Modern Hell #21: The Twitter Machine Stops

Two key takeaways from the so-called collapse of Twitter

“Please be super vocal if there is something dumb I’m doing or not doing.” This is what Elon Musk texted former head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, in April after Dorsey tweeted his support for Musk joining Twitter’s board of directors. Musk added that criticism would be “greatly appreciated.” Since buying Twitter in late October, he has put this position to the test. It has not gone well. Many believe the site is now doomed in some way: either there’ll be a full takeover from the Elon cultists (the fasci-nerd free-speech absolutists and crypto bros) or more radically-minded weirdos that will scare advertisers and users, making it a no-man’s land of racists, bigots, and other losers; or Musk will simply fire so many staff members that Twitter will grind to a halt due to some technical glitch. Maybe both.

Those doom-sayers might ultimately be proven correct. Musk has already, in under a month, nearly run the place into the ground, at least as far as operational staffing is concerned. Will the rest of the site follow?

In a mega-convo on Twitter Thursday night, Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopolous welcomed opinions on this very subject from a multitude of high-profile users, including journalists, social advocates, as well as other people who really only make sense on Twitter, like the guy who runs @masturbate.log, an account that tweets every time its owner jerks off. It was a nice cross-section of the site’s user base, in other words. At one point there were over 20,000 listeners. The conversation lasted hours. But nobody could confidently predict where everything is headed. Then again, why should they have? Unpredictability is what Twitter is all about.

If Twitter is to finally collapse in some form, it’s fitting that it may do so with someone like Musk at its helm. No better captain likely exists to steer Twitter into oblivion. As a thin-skin rich know-it-all relying on a sophomoric understanding of the world who considers himself the funniest guy in the room, Musk is more a lifelike avatar for Twitter than he is human. It’s been said that Musk is tweeting his way through his Twitter takeover. Indeed, there’s something to this. He seems to have mulled some of his major moves, including his pricing for the failed Twitter Blue paid verification scheme, for only as long as they’ve taken him to post them on Twitter.

But what did we expect? Musk, as the embodiment of Twitter, is naturally governed by its logic – and to follow Twitter’s logic will always lead to a state of semi-incoherence. One of the main conclusions of the Twitter Space Thursday night was that Twitter is, by its very nature, a bit of a shit show. And, in fact, that’s what everyone likes about it. It’s not just that you can find a niche on Twitter, it’s that, even if you do, you’ll still be exposed on a daily basis to an infinite array of completely random items flying across your feed, some good, many terrible (including plenty of guys like Musk). It’s possible to insulate yourself from Twitter’s info-strafing, but only in the same way you can insulate yourself from the sun on a clear summer day. Even in the shade, it will find you, and given enough time, could kill you. This is what’s always made Twitter slightly thrilling – it’s unpredictable danger.

Anyway, no matter what happens, there are clearly two main takeaways emerging from Twitter’s current collapse, or whatever you want to call it. Both are about control.

First thing’s first: Musk should not be in control of Twitter. His complete disrespect for its staff, let alone its users, is proof enough of that. Entertaining as it may be, Musk’s approach to Twitter wilfully, even dangerously, disregards the communities that have been created on the site over the last decade or so, the personal security of users, and Twitter’s utility as a communications tool – particularly for people around the world who, for one reason or another, have very few other means of speaking. And while things were slightly better when the site was being run by a different billionaire tech nerd (Dorsey), the core issue still existed, which is that a global communications tool, along with all the information and data and messages created and posted on it, were subject to the whims of a billionaire tech nerd.

Among the questions raised about the post-Twitter world are those about what media will do. Some people might not care; after all, a lot of media organizations have other ways of reaching people. But really that question isn’t about media, it’s about information distribution. The quality of information shared on Twitter is up for debate. What probably should never have been is the idea that a communications tool via which hundreds of millions of people connect could be left unregulated, unprotected, and completely exposed to being destroyed by one man.

The second takeaway is how much we let Twitter – its chaos, its randomness, its frenetic and insane logical pathways – control our society. As has been repeated often, Twitter punches above its weight in setting the general discourse agenda, at least in this part of the world, because of who uses it. Presumably, this factored into Musk’s desire to own it in the first place. Owning Twitter isn’t like owning the Washington Post; its impact is several magnitudes larger in scope. Consider the social issues of the last decade or so, and how many of them have either begun or been accelerated by a hashtag (#MeToo comes immediately to mind). Twitter is ground zero for pretty much all of our social fights, both progressive and regressive, because that’s where so many decision-makers hang out. It’s why Musk and his moron army of shunned right-wing twerps are so obsessed with the blue verification checkmark. What they’re after is narrative control, which they believe is garnered by virtue of the blue check. And they’re not entirely wrong. But it was a mistake to allow that to be the case. Yet it is.

What Musk is after is not so much control over the platform, but control over the chaos Twitter creates in the world beyond the platform itself. As we have allowed Twitter – its popular themes, its elite users, and (importantly) its logic – to govern the way we interpret and subsequently run our world, we have led ourselves into a trap that Musk is now trying to exploit. If you can control the mechanics of Twitter, what else can you ultimately control? Musk seems to be betting the answer is: pretty much everything. Is he wrong? And if he’s not, who’s fault is that?