The Day I Invented Twitter
I was working at a Coconuts music store in 1994 when I invented Twitter.
OK, I didn’t exactly invent Twitter. I mean, the internet didn’t even have a name yet. One person in my dorm had Prodigy while I still banged out research papers on a word processor. I couldn’t yet conceive of placing a “comments section” under an article or piece of writing so that anyone in the world could give their wholly unsolicited opinion, not to mention the mental leap it would take to decide to give the comments section its own life without the burden of having to be attached to a written piece. A living, sentient comment section commenting on EVERYTHING. At all times!
No, no. I didn’t do all that. But I did discover the soul of what Twitter would eventually be.
Coconuts was one of those last phase “music and movies” stores like FYE that tried to salvage the likes of Sam Goody and Suncoast Video by combining them into one mutant chain. It provided me with a lot of free music — most courtesy of sampler CDs sent over by record companies back when both of those things existed — and since I was in charge of restocking and ordering movie titles I could line the shelves with what was mandated by the company and whatever I wanted, which led to a heady mix of teen comedies, Mike Leigh films, and Fishin’ With the Big ‘Uns.*
*- Quick aside regarding “Big Uns.” I did not, in fact, special order that title. It was there when I started and was there when I left, despite my best efforts to convince someone to buy it. When the head office mandated that we attempt “add on” sales at the register, including keychains and these little razor-like devices designed to help you open CD packaging (yes, for real), I decided I would offer customers Fishin’ With the Big Uns as a last minute impulse buy until my manager told me to stop it.
Working at Coconuts was typical tedious retail, but at least my manager was lax about the in-store music policy — my track of choice was “You Suck” by The Murmurs just for the collective neck snapping that would occur then the sweet angelic voices sang “Now there’s dust on my guitar/You fuck!” — and not exactly taxing. My manager — let’s call him “Dave” because that was, in fact, his name. If you’re able to piece together his identity from anything else mentioned in this story than all I can say is, thank you for reading this, Mr. Wayne — was a ball of stress and anger. But at least he was a ball of stress and anger that tended to explode in humorous rather than violent ways. Not that the potential for violence wasn’t there. Even though he was short and not physically intimidating, you definitely got the sense that if you angered him to the point of physical altercation he may lose the fight but you’d walk way missing something, too. An eye. An ear. Something. He’d not go quietly.
Anyway, the most frequent source of Dave-related anger was Ticketmaster. Although our Coconuts was a licensed Ticketmaster point of sale, we didn’t physically sell any tickets. We could help you order them, but we could not hold them, put them in an envelope behind the counter while you ran to the bank, or give you a refund. This did not stop people from asking for all of these things all of the time, which drove Dave to many a window-rattling shouting match with an irate customer.
On one such occasion, the gentleman in question decided to up the ante on 5’4” Dave and invite him to settle the score physically in the parking lot. Dave refused, of course, which prompted the man to sneer, “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.”
My ears perked up. Standing a few feet away restocking Rush CDs, I looked up and barked a laugh that caused everyone in the sparsely filled store to turn in my direction. “That’s a line from Road House!” I shouted, because back then you couldn’t Google or IMDB a movie, you had to have bad movies permanently etched into your memory by endless late night hours of unsupervised cable TV watching. That’s the way it was and we LIKED IT!
Dave laughed at the guy. Other customers laughed. The angry guy went beet red. The tension was diffused because now everyone thought of this guy as a joke and not a threat. I mean, Road House? And not even a Swayze line? He had to quote the creepy line spoken by one of the villains? And he meant it seriously?
In this moment, the soul of Twitter hatched. I understood the power of weaponized arcane knowledge. How pop culture would be mined as a source of not only empty threats, but the means to de-power those threats. People would borrow from versions of toughness or intelligence or goodness or anarchy that they had seen in movies and on TV and use them as blunt tools to attack perfect strangers. One slip-up, though, and millions more faceless pop culture warriors will rise up and use your obvious plagiarism or misquoted line against you as you burn. It’s “Well, actually” as nuclear deterrent.
It was what Twitter would become. What we’d all become. But back then, in the innocent haze of the early 90s, we were just people. Violent, petty, sarcastic, annoying, asshole people. And no one else had to know.
