Daily Show producer David Javerbaum, owner and proprietor of the legendary @TheTweetOfGod, dropped a Nietzschean bomb on the world of Twitter today: God is dead. Or his Twitter account is, anyway. Let’s start with Javerbaum’s explanation, as told to The Frame, because it’s the funniest part of the whole story:
“It’s been taking up too much of my time and energy and mental agility. … I just have to, at a certain point, just cut that cord. And the point was this weekend,” Javerbaum told The Frame, explaining, “The triggering event was I got hacked. The Twitter account got hacked. God got hacked, which wasn’t surprising. There were a number of obscene messages put up there briefly and then removed. There was a pornographic picture of Garfield. I just have to move on.”
Javerbaum’s 2.3 million followers will now be Twitter atheists, but it seems like it’s the right move for the man behind the curtain. He even made some very good points about how Twitter fame alters your brain:
“Working on twitter for a long time, it just miniaturizes the way you think, because that’s the medium. You’re a miniaturist. And if I’m going to work on other things that require anything longer — i.e. anything else in the world — I need to stop doing that…
I think the thing I’ll miss most is the thing I’m leaving deliberately,” he says. “You tweet something and immediately you see people retweeting it and it feels like, ‘Oh, you have made people laugh. You have caused people to react.
And it’s a rush. It’s a limbic brain rush to do that. But heroin is also a limbic brain rush, and that is problematic.”
Javerbaum, who has also worked with James Corden on CBS, gave the last word to his wife:
My husband @TheTweetOfGod and I are leaving the Twitterverse for a new cosmos. There’s milk in the fridge. Good luck and godbye.
— Mrs. God (@TweetOfMrsGod) February 15, 2016