“Was that an earthquake?” I wondered, gazing at the vase of dried out Trader Joe’s flowers that was rumbling on my table.
For a brief moment, the internet was at its finest. I was too stunned to comprehend what I was witnessing, but the tweets immediately flooded in (which, in that moment of surprise, I refuse to call “X posts”).
“Did we just have an earthquake in New York?”
“Was that an earthquake??????”
“Did everyone just feel that or…?”
“THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS I MOVED AWAY FROM CALIFORNIA”
“So excited that us east coasters can finally get earthquake Twitter”
It’s a rare occurrence for something to happen so suddenly and unite an entire region. People from New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York City, and Massachusetts all chimed in on my timeline, unabashedly sharing their experiences. It was like old-school Twitter, where you could post something as mundane as “eating a ham and cheese sandwich” and it wasn’t ironic. You were invited to say exactly how you felt, and everyone else was doing it too. It was like old LiveJournal or Facebook statuses, where you could simply state “is feeling sleepy” without worrying if anyone cared.
People on microblogging sites (it wasn’t just “X” – I see you, Bluesky) had already established the size of the earthquake, confirmed it as an actual earthquake, and started making jokes about the situation before those less chronically online even realized what had happened.
“The window just blew so strong it shook our entire house?!?” my friend Andrea texted me.
“Andrea, I think there was an earthquake,” I responded. “My apartment just shook and everyone in New York is freaking out.” I wasn’t spelling very well in those initial moments of shock.
“I leave for ONE WEEKEND,” texted Dan, who is watching all of this unfold from a place beyond our wildest horrors – the Atlanta airport.
It was like a middle school cafeteria, hours after an unplanned fire alarm went off. We were all buzzing with a certain ignorant excitement and awe, bouncing off each other’s surprise and exaggerating our memories of what happened, turning it into some sort of legendary event. None of us could focus on work. On Slack, Ron said he thought it was a train and his chair shook a little. Matt said in California, it usually felt like a car crash. Dom, who used to live in LA, confirmed it was indeed an earthquake. Brian said, as a Californian on the east coast, he didn’t even feel it. And then I shared my own riveting account of this brief moment we all just experienced: I thought it was my neighbor’s washing machine.
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter and critics fled to other platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and even ones that no longer exist like Pebble, we mourned the end of an era. There used to be only one option for microblogging – Twitter – unless you were really into open source federated software before 2022. Moments like these remind us of the true value of the so-called “public town square” – it’s a way for us to know we aren’t crazy, or that our boiler isn’t exploding, before anyone else even knows what’s going on.
But as the most populous town square becomes increasingly hostile to those who aren’t crypto bros or Tesla stockholders, we get a sense of what we’re missing. On Threads, people are talking about cherry blossoms. On Facebook, I’m delighted to learn there’s a new grocery store coming to my neighborhood, but no one is talking about the earthquake.
As someone who has lived on the east coast my entire life, I experienced something I never had before as the ground shook beneath me. And immediately, scrolling through my Twitter feed, I felt nostalgic for what the internet can offer at its best: a sense of peace, comfort, and camaraderie in knowing that I’m not alone.