Jack Dorsey

 The Exit Code:  A Jack Dorsey Message

By Candace Goodman | The Good Blog

This is fiction, but only barely. Jack Dorsey has always been more myth than man, a silent architect whose creation outgrew its code. What follows is a letter he never wrote, drawn from public fragments and imagined truth—a final transmission from the man who built the machine, then watched it burn. My response comes after. Because someone has to answer.

 Letter from Jack Dorsey

Typed from memory. Folded between regret and resolve.

To the Ones Still Online,

It was March 2006. The idea came to me on a walk. Not a lightning bolt, more like a signal—soft, rhythmic, persistent.

What if we could broadcast status in real-time? Not blog posts. Not essays. Just… moments. A quick, simple answer to a simple question:

What are you doing?

I wrote it down in a notebook. Showed it to Noah Glass first. Then Biz, then Ev. We were all trying to save Odeo—our podcast company—after Apple pulled the rug out with iTunes. The room was quiet, mostly. No one was sure if 160 characters could do anything meaningful.

But I believed. It wasn’t just a feature. It was a pulse.

I pitched it like this: imagine a world where everyone is connected not by speeches, but by whispers. By the smallest unit of thought. A global status stream—open, live, human.

I called it twttr. Stripped of vowels, like how life feels when you remove the noise.

My dream?
Not news.
Not trending.
Just presence.

I imagined a world where you could walk through Tokyo or Lagos or Chicago and feel—really feel—what others were feeling. Ambient empathy, mapped in real time. No gatekeepers. Just connection.

It sounds naïve now. But I thought we could decentralize the human experience. I thought we could build something that scaled intimacy without distortion.

Instead, we built a mirror that cracked into a thousand echo chambers.

I didn’t predict the retweet mobs. The dopamine addiction. The bots. The violence. We handed the world a microphone with no volume knob—and called it free speech.

When the toxicity grew, I retreated. I thought restraint was wisdom. That silence was leadership. That if I didn’t interfere, the network would self-correct.

But platforms don’t fix themselves. And neither do people.

I tried to hold two worlds at once—Square’s optimism and Twitter’s entropy. I failed at both.

Elon came later. He wanted the cage match. I wanted the garden. I handed it to him because I thought chaos might cure itself.

He promised openness. He delivered spectacle.

He didn’t break Twitter. He revealed what we never secured: trust, moderation, humanity.

I won’t take full credit. Or full blame. But I will take this moment to say:

What we built was never neutral. It was always a choice.

Bluesky isn’t a sequel. It’s a sigh. A hope that maybe the next version of connection doesn’t have to be fatal.

My utopia was never likes or followers. It was a lattice of empathy. I still believe in it.

Just not the way I used to.

—Jack

 Utopias Break Louder Than They Build

The story of Twitter’s birth has been told a hundred ways—but always at a distance. In truth, it was a pivot from failure. Odeo was crashing. Steve Jobs had moved into podcasting. Jack, quiet and observant, pitched status as connection. His idea was small, almost laughably so. “What are you doing?” in 160 characters.

But from that modest pitch came the seed of something massive—and dangerous.

Jack’s dream of “ambient empathy” is real. I believe he meant it. He wanted to give the world a sensory net. He thought brevity would bring clarity. He thought connection would bring compassion. He thought removing the noise would reveal the signal.

But connection without context becomes weapon. And brevity without responsibility becomes outrage.

From 2007’s SXSW launch to 2009’s Iranian protests, Twitter moved from curiosity to necessity. By 2011, it was pulsing through revolutions. By 2016, it was electing presidents and radicalizing teenagers. And by 2020, it had turned into a digital minefield where cancel culture, harassment, conspiracy, and community lived on the same timeline.

Jack didn’t code that. But he didn’t stop it either.

He spiritualized his withdrawal. Fasting, floating, watching. Meanwhile, the company was overrun. Moderation teams begged for policy reform. Trust and Safety sounded the alarms. And Jack meditated.

Then came Elon.

The libertarian philosopher-king with a meme addiction and a messiah complex. Jack didn’t just approve the sale. He blessed it. He called Elon “the singular solution” to save Twitter.

Instead, Elon opened the floodgates. Mass layoffs. Subscription-based verification. Censorship disguised as freedom. And a slow rebrand into a dystopian sandbox called X.

Jack’s utopia shattered. But utopias always do. The problem isn’t in the dream. It’s in the power required to enforce it.

So now, Jack builds again. Bluesky. Smaller. Cleaner. Maybe even noble. But the internet has changed. We’ve changed. What once connected us now commodifies us. We speak less to be heard, more to be seen.

Still, this letter—the one he never wrote—feels like a necessary crack in the mythology.

Because Jack Dorsey wasn’t a villain. He was a dreamer who mistook neutrality for nobility. A monk who gave the world its loudest weapon—and tried to solve it with silence.

And in that contradiction lies the legacy: a platform that made us more connected, more informed, and somehow more broken.

We all built Twitter. Jack just gave us the blueprint.

—Candace Goodman, The Good Blog