In 2010, Twitter bestowed its entire archive of public tweets on the Library of Congress, which the library called “an exciting and groundbreaking acquisition.” The collection began on March 21, 2006, when the company’s co-founder and C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, typed “just setting up my twttr,” and has been expanding significantly each day since (approximately six thousand public tweets are now posted every second). Private and deleted tweets are not included, and neither are images or embedded videos. Everything else, though, is immediately churned into an ever-thickening text archive, to be preserved by the library for all of eternity.

Anyone who has spent time on Twitter understands what happened next. A small, gnawing anxiety develops in the gut. Jeez, this is a lot of information. Oh, wow, people are so angry. Hey, a bunch of folks are talking about this, am I supposed to be talking about this? Wait, I don’t get it. Yikes, everyone really hated that episode! Gosh, this is a lot. Ha-ha, the bird stole the chips! And so on, and so on, until, one day, you glance up from your device, depleted and desperate, wishing only to quiet, contain, or excise the whole debacle like a cancer. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words,” William Faulkner wrote, in 1927. Unbounded chatter begets unbounded despair.

Last Tuesday, the Library of Congress announced that it, too, has had enough, and politely recused itself. “The Library now has a secure collection of tweet text, documenting the first 12 years (2006-2017) of this dynamic communications channel—its emergence, its applications and its evolution,” Gayle Osterberg, the director of communications for the library, wrote. “Today, we announce a change in collections practice for Twitter. Effective Jan. 1, 2018, the Library will acquire tweets on a selective basis—similar to our collections of web sites.” The phrasing was elegant, but the sentiment was nonetheless familiar: “Quitting this shit!!!!”

Conceptually, the whole of Twitter is hard to hold in mind—a paralyzing onslaught of self-professed inanity, punctuated by occasional moments of profundity, and, from time to time, a good joke. Does it reflect something about the global spirit in the first two decades of the twenty-first century? Probably? Twitter is, at least, wildly valuable data, for both marketers and academics. (Linguists alone could likely fill volumes by analyzing any given week.) But the library hasn’t yet figured out how to efficiently index or manage its tweet collection; the cost of properly arranging and organizing vast amounts of information is frequently underestimated. (I’ve spent plenty of time clawing through university archives in fervent search of some bit of recorded arcana, only to be told by an exhausted-looking research associate that it’s probably in a box somewhere offsite, but, until the institution receives another grant, nobody can say where, or precisely which box.) In 2013, executing a single search of Twitter’s first four years took twenty-four hours. “This is an inadequate situation in which to begin offering access to researchers, as it so severely limits the number of possible searches,” the library admitted.

The library’s initial interest in Twitter felt both prescient and forward-thinking—a way for it to reëstablish its dominance as the world’s greatest and most dynamic research organization. The Library of Congress, which was established in 1800, is the oldest federally funded cultural institution in the United States, and it calls itself the largest library in the world (the British Library, in London, makes the same claim). It controls a hundred and sixty-four million items (books, manuscripts, recordings, correspondence, photographs, maps), which have been indexed and slotted onto eight hundred and thirty-eight miles of bookshelves. Many extraordinary projects have launched under its auspices, including, in 1928, the Archive of American Folk Song, the “first national archive of traditional life,” which contains slave narratives, Appalachian fiddle tunes, Celtic ballads, Balinese Gamelan, sea shanties, and more—gripping vernacular expressions that might have otherwise been lost. On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., I was left flabbergasted merely by the historical maps on display in one of library’s public galleries. The collection (“Maps in Our Lives”) offered a shifting visual compendium of the ways in which we navigate and survey our world—a time line of human hubris and ingenuity. (It turns out one often depends on the other.)

The library occupies several physical spaces, though the most glorious is the Beaux-Arts-style Thomas Jefferson Building, which is just across First Street from the Capitol, When the Thomas Jefferson Building opened, in 1897, it was connected to the Capitol via an underground tunnel, which housed a “book conveying apparatus”—it could move a book six hundred feet in less than sixty seconds, meaning the quarter-mile between the library and the Capitol was fully traversable within three minutes—designed by the Miles Pneumatic Tube Company, of Boston.

The idea was that members of Congress should have immediate and consistent access to the library’s collection, so that their arguments and judgments would always be substantiated and informed. “Thirty Years in Washington, Or, Life and Scenes in Our Nation’s Capital,” a book edited by Mrs. John Logan, in 1901, describes the process: “If in the midst of a speech it occurs to a Senator that he needs a certain book or the file of a certain newspaper, he has but to call a page, whisper his wish, and before he has delivered many more sentences, the page returns with the book or file.” The tunnel has since been bricked over, which is tempting to read metaphorically—the closing of the American mind, made literal. The way President Trump himself frequently tweets dubitable information has, at least, further devalued the entire idea of substantiation, if not knowledge itself. (Except for those he conspicuously deletes, his tweets have nonetheless been dutifully collected by the Library.)

At first, the library’s interest in Twitter felt perfectly compatible with its mission “to acquire and preserve a record of knowledge and creativity for Congress and the American people.” Rather than sorting and securing a crucial figure’s “papers”—the ephemeral, inevitably decaying documents that chronicle an intellectual arc, the gradual but pointed establishment of some personal ideology or gestalt—it would catalogue her Twitter feed. But figuring out who’s doing something important on Twitter (and what “important” means) is more difficult than ever before. Online, the signal-to-noise ratio inevitably skews toward noise, and lots of it. Human beings have always obsessively documented the mundane fiddle-faddle of their lives—one of my favorite books is “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” a vaguely neurotic, million-word accounting of ten years (1660-1669) in one London man’s life, including the weather, how much wine he drank, whether his bladder stones were acting up, and various domestic dramas involving his young wife and his mistresses—but it wasn’t until recently that everybody had the means to broadcast those narratives publicly. The democratization of media and the cultural Zeitgeist both suggest that all stories are equally important and representative—but can that be true?

That the Library of Congress has now chosen to be more selective about its work feels perceptive, and germane to our moment. Healthy consumption of the Internet requires curation. Though reading widely and expansively offline remains crucial, the present Internet deluge still means we all have to make serious choices about what we let in. (Some people call this “self-care.”) The downsizing can be nutritive. “Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing,” William S. Burroughs once said. Maybe the library’s choice is a significant sign of our times—an admission that sometimes everything is too much.