I dislike Twitter, but I think it's more than junk food. Its merits are about speed. When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes

I dislike Twitter, but I think it's more than junk food. Its merits are about speed. When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes processing by at least one human to be a thing, with associated words, that you can talk about. And when it comes to the collective consciousness, there's a similar dynamic at play. You have maybe 24 hours, maybe less, before the narratives settle down into "what happened" and "an alternative view of what happened". Twitter's design is such that it lets you watch and potentially participate in that process in real time. There are a lot of problems with letting it be your only source of news, but if you decide to do that anyway you'll notice that the rest of the news sources are two days behind you. Like you already heard about that thing, and you know how it got that way and saw glimmers of how it could've been a different way. In some sense, Twitter decides what makes it into the other information sources because information spreads across it faster than others. By the time somebody's bothering with a long form post on substack, Twitter has already decided that it's newsworthy. It's the quantum foam from which real news condenses. It's first-mover advantage for narratives.