Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks

Hi, and welcome to the first edition of What’s Next in Tech. Every Tuesday, we’ll explain what’s up in emerging technology. Today, we hear from a Twitter insider who says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform. Plus, learn how Big Tech could help Iranian protesters and take a deep dive into Alphabet X’s new effort to combat climate change.

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This is how Twitter is breaking

On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.

A few users who pressed the retweet button were met with a manual retweet, a crude, copy and paste approximation of how the function should appear. But its return wasn’t Musk’s latest attempt to appease users. Instead, it was the first public crack in the edifice of Twitter’s codebase—a blip on the seismometer that warns of a bigger earthquake to come.?

While many of Musk’s detractors may wish the platform goes through the equivalent of thermonuclear destruction, the collapse of something like Twitter happens gradually. Here’s how it’s likely to play out.

Big Tech could help Iranian protesters by using an old tool

After the Iranian government took extreme measures to limit internet use in response to the pro-democracy protests that have filled Iranian streets since mid-September, Western tech companies scrambled to help restore access to Iranian citizens.

So far, the workarounds deployed by Signal, Google, and Starlink aren’t enough. But there is something else that Big Tech could do, according to some pro-democracy activists and experts on digital freedom. Although it has received little attention—despite being something several major service providers offered until just a few years ago—reinstating the technology could be Big Tech’s best chance at getting Iranian back online, and fast. Read the story.

Inside Alphabet X’s new effort to combat climate change with seagrass

For years, Tidal, a project within Alphabet’s “moonshot factory” X division, has been using cameras, computer vision, and machine learning to get a better understanding of life beneath the oceans.

Now, Tidal hopes its system can help preserve and restore the world’s seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and store away far more carbon dioxide.

The project’s ambitious mission is to improve our understanding of underwater ecosystems in order to inform and incentivize efforts to protect the oceans amid mounting threats. It could also provide crucial answers to the many questions about seagrass’ role in both sucking up carbon and regulating the climate. Read the story.

Get ahead with our most-discussed stories:

1. Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history — What happens when the world’s knowledge is held in a quasi-public square owned by a private company that could soon go out of business?
2. A wrongfully terminated Chinese-American scientist was just awarded nearly $2 million in damages — It’s been almost a decade since an unfounded accusation of spying turned Chinese-American hydrologist Sherry Chen’s life upside down. Last week, she finally received something like justice.
3. How to befriend a crow — Our reporter watched a bunch of crows on TikTok and now they’re trying to connect with some local birds.

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Image credits: John Lamparski/Nurphoto via AP; Agoes Rudianto