Initial Reflections on 15 years of Twitter

Since the ongoing implosion of X, née Twitter, began, I’ve been combing through my archive of 15,000-ish tweets across 15 years since April 20, 2008.

It’s the longest record of anything in my life, stretching back further than my oldest Day One entry1 2.

I remember almost all of it. Sometimes that’s good: starting in 2017, I published almost 90,000 words of Bible analysis to Twitter. Sometimes that’s bad: I spent a lot of days over the years angry about American politics—left and right—screaming impotently into the void instead of building something valuable.

I’m trying to change that; moving here is helping. I find that here I write with more intentionality. The sense of presence, permanence, and possession encourages me to think more—not too much more, I hope—before hitting “Post.”


  1. I suppose there is a longer photographic record of me, but since I didn’t get my first camera until high school, many of those photos reflect my physical evolution, not my intellectual, emotional, or spiritual evolution. Important, but incomplete. ↩︎

  2. I should have guessed dpreview has a 14-page review of that camera. Its 1.9 megapixels and 32MB of Compact Flash were precious to me; I’m glad the Internet remembers. ↩︎

Jerry Towler @jatowler