ICYMI | Twitter Is Dead (Really, We Mean It)

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News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2026

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by The Atlantic staff writer and host of the Galaxy Brain podcast, Charlie Warzel. Charlie has been following the demise of Twitter, now called X, since Elon Musk took over in 2022. While many of Musk’s decisions have prompted people to declare the end of the app, the introduction of a new location feature undermines almost all of what was left of its relevance. Can we finally call it? Is this Twitter’s official time of death? This podcast is produced by Daisy Rosario, Vic Whitley-Berry, and Kate Lindsay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, it's Kate. As you can probably hear I'm at the airport, but I wanted to hop on before today's episode to quickly note that we recorded this episode before the recent developments where Elon Musk-Rock AI generated sexual images of children. We will talk more about this at a later day. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, good for you. Please enjoy the last days of your holiday. But that news makes this episode's core idea even more apt. So please enjoy
0:26.7	and happy new year. Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I, or in case you missed it, Slate's
0:48.3	podcast about internet culture.
0:50.7	And today our guest is Charlie Worsell, a staff at The Atlantic, who also hosts the technology podcast Galaxy Brain.
0:57.1	Charlie, welcome to the show.
0:59.3	Thank you for having me.
1:00.4	Charlie and I used to work together, and I typed way back when, and then I was like, what was the year?
1:04.5	And it's 2022, which is actually not way back when at all.
1:07.3	That was only three years ago, but it feels like another lifetime.
1:18.1	But despite working together, I don't actually think I know the answer to this question,
1:22.3	which is the question we ask all first time guests, which is what was your first internet memory?
1:28.3	It is supremely wholesome.
1:31.2	Like, so, so ridiculous.
1:34.4	We got the, I want to say it was 1994, I think, and it was President's Day around that time.
1:44.1	Or no, it was Martin Luther King Day.
1:46.5	Like when, like it was that long weekend.
1:48.6	It was really snowy out.
1:50.3	And I got permission to like install American Online.
1:54.5	It took it like a day to boot up.
1:56.7	So that's Sunday night.
1:57.9	And then Monday morning I was like, I'm going to go check this thing out. And there was a short video clip of the I Have a Dream speech. Oh, my God. Literally, I was like, what's this? And I was like, cool. Like, content aside, I was like, you can watch a video on the internet. And it was like, it probably took like six hours to load, you know, that 15 second clip of him. But I was just like, I'm in, I'm in. We can consume video. So, but it ended up
2:23.1	being as, as wholesome as you could have ever expected. And it was just totally downhill from there.
	...

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