'Threads' is having a moment. No, not the social network.

Finding a good name for a Twitter rival is harder than it seems. Might Mastodon, one of the earliest rivals, have made more of a dent in Twitter’s user numbers if it wasn’t an extinct species, or if the name wasn’t so easily lampooned by Elon Musk? Would more of us have been curious about Bluesky if it didn’t sound so…insubstantial? Twitter is a pretty unbeatable name for a generic social network, it turns out. (Which makes it all the wilder that its creators came up with the name Twitter by accident, after nixing “Twitch” then skipping forward in the dictionary.) So it’s no small deal that Threads, the new Instagram-based social network from Meta, has stitched together a massive following so fast (100 million-plus sign-ups in the first week). Especially given the association many Gen Xer’s, myself included, have with the name. For plugged-in Cold War kids like Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, the word “Threads” will never fail to spark unsettling memories of air-raid sirens and mushroom clouds over Sheffield. We’re so willing to escape Musk’s hellscape, it turns out, we’re willing to run into a place that shares its name with a literal hellscape. For those who haven’t felt its blast, Threads is a 1984 BBC movie that has earned a reputation in the last four decades as one of the most truly terrifying films ever made. If it were in the horror genre, you’d say it had a cult following. But that doesn’t really apply to a work of art…'Threads' is having a moment. No, not the social network.