Around March 10 2020, I was puzzling over the strange new virus, when someone on Twitter posted an essay by a guy I’d never heard of: Tomas Pueyo, who works in tech in Silicon Valley. I read it twice. “The coronavirus is coming to you,” wrote Pueyo. “It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly?.?.?.?When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed. Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways. Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die. They will have to decide which patient gets the oxygen and which one dies. The only way to prevent this is social distancing today.”
Pueyo’s essay, which swiftly notched up 40 million views and his follow-up, “The Hammer and The Dance”, which correctly predicted a vaccine within months, foretold what was coming. And I encountered both, thanks to my addiction to Twitter. With Elon Musk seemingly about to buy the social-media platform for $44bn, let me say something unpopular: Twitter is the best global information and ideas exchange ever. It’s also very funny.
It gets a terrible press. Even “the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as ‘this hellsite’”, notes Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. That’s fair enough. Twitter is swarming with bots, disinformation and fake accounts (Mitt Romney used to tweet under the pseudonym “Pierre Delecto”). Worst, as Donald Trump himself told the FT while he was president: “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here?.?.?.?I don’t have to go to the fake media.”