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It's recently been announced that a small startup called Operation Bluebird is trying to relaunch classic Twitter, arguing that the Elongated Muskrat has allowed the name and logo to lapse. I'm no legal expert, but there may be something of a leg to stand on. As a rule, a trademark is only enforceable so long as the company in question keeps using the mark consistently. That is, if a company rebrands, giving itself a new name and logo, they lose all rights to its previous assets. This is intended to encourage competition rather than allowing companies to essentially sit on their rights. There’s a lot more to this sort of move, but those are the broad strokes. 

As for the new Twitter, it’s set to launch in early 2026 and is currently letting people reserve usernames and handles for when it finally launches. As of this writing, it’s at a little over 150,000 applicants. 

I don’t intend to be one of them. 

I can respect the effort on display here, and there’s clearly a love and affection for what Twitter once was, but I don’t think there’s any chance of catching the same lightning in a bottle. Twitter’s acquisition by Musk fractured a big part of the social media landscape, and I think things are all the better for it. 

Once upon a time, I called Twitter my favorite social networking site, warts and all. It’s hard to describe what exactly I loved about it, but if I had to put it into a single coherent thought, it had an immediacy and a conciseness to it that you didn’t really get out of other platforms. It took the status update aspect from the likes of MySpace and Facebook and made that the entire site. It was also very accessible. I’m old enough to remember when you could use text messaging to post Tweets, back in the days of flip phones and T9 predictive text. That may seem rather quaint now with smartphones, but this was kind of a big deal back in the day. You weren’t bound to a swivel chair in front of a desktop, you weren’t lugging a laptop, and you didn’t have to break the bank buying one of those new fangled smart devices that HTC was making. If you had a phone and a good connection, you could submit a small message to a public square. I remember once reading an article about some activist tweeting only one word: Arrested. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but you certainly couldn’t have made such a quick and concise post to such a wide audience while seated at your desktop as the SWAT team kicked your door in. 

Over time, the site evolved to include a few quality of life features, such as the ability to post images, the ability to post links in a way that didn’t count against your character limit, and eventually a doubling of the character limit from around 120 to 240. On a side note, I love the reason this upgrade happened. The story goes that Twitter wasn’t very big in Japan until a massive earthquake hit the nation. Suddenly, people all over Japan were signing up for Twitter to keep in touch during the crisis. That may not seem like a big deal, but you have to consider that the Japanese language is built different from us European/Latin-based types. To a Japanese person, that 120 character limit may as well have been a 120 word limit since a single character in Japanese can be either a letter, a word, or even a short phrase depending on the usage. Microblogging was the chocolate to Kanji’s peanut butter. As word of these longer-than-normal tweets spread, people around the world wanted in. Obviously, you can’t change a language overnight and emojis can only get you so far, so Twitter opted to double the character limit. The platform’s biggest paradigm shift was done out of jealousy for the Japanese language. 

Despite all this, Twitter grew with the times by sticking to a very practical model. This drew in a lot of new users and eventually Twitter became the go-to place for news organizations to seek out statements from famous people who had now graced the platform with their presence. There would be an incident or scandal or some other controversy, the offending parties would release statements to Twitter (as opposed to directly to the press) and you’d see a screenshot of that tweet on the news, be it on the TV or on the website or anywhere else you’d get your news. There was a direct line between a person of importance and the general masses. Of course, this was a bit of an illusion as it was just as easy for a celebrity to post a Tweet themselves as it would be for them to hire a full-time social media manager to post on their behalf. Still, it came with a sense of authenticity. Barring any hacking, there wasn’t anything on that feed that a user wouldn’t want there. 

However, this wasn’t going to last. Nothing does. Something at sometime was going to come along and disrupt the whole operation. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Twitter was no exception.

The fall came in the form of a buyout by a narcissistic billionaire who felt that Twitter wasn’t being as transparent and honest as it should be with what kind of content was and wasn’t allowed on their site. One of the events preceding this takeover was Twitter banning a number of high profile users for violating terms of service, including Alex Jones and Donald Trump. This was viewed by Musk as Twitter not being a platform supporting free speech despite its insistence on being the digital village’s public square. Musk seems to have trouble grasping the fact that free speech does not extend to things like slander and libel or hate speech or calls for violence and harassment. His view seemed to be that people would get to say whatever they want and that the consequences of these actions would just somehow magically work themselves out. Ironically, he’d go back on this promise of totally free speech as he’d start cracking down on satire accounts or impersonations of people and organizations. 

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. 

So, what’s happened since Twitter imploded? We’ve seen a number of other social sites step up to fill the gap. The centralized source of direct information is now decentralized. It’s no longer “So and so Tweeted yesterday…” but now “The blah blah blah posted on Substack that…” or “What’s his name wrote on Medium...” or “… the company announced on its Threads account.” Among many other new names and faces to the scene. Sure, some of them have been around for some time, but now they’ve found a new purpose serving as a place of refuge for those fleeing the Muskrat. There’s no longer one name in the directory. The monopoly that Twitter built for itself through raw determination crumbled under its own weight and now it’s no longer top dog in the social media scene. 

In the end, people don’t need a new Twitter because they’ve already found one, whether it’s Bluesky or Threads or Substack or Medium or WordPress. While Operation Bluebird is more than welcome to prove me wrong, I don’t think they’re going to achieve what they set out to do because it’s physically impossible to replicate the success of Twitter. Even if they were to, what safeguards do they have against history repeating itself? 

In the interest of full disclosure, I left my Twitter account abandoned on the very day of my 15th anniversary of signing up. I keep it around for a few reasons, partly because it's costing Musk money to keep it up and running, but mostly because there's a number of very talented artists there who have yet to jump ship because they don't want to lose the audience they've built up over the years. 

18 DEC 25 THU Update: Well, this hit a snag earlier than I thought it would. 

Boof Jark: My AI Pledge

A wise man once said that one man’s software is another man’s AI. As such, it’s important we establish some kind of clear, working definition of what’s being referred to when it comes to AI-generated content. For example, the ghosts in Pac-Man are AI. That’s not what we’re talking about. Spellcheck is arguably a kind of AI, but it’s not what we’re talking about, and I’ll even give a pass to predictive text for reasons that will hopefully become clear as we progress. Case in point, I only had to write “prog” and follow it up with the tab key to write the rest of “progress”. Another writing tool I feel I should disclose use of is an oldie called Grammatik. It launched around 1981 by Aspen Software before eventually being absorbed into Corel's WordPerfect, which was how I was introduced to it circa mid 1990’s. Bear in mind, this was not a Large Language Model trained on all the text in the world. I have absolutely no idea how it worked, but it’s not important because outside of obvious things like run-ons caused by a misplaced period, I never relied on it more than I trusted my own two eyes giving my paper a once-over (and that was only the first line of defense). It was also oddly fixated on the idea of passive voice, a grammatical concept that I think I understand and I know I’ve had explained to me countless times, but I couldn’t spot it in the wild or stop myself from writing it if my life depended on it. If anyone knows a really good mnemonic for it, I’d love to hear it. It’s also worth noting that Grammatik couldn’t really learn as you wrote. At best, you could tell it what to ignore, but it wouldn’t remember what you told it to ignore the next time you reopened the document, so it was only useful if you wrote in crazy, uninterrupted marathon sessions a la Jack Kerouac. Most importantly, Grammatik couldn’t offer suggestions for how to revise something beyond “You’ve started every sentence in this paragraph with the same word. Avoid repetition.”, it certainly couldn’t offer suggestions about tone, and it definitely could not fabricate a full essay on my behalf from a briefly descriptive prompt. I was still doing the work, and that’s the key distinction to keep in mind. 

To put it another way: Who is driving the car? The one in the driver’s seat with the wheel in hand, or the one in the passenger seat giving directions? The officer who pulled you over already knows, but he’d really like to hear it from you. 

I don’t know if it was on Medium or Substack where I saw about a half-dozen AI generated images in a row while scrolling and saw red for a moment before closing the tab, toppling a chair, and storming out of the room grumbling about the decline of Western Civilization. That’s a slight exaggeration; I would never do that to a perfectly innocent chair. Besides, the last thing you want is to make a chair mad at you. They won’t stand for it. 

What upsets me most about this trend is the fact that these writers are often the first, loudest, and yet most eloquent at bemoaning the fates and predicaments of artists, creatives, and professionals in general in the face of this ever-changing landscape that AI is slowly consuming. It makes me want to grab them by the shoulders, shake them like they’re the first character to go hysterical in a disaster movie, and scream, “YOU ARE NOT HELPING!” and finish off with a slap across the cheek. For the record, I have the kind of upper body strength that makes Mr. Burns look like Sugar Ray Leonard at the height of his career, so if you’re afraid of this potentially becoming reality for you, rest assured you’ll barely feel a stiff breeze. I’ll also likely collapse from the exertion while breathily asking if you’ve had enough, so the only pain you’re guaranteed to feel in the whole ordeal is the pain in your sides from laughing.

I made a note on Substack (their version of a Tweet) to essentially complain and vent, vowing that if I saw an AI header image to an article, I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t addressing anyone in particular; it was not about naming and shaming. As you may have heard from your parents at one point while disciplining you, I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at what happened. Moreover, I'm saying this because I want you to do better, and I know you’re more than capable of it, whatever your self-doubt is saying about you right now. 

As for doing better, these are your options.

1. Learn to draw and/or take photos. 
2. Use a stock image service; you’ll be paying real artists or at least using works volunteered by willing artists. 
3. Commission a human artist directly. 

This is the part where I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the potential pitfall of my pledge in that I may well mistake something genuine for something AI-generated, therefore missing out on something authentic, inspiring, compelling, and any other praise I could throw at it. That said, let’s be real, a lot of what we collectively refer to as AI Slop is pretty samey. I think the best description I ever heard for it is, “Well-rendered but badly-drawn” with tells such as heavily-detailed shading and color gradients while the proper lacing of shoes and/or number of fingers on a hand is spotty at best. Basically, a painterly once-over of a hasty sketch. Even more basically, polished shit. There are other descriptors, but these are the most polite. 

“Well, those AI generators can make some really photorealistic results that are harder to detect, especially if you know how to—“ 

If you’re willing to put that much effort into hiding your use of AI, you have even less of an excuse to not employ any of the alternatives I’ve listed. 

Before I go, I’ll reward you for getting this far with an explanation of just what in Hel’s Realm Boof Jark is. I don’t know where it was posted, maybe Instagram or LinkedIn, but it was an image of two boats on the shore of a deserted island, one filled with fruits and vegetables (along with eggs and a rooster because MidJourney doesn't know how poultry reproduction works), the other filled with all manner of meats, including a package of Boof Jark. I mean, you seriously couldn’t be bothered to take the most basic pen tool and write some block letters on a white box? 

Speaking of handwriting, which I’m notably not using for this, I’ll close with a story about Bob Ross. He once received a letter from a fan saddened that he couldn’t follow along with the painting sessions because his hands shook too much. Bob Ross, being the absolute legend that is Bob Ross, assured this person, “Well, then you can draw trees better than I can, because trees are rarely straight.”

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