Casually, colloquially—sifting through photo albums, sorting through obsolete tech in our parents’ homes, watching TikToks ironically warning of TikTok-induced brainrot—we refer to “Y2K” as the start of a new digital frontier. Yet a phenomenon far greater than any symbolic system error would follow just six years later—the genesis of social media as we know it. In July 2006, Twitter (now X) was...










