I just realized something funny about Twitter, and that’s all thanks to (of all things) a 10 year old Doctor Who audio story.
So 2023 is Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary. I was in the mood to relisten to some of the audio/radio stories that Doctor Who put out for their 50th anniversary back in 2013. One of those stories is “Babblesphere.”
In “Babblesphere,” the 4th Doctor and Romana land on a planet called Hephastos that’s occupied by humans. The people of Hephastos all have chips implanted in their skulls that connect them to a network called... well, the Babblesphere. The Babblesphere is basically Twitter, except you send/read tweets with your mind instead of your phone. The main conflict/danger is that the AI who moderates the Babblesphere is sick and tired everyone’s boring mundane tweets, and it’s starting to kill the most boring users by overloading their chips and melting their brains.
Obviously, this story is making very unsubtle commentary on how dull Twitter is. It’s just a bunch of random people with nothing interesting to say, and they’re all droning on about what they ate for breakfast or how much laundry detergent they just used.
Except... that’s not how we see Twitter anymore. Ask most people these days, and Twitter (when it’s not being run into the ground) is a crucible of chronically online hot takes, volatile political rants, disinformation, and other shit that slowly chips away at your mental health. It’s a whole different beast.
I just found that so jarring. I remember loving “Babblesphere” when it first came out 10 years ago, but now it feels like it’s passing commentary on a whole different social media platform. Twitter used to be so humdrum (with the occasional funny tweet from Wendy’s), but now it’s incredibly toxic and falling apart at the seams.
