On Twitter Seduction
The failure of social depth and connection.
Some fraction of us are fascinated by the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. I know at least two people who used to work for him, one of whom has moved on to Virgin Galactic because he enjoys working only 40 hours a week. The other, a much higher level dude, is doing a new startup somewhere in Scandinavia. I personally am more fascinated by the fact of the Raptor 2 rocket motor that SpaceX has built than pretty much everything about the man. It is a stunning engineering accomplishment, and as a practical aesthete I am stunned by it.
I should also say that Musk’s ambitions are ridiculous, and also as daring as any human’s. People keep saying he’s the richest man ever when they should be comparing him to Napoleon. When it comes to Mars, let a nation of fools emigrate. No habs built to survive the Martian climate will be worth beans until they’re tested in the Arctic and the Sahara. There’s the Solar City I am looking for. There remain many isolated spots on this planet where new cargo cults might thrive once pocket nuke generators and compact chemical plants become affordably subscription based. Civilization is where you put it. I’ll take Earth’s physical advantages over the remoteness of Mars in a heartbeat. Here at least, failed states can easily be overrun with simple logistics. There is a distinct possibility that people should be comparing Musk to Jim Jones. If I’m alive when it happens, I will be calling the first Martian settlement Jonestown. After all, I do have a brother who is now living comfortably in the suburbs of Phnom Penh. Lesson taken.
Over the past month, much has been barked about the fate of Twitter and presumably of the fate of free speech.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of the Old Twitter had the following to say:
I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable.
Duh. We had that at The Well in 1991. “You own your own words.”
I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally. It can only be done through ranking and relevance algorithms, the more localized the better. But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all.
Content moderation is easy at the subReddit level. Three mods can do it for a 10k community. So why doesn’t Twitter facilitate 10k sized tribes? Because autonomous tribes would generate the expectation that they are sovereign and should not be taxed with whatever Twitter decides to demand in their Terms of Service. In this way Twitter is not a service for the people, it is a product for the company. It begs several serious questions about Twitter’s ability to facilitate the kind of communication that specific types of people want. In other words, a non-differentiated Twitter customer must be commoditized. That’s the situation today. Whereas a smarter Twitter could leave a large pool (by language which they do already) and allow smaller self-selected pools.
A consequence of this is that one might not get a million followers. But what kind of individual needs that on Twitter? How is that actually social media? Well according to the heuristic I used, it became self-explanatory.
Facebook is full of people you used to know.
LinkedIn is full of people you need to know.
Twitter is full of people you want to know.
Thus Twitter is the realm of desire for fame. Not of expert repute or character bona fides. That is not anywhere in the API. Here are the things you can do:
You can embed, copy, share, reply, follow, contact, organize, associate, mute, block or fink. The last three are enablers of censorship of varying degrees. The first section is all about contributing to virality. The middle section allows you to think more about a tweet and its author. What can be built on that? Not much other than a fame machine and a denial of fame service.
Dateline: January 2, 2023 0737 PST. In bed reading my phone lying sideways with one eye in my pillow. Today Lex Fridman tweeted out a list of books. The first answer tweet is the first I know of it. This person says that the list contains at least one book that is absolute trash and shouldn’t belong there. Following a thread of quips, I determine that book is Sapiens by somebody with three names. My guess was The Little Prince. Some other person puts up a poll. Is it Sapiens? Yes. No. Without knowing anything about the book, I vote Yes. I am in the 78% majority. Following another path of jibes, I discovery that the thrice named author is associated with the World Economic Forum, and that it a crockpot of historical deepities. OK, I’ve seen and criticized this form of edutainment from the WEF before. Jason Littlefield and I did a podcast about it. So I guess I agree.
Well it turns out that Nassim Taleb thinks that Lex Fridman is some kind of fraud, which is why he has turned down 10 invitations to speak on the Lex Fridman podcast. It also turns out that Jordan Peterson was told by Taleb to shutup and mind his own business. Somebody else posts snark about the nature of the list which Fridman expects to read one book a week. I didn’t notice this with my one eye. The list contains The Brothers Karamazov which I am currently reading. Nobody can read that in a week. The verbal slapboxing continues. Somebody says “Pretty good for a computer scientist.” Somebody replies, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Elon Musk says “Good list.”: It gets over 3.8 million impressions.
Twitter is not broken. What’s broken here is the Old Boy Network. When I first came to understand how corporations were organized I recognized how many retired CEOs sat on multiple boards of directors of other Fortune 500 companies. Perhaps the invention of the MBA has professionalized all that and we believe that individuals don’t make the difference any longer - it’s all process and framework. So this network no longer exists, except perhaps at Disney which has recalled Bob Iger to replace his failed protege.
There must have been an equivalent network, perhaps like those run by Brooke Astor in NYC that we might called the society of salons, aka Old Money. All the new money has surpassed the ability of Old Money to direct and influence the larger society. I’m a peasant, I don’t know from the POV of an insider. I can only calculate and deduce, but I can see we’ve elected Donald Trump. In my attempts to get to understand what all of society is about, I began blogging 20+ years ago to connect with my approximation of the new Chatting Class. I’m comfortable with what I’ve discovered, and yet the fact that now it all might be Twitter is disturbing. Is that all there is? A quote from Sam Harris about Taleb’s personality was also attached. I’m thinking that’s all there is. Twitter is the Chatting Class. The medium is the message and the messages all fit into a narrow API. This is what we have been reduced to.
I hesitate to extrapolate my view of the world from the small sample of Twitter I bother to scan, but there is another side to this story. It is that the fraction of the world that is decentralized, idea driven, detailed and complex is in place and maturing. It is a new network with links to Twitter, but no way is it Twitter or Mastodon. It is us, and those like us running beneath the radar. We are capable agents in the field, but our handlers are disconnected from our payrolls and our sources & methods. We cannot be called in and safely harbored because we’re actually, solemnly independent. We do not aggregate under the lights of one authority. We’re just out here doing what we do in the dark. Occasionally, we meet a friend.
The social territory remains utterly baffling to the human mind. We attempt to make sense of it all by living within a our predictable bubbles of social activity. These are fragile domains that could collapse at any moment. It renders all of our projections witless and all of our criticisms obvious. We deal with abstractions, just effectively enough to call what we do communication, and we are compelled to continually scratch the surface of reality. Mostly we are scratching each other in a circular drama.
The seduction of Twitter is false. I think I am seeing the ends of it. I think I am finally understanding what used to be something I dismissed. Perhaps I wished it were something other than the marketing tool it is. Perhaps my intentions for it circumscribed my use and expectations of it. So I’ll leave them at that and stop expecting more, knowing what it will reduce our words to: memes and strawmen. Life is everywhere else so I won’t let Twitter be more than a tool. It is not the network I am looking for. It is a parade of droids and occasional humans whose light escapes with eccentric frequency. Let it be.
“The seduction of Twitter” is the perfect framing. I jumped in summer of 20 for election purposes-was entranced, angered, exhilarated, captured and finally disgusted with what it was doing to me. I terminated my account a year ago and discovered that my need for community and discovery fulfilled by Substack and others. Sort of like trading a sugar high for a deep dive into introspection, intellectual challenge and discoveries.
Musk is a epic hero, and like all such men, fatally flawed. May he rediscover his purpose in pursuing visionary explorations of human potential.