The dread pirate Billy Bones is drinking himself to death, hiding in constant terror, at the Admiral Benbow. One day, a blind man presses a piece of paper into his hand, black on one side. It’s a judgement of guilt, but before the death sentence can be passed Bones suffers a massive stroke induced by fear and alcoholism and expires right there and then. Regardless, a band of pirates arrive and pillage the inn in search of a treasure map.
So begins Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which I’ve been thinking about a lot in the build up to Twitter’s 20-year anniversary. Over that period of time the social media app has dictated national politics, birthed and destroyed satellite media companies reliant on traffic referrals and become the place to consume immediate information about global events. There’s also a healthy dose of street-violence porn, war-crimes porn, and actual-humans-having-sex porn.
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