In 1899 H. G. Wells wrote When The Sleeper Wakes, a story about Rip van Winkle with a bank account. In 1910 he revised it as The Sleeper Awakes, but I read the early version on Project Gutenberg without realizing this.
A man falls asleep for a few hundred years or something and, through the miracle of compound interest, wakes up with the vast majority of the world in debt to him. On his first formal encounter with the masses, he has to address them somehow:
"You will be expected to say something," said Ostrog. "Not what you used to call a Speech, but what our people call a Word—just one sentence, six or seven words. Something formal. If I might suggest—' I have awakened and my heart is with you.' That is the sort of thing they want."
Surprisingly, the only connection I can find between Wells and Twitter is to suggest that he did not predict it. So much for that. Ψ
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