Send a few tweets while you still can

If Twitter collapses, will that be bad? I mean for people, not for bots and ChatGPT

As soon as I publish this newsletter on Substack, I will call attention to it on Twitter. So I’d better work fast while Twitter still exists.

That meta enough for you?

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Amongst the chattering classes there is a growing sense Twitter is about to go the way of Enron and WorldCom.

But weren’t those steam-age physical-equipment enterprises? Big-money all-electron firms have vanished too. My 2009 book Sonic Boom has a chapter on how Silicon Graphics went from struggling 1980s startup to internationally known after its (then amazing) graphics made dinosaurs of the movie 1993 Jurassic Park seem real, to leading purveyor of (then exotic) graphics cards, to 2006 bankruptcy. Trustees sold the futuristic Silicon Graphics headquarters to Google – which will never fail, right?

The sense Twitter is about to join the brontosaurus in the extinction museum comes partly from Elon Musk’s recent statement the company has lost $24 billion in valuation in less than a year. Musk has mismanaged more money in less time than anyone else in history -- except for every member of the United States Congress!

It's also believed, though not confirmed – Musk took the company private, so it doesn’t disclose operating data – Twitter use is down. BuzzFeed says down by 9 percent. Reuters says down by a lot more . It sure feels like Twitter has lost its sparkle. And in the social media universe, the way something feels is more important than facts.

Three questions: how did Twitter get to be so important, why did many turn against the platform, and what’s next if it vanishes?

How did Twitter get so important? Founded in 2006, Twitter’s arrival coincided almost exactly with the arrival of the iPhone. They potentiated each other. Computers had shrunk from huge to TV-sized with heavy peripherals to laptops to a little thing in your pocket. Twitter let you use the little thing in your pocket to comment on news and pictures and celebrity fashion info. Other platforms would too, but Twitter was among the first, and easy to use.

Ease of use was central to Twitter’s spread. Journos and pundits obsessed about Twitter because it was the sole social-media development people over age 40 could understand without a 14-year-old having to explain it to them while rolling eyes and exclaiming, “Jeez, it’s obvious, just press the big bright button.”

Today most social media sites are easy to use, but Twitter got to this first, accounting for an early edge the platform has now lost.

Journalists loved Twitter because it was the greatest lazy-reporter’s tool ever. Politicians and celebs issued statements that came straight to your phone! You didn’t even have to call a publicist. Twitter made it seem as though you’d interviewed the person. The statements were brief and could be taken out of context! A journalist’s dream come true.

Corrupt politicians and greedy pop-culture celebs liked Twitter because it allowed them to bypass cranky self-impressed reporters and editors, taking their self-serving statements directly to a gullible public. Overstated? Hey, it’s social media we are talking about.

There was another factor. Early on in Twitter’s rise the late Rush Limbaugh noted the establishment left “mistakes Twitter for America.” When something played well or poorly on Twitter, Limbaugh maintained, the New York Times and Hollywood would think the reaction must represent the view of the common man.

Rather than an instantaneous plebiscite on America, Twitter was an echo chamber, reinforcing whatever a person already believed. Many social media platforms now function this way – Twitter was there first, an edge now lost.

To the extent Twitter is a business (a means to sell advertising) there’s nothing perforce wrong with giving people what they want. If you go shopping for, say, clothes, you’ll stop first in a store that carries whatever style you like. Twitter algorithms did this for opinions and news.

To the extent Twitter was a form of entertainment and forum for casual communication, the echo-chamber aspect was fine. Once Twitter was drawn into presidential politics, public-health emergencies and the stoking of political and racial anger, the echo chamber ceased being fine. Algorithms Twitter designed to sell ads (never forgot, Google’s big innovation was a new way of selling advertising) caused public emotions to seem to be seething, which eventually spilled over into public emotions actually seething.

Rest his soul, Limbaugh was clever and insufferable. Yet he was right about the illusions Twitter created for the privileged classes. What do you do when an insufferable person says something wise? All Predictions Wrong will ask this question about Tucker Carlson soon.

Limbaugh’s point – that the coastal elites mistook Twitter for America – suggests that if Twitter vanishes, only coastal elites will care.

Why did many turn against the platform? In a way one hopes future historians can sort out, there were several years in which Twitter simultaneously was the foghorn of the far-right Donald Trump and otherwise controlled by the far-left thought police. For a spell these extremes coexisted.

Trump’s addiction to Twitter made supporters cringe and may have cost him a second term. I’d submit that even considering covid, had Trump simply stayed away from Twitter, he would have defeated Joe Biden in 2020. A teetotaler, Trump was addicted to the little dopamine shots from likes and retweets. He’d have been better off with a nice bottle of single malt.

For their part the thought police saw in Twitter what bolshevism has always dreamt of -- control of people’s opinions. You don’t have to reason with views you don’t like, they can be BANNED! BLOCKED! To subsets of academia and the media, nothing had ever tasted so sweet. And blocking views you didn’t like was super easy, barely an inconvenience. (Sidebar: catch phrase of the hilarious Pitch Meeting, to which I link to put a smile on your face, if you haven’t seen, you must.)

https://www.youtube.com/@PitchMeetings

As Trump brought out the worst in everyone and everything, he brought out the worst in Twitter. People who would never dream of saying an unkind word to a passerby began to demean total strangers via buttons on the app. It was like that short story about the lottery, except the seemingly nice residents of the seemingly pleasant village were picking up phones rather than rocks.

When Musk bought Twitter, the thought police became outraged that the platform they once controlled fell into the wrong hands -- a guy who questioned covid orthodoxy and made deeply offensive statements like that free speech is good.

Musk’s decision to run the Twitter Files was the right thing to do – all big institutions should admit when they lie – but further outraged Twitter’s base. They’d been able to pretend Twitter was honest about opinions and science; now, proof the site was rigged. One hopes history will admire Musk for running the Twitter Files. After all, it seems to have cost him $24 billion.

What happens next? This may be impossible to quantify, but it sure feels like anger has risen in the United States since Twitter and the iPhone arrived. Newspapers have always loved bad news, but the newspaper didn’t follow you around. Your smart phone does – a ceaseless barrage of tweets and similar snippets engineered to make you upset, always physically right in your face. (That site is named FACEbook.)

Mass shootings have risen in the period since Twitter and the iPhone came into use. . Of course there is no direct connection. But both act as mechanisms for encouraging and rewarding anger. A steady diet of cultural poison may make typical people anxious and sad – mock her all you want, Marianne Williamson is right about this – while pushing a mentally ill person across a horrific threshold.

Americans have grown angrier and sadder at a time when objectively, most things keep getting better for most people.

Social media is hardly the only force behind this paradox, but the most powerful. Millions seem now to feel we must use some photon-powered gimmick to register disapproval of persons and things that will never have any direct impact on the lives of those we love. I’m guilty of it, and I want this poison out of my system. Perhaps you want to be freed too.

That makes it seems society will be better off if Twitter dies a peaceful death of natural causes, or in the least, becomes less significant.

As for Musk, his rockets, which reduce the cost of access to space, and his electric cars, which reduce (though don’t eliminate) greenhouse gases, are of benefit to society. We need green cars and affordable rockets. We need the extra-large batteries Tesla builds as well.

Musk’s 133 million followers salve his ego, but the rockets, green cars and high-capacity batteries may be keys to a better future. Elon should devote his considerable talents to them, not tweets.

Bonus: Best Comment on Twitter About Twitter. I hope I correctly attribute this to the magazine editor Chloe Schama, who is @ChloeSchama for as long as Twitter still exists: “If Twitter were named Fritter, we could Fritter our time away.”