This film shows how a ‘hallucinogenically optimistic’ vision descended into the hellscape we know today. Young, confident men really should not rule the internet …
It turns out that Mike Judge’s supposed sitcom Silicon Valley was a documentary after all. My bad, as the people young and in touch enough with the world to have known this all along may still say.
Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a 75-minute CNN film chronicling the rise, fall and possibly end of the social media site that was launched by a group of eager young things in 2006 amid a widespread belief – at least in the Valley – in the power of the internet to remake the world in radically better ways. This, a co-founder or two has come to consider since, may have been a “hallucinogenically optimistic” view. Well, we were all young once. Although that feels – and in no small measure because of Twitter – like a very long time ago.
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