Each Tweet Counts

In the project Each Tweet Counts (2012), the computational sublime arises from considering the simplicity of a 140-character statement when expanded to all possible tweet combinations. There are 95 possible ASCII characters that can be used in a tweet. At a rate of 1 tweet per minute (TPM) it will take a little less than 155 years to complete all possible tweet combinations up to a length of 4 characters. To calculate all tweets up to a length 140 characters, the total number of combinations is 95¹⁴⁰, a quite sizeable number:

With a single 2.5 GHz computer calculating at 2,500,000,000 tweets per second, it will take the following number of years to complete all possible tweet combinations:

Meanwhile, a larger issue is that the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe is between 4×10⁷⁹ and 10⁸¹. The latter number in long form:

1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

This, humble by comparison, number means that not only are there more possible tweet combinations than atoms in the universe, but that there aren’t enough atoms in the entire universe to store every possible tweet. Through a brute force approach, the Each Tweet Counts bot will conceptually-eventually produce the totality of all possible ASCII-based tweets – a number greater than the atoms in the known universe. To date the bot is approaching 1,000,000 tweets at a rate of 1 tweet per 2 minutes, .5 TPM, which is also the maximum TPM rate allowed by the Twitter API.

In 2019, Twitter suspended the @EachTweetCounts account. Despited repeated attempts, Twitter would not reactivate the account. @EachTweetCounts last tweets were: v{VB, x{VB, y{VB, z{VB, 1{VB, 2{VB, 3{vb, 4{VB, and 5{VB. Disappointingly, @EachTweetCounts reached only a few million tweets; alternatively, the universe is now protected.