Twitter's emblematic logo, a metal structure measuring almost 3.6 meters and weighing around 250 kilograms, had been installed on the façade of the company's headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco. Known as Larry, in reference to the social network's signature blue bird, this visual element was an integral part of the building's architectural identity. Its disappearance marks a clear break in the history of the site and the company.
The sign was not simply dismantled or stored, but staged in a pyrotechnic display involving several Tesla vehicles and a film crew in the Nevada desert. This controlled fireworks display, orchestrated by a young private sales platform, is less an act of recycling than of symbolically charged visual communication.
Acquired at auction for 34,000 US dollars, the Twitter sign briefly changed its status: from signage element to collector's item. Its purchase and public destruction raise the question of how to manage the material heritage associated with brands in the digital economy. Should these symbols be preserved in the same way as old industrial signs? Or should they be seen as perishable objects, whose function ceases with the life cycle of the company that wore them?
Rather than being put to good use in a museum or conservation project, the sign was literally pulverized. Fragments of the logo have been collected and are now being auctioned on a local commerce app. All profits from this operation are to be donated to an organization dedicated to entrepreneurship. The commercial hijacking of a Silicon Valley architectural element thus becomes an indirect act of philanthropy.
This operation, filmed and widely relayed on social networks, is part of a media logic of visual provocation. The use of iconoclasm, applied to a corporate brand, is a symbolic killing off of the old social platform model, in favor of new commercial narratives. By blowing up the old logo, its detractors want to signify the end of a system perceived as obsolete.
