/wiki/TUWAT.TXT "Do something" in German has ~the same connotations as in English: the situation is bad and you urgently need to start fixing it.