Read on Twitter
Why did I get verified? Well, like countless other blue checks, I just happened to be working at a glossy media org that Twitter was attempting to wine and dine. Now, through no effort of my own, I am part of a seemingly permanent social overclass in a highly consequential forum
If I had all the riches in all the heavens, I could never buy something as valuable to my career as my blue checkmark has been. It has opened countless doors for me and fundamentally redefined my presence in the eyes of hundreds of millions. I didn’t even ask for it. Insanity
What I’m really saying is someone needs to write the history of the mid-‘10s Media Twitter party scenes in NYC, DC, and CA, which hastened the apocalypse and produced many of the worst things/people we have to deal with in public life now
I say this because I was a part of that scene, often a truly stupid part, and it is insane that this terrible app, which changed the world for the worse, was largely guided by people who either were or were trying to fuck stoned 20something morons with logorrhea and a press pass
The mass-verification of BuzzFeed employees, alone, is worthy of close study. The BF Millennial diaspora has gone in a lot of... uh... different directions, and brought their vague-but-imposing checks as armor wherever they’ve done battle
I appear to have gotten the time span slightly incomplete, but the point stands https://twitter.com/jenleereeves/status/1350624394339622915
I can’t write this book, nor could I ever speak on the record for it, but it needs to exist and we will all take our lumps
