This day in history.
On July 15, 1799, a French soldier digging a fort in Egypt turned over a slab of black stone covered in writing — THE ROSETTA STONE. The same message, carved three times, in three languages: hieroglyphic, Demotic, Greek. Two of them, nobody alive could read. It took over twenty years to crack — and when it broke, it handed back a civilization that had gone silent for more than 1,400 years. One message. Two decades to read it.
On July 15, 2006 — 207 years later, to the day — a website launched where a message was capped at 140 characters and hit the whole planet the instant you pressed send. No scholars. No decades. One message: about six seconds to read. Roughly 500 million of them go out every day, in nearly every language on Earth. It was called TWITTER.
The Rosetta message was carved to last forever, and almost vanished. Today’s messages are built to vanish — and there are 500 million a day.
We got infinitely better at sending, and worse at keeping.