The Tweet Hereafter is a new website with a very simple concept, posting the final tweets of well known people.
The founder was interviewed by our friend Jian Ghomeshi (I was on his program once, that counts as friendship, right?) and gives a very good pitch for the site, which is that attaching profound significance the last word gravitas of famous people is a little ridiculous on Twitter. Especially since Twitter lends itself to totally goofy, absurd posts like “Cant wait 2 c u gurl much <3 lol” or “This hambuger is HELLA dope.”
I don’t know if it’s necessarily honoring those who died. Not everything has to be about honoring the dead. But it’s not disrespecting them either. It’s just an honest reflection of people’s engagement with the modern world. More importantly it is a memento mori for the fact that we can die at any time in completely out of left field/ insane ways that cannot be predicted.
As an example, here are some tweets that TOTALLY could have been my deep, profound last words if I had died in some kind of accident in the past few weeks.
The site is not “morbid.” At least not in the sense that people love to throw that term around. Morbid, unfortunately, has become a catch-all term to describe anything remotely related to our relationship with death. Any interest in death (or how death happens) can be labeled “morbid” as a way to dismiss it. As if interest in mortality is somehow less valid than other interests.
Tweet Hereafter isn’t showing you murder scenes or dead bodies or describing in graphic detail how someone was killed. They’re simply showing you a series of innocuous Twitter posts and letting you draw your own conclusions about what they might mean, and where death may be going in the future.