Venkatesh Rao

There is no stopping MAINCHAR. It is unclear why MAINCHAR is required of Twitter and not other social networks. Extensive research conducted on Facebook — before researchers were unceremoniously barred — found scant evidence for MAINCHAR there.

During 2020, there were faint signals indicating potential presence of *multiple* instances of MAINCHAR operating at the hyper-local level on Nextdoor.

Historians of science, technology and media argue that MAINCHAR is not a unique, internet development and that there is non need (in this case) to fear the algorithm.

They point to an earlier, analogue version of MAINCHAR developed in the UK media and found in ancient CMSes known as BLEED_LEAD. BLEED_LEAD likely worked on a much slower cycle. BLEED_LEAD might have iterated over two, three or even five days or more.

It is 9:46pm on the west coast. In just over 7980000 milliseconds, MAINCHAR will iterate, again. Just as it has done every single day for over the last ten years. MAINCHAR will return a result, again. MAINCHAR will provide a sacrifice, again.

Because the most important thing to understand is this: MAINCHAR is an automated system. No humans are involved in its operation or maintenance. No humans are involved in its selection process.

In 2010, despite extensive effort, including the contracting of deniable librarian and information science assets, Twitter’s leadership were unable to find any documentation for MAINCHAR.

So in 2011, a team from Netflix were deployed to Twitter with a single objective: document MAINCHAR, with a goal to decommissioning.