Last October, the richest manchild in human history fell into the trap he had dug for himself. Elon Musk was forced to purchase Twitter at an absurd price. He had no clear idea of what to do with his new acquisition, other than realising a fatuous idea about “free speech”. It was like watching a monkey acquire a delicate clock: the new owner started thrashing wildly about, slashing the headcount (from 8,000 to about 1,500) – in the process losing many of the people who knew how the machine worked – and generally having tantrums while tweeting incontinently from the smallest room in the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
All of this frenetic activity was watched – and avidly reported for weeks – by the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that would have puzzled a visiting Martian anthropologist. After all, in relation to the other social-media companies, Twitter looked like a minnow. Most people have never used it. So why all the fuss about its acquisition by a flake of Cadbury proportions?
The answer is that there is a select category of humans who are obsessive users of Twitter: politicians; people who work in advertising, PR and “communications”; and journalists. These are people who spend every waking moment on the platform, and use it to disseminate information, argue, troll, boast and engage in relentless virtue-signalling. Given that some (many?) of these people work in media, their obsession with Twitter meant that it had become, de facto, a significant part of the public sphere. If you wanted to be anyone in that networked world, you had to be on Twitter.
The person who understood this best was Donald Trump, who was an inspired maestro of the medium. He campaigned on Twitter, and eventually even governed by tweet – to the extent that some genius created a bot that automatically reformatted every tweet Trump issued as president as an official-looking White House press statement.
When Musk embarked on his chaotic attempts to mould the platform to his liking, there was a stampede of advertisers and disaffected users from it. The former sat on their corporate hands, worried about brands being tainted by the racist and xenophobic hordes that Musk allowed on to the platform; the latter went to Mastodon which, though superficially similar to Twitter, is actually very different – it’s a decentralised federation of independently run servers.
Mastodon is fine for some purposes. For one thing, it’s somehow quieter and more conversational. For another, it’s not algorithmically curated, so you only see posts from people you have chosen to follow. And though it does have some journalists on it, most of them seem to have hedged their bets – in that they have also remained on Twitter. And I can see why: if you are interested in reaching the widest possible audience for your humblebragging or even news of your latest scoop, then – because of its decentralised architecture – Mastodon doesn’t have the “reach” that you crave.
Which means that, no matter how depraved Twitter becomes under its reigning proprietor, you have to be there, even if he despises you. Which he does. After he fired all the company’s press team, for example, replies to media inquiries consist of an automated poo emoji. So, as tech journalist Casey Newton observes in “Why journalists can’t quit Twitter”: “The company was symbolically shitting all over them, and journalists couldn’t get enough of it.”
Which brings us, oddly enough, to the UK and Keir Starmer’s Labour party, which is suddenly displaying a perceptive understanding of how to use Twitter for political purposes. Exhibit A is a Labour advertisement that everybody in politics has been talking about for at least a week: a photograph of Rishi Sunak accompanying the text: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” Under the Tories, the ad continued, “4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children under 16 served no prison time.”
The interesting thing is that the advert was posted only on the party’s Twitter feed – and not on Facebook or other social media sites that account for the majority of party-political online advertising in the run-up to elections. The ad was seen by more than 22 million people – in itself a formidable achievement in a world where most people pay no attention to politics. But more importantly, it was seen by every journalist in the country, which is why so many people have been talking about it ever since.
All of which suggests that unless Musk succeeds in actually demolishing his new toy, mainstream media will continue to be glued to it. None of the available alternatives look like a convincing replacement for it. And yet it’s clear that the world would miss Twitter if it disappeared. So maybe, as with death and taxes, we are stuck with it.
What I’ve been reading
Kids: still alright
“What’s missing from the cultural narrative about gen Z” is a sensible, unpatronising essay by Alfie Robinson on the Persuasion Substack.
Backchat
Jill Lepore has written a thoughtful New Yorker review essay about chatbots and knowledge called “The data delusion”.
Tepid tech
“The dawn of mediocre computing” is an intriguing essay by Venkatesh Rao on the Ribbonfarm Substack.
