A positive conspiracy theory that Elon Musk is an anti-Twitter accelerationist
Nicholas Clairmont
Very few things could improve my life as quickly as the destruction of Twitter, which is why I was so glad when, in the spring through autumn of 2022, businessman Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.
He then proceeded to make a number of changes that have, in the near-ubiquitous opinion of power users of Twitter, made the product worse. He fired some 80% of the workforce. He worked with a set of contentious journalists to audit internal files and the communications of the prior management vis a vis the way it had worked along with the U.S. government to surveil and censor public communications around COVID-19 and lockdowns, Hunter Biden, and the banning of Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C. He changed the name of the service to just X, which led to a lawsuit from another company already called that. (He apparently hadn’t bothered to check.)
SUPREME COURT SET TO CONSIDER CONSERVATIVE-BACKED STATE SOCIAL MEDIA LAWS
Musk eliminated the system of “blue check” verification that had reigned as a shorthand for years, marking people supposedly worth impersonating as the legitimate holders of the account bearing their names but de facto separating a class of Twitter users as special and worth attention from the riffraff. Then he reinstituted the blue check mark, only for anyone who pays, and disabled features, including default direct messages for anyone who does not pay. Most recently, he made news articles appear without headlines, leading to widespread confusion and making Twitter (I refuse to call it X) much less useful for getting viral traction on news and opinion articles, and also just making it visually confusing to use.
All of this is good. It’s good because it hurts Twitter, and Twitter is bad for America, for the quality and long-term financial health of journalism, and for the hearts of individual users of Twitter.
This should be, as they would say on Twitter, a cold take. American Twitter users, according to Pew, are incredibly unrepresentative of the American population as a whole. They’re younger. They want to talk about politics online much more frequently. They’re richer, and they hold higher levels of educational attainment. Crucially, a tiny number of active Twitter users send the vast majority of the tweets, with something like 10% of posters posting 80% of the content. When Pew analyzed just these highly active Twitter users, the ones presumably making up most of what you’d see if you spend time on Twitter, it found that this population was much, much more disproportionate to the general population than Twitter users as a whole, especially in terms of its interest in politics.
Twitter users use the site primarily to form quickfire consensus, very often stupid ones. The social and algorithmic dynamics of Twitter exacerbate the underlying human need to belong, which in practice is carried out through loudly proclaiming allegiances to things that don’t matter, conceptualizing groups and forming identity-level attachments to being part of them, and most importantly, policing the bounds of those groups using social exile as a weapon.
So, Twitter is a machine for making people angry. And not just angry, but angry about politics in a way that makes us think in terms of “us” versus “them,” “allies” and “enemies.” And based on its userbase, Twitter is likely to mislead Americans into thinking that the consensuses formed on the site are majority views, when they’re really weird, rare ones.
There’s one last important finding from Pew, which is that Twitter users are vastly disproportionately journalists, for reasons having to do with the precarity of employment in this field, as writer and former social media-engagement professional Ben Dreyfuss explained in his Substack. In essence, he wrote, the fact that journalists get special attention and lots of followers on Twitter means Twitter is an irreplaceable career asset to individual writers and editors. It’s a place where members of my profession are an almost noble caste: “Twitter isn’t influential because a tweet will go viral and then they talk about it on Good Morning America,” Dreyfuss wrote. “Twitter is influential because the people who work at Good Morning America spend a lot of time on Twitter. … That engagement shapes their worldview and how they program Good Morning America.”
The result of this is that the reality skewing that is done on Twitter does not stay on Twitter. It’s a machine for forming narratives, enforcing them, making users hate people who disagree with them, and making sure those users have the power to control the narrative and editorial of the news and information environment as a whole. Of course this is bad. I’ve been working in magazines for a decade now, from small online ones dependent on Twitter traffic for our growth model to big, centuries-old ones rendered inane by the hold Twitter has on the mind of the staffers. Everyone agrees that having to write the articles and the headlines with Twitter in mind is bad for journalism.
Also, speaking as someone who has been on Twitter for 11 years: It just sucks to be on it. This is so accepted as fact that anyone reading this who is a Twitter user him or herself will know what I mean and will be in on the little unfunny in-joke (Twitter has lots!) of calling the thing we’re all addicted to “this hellsite.”
All of this is to remind you: What Twitter seems to have forgotten in its blind hatred of Elon Musk and his takeover is that they have long hated Twitter. So, isn’t it obvious we should greet Elon Musk as a liberator? And also, while I do not purport to know the inside of Musk’s mind, shouldn’t we consider the possibility that the longtime Twitter user actually sees things the same way? Put aside your personal dislike of Musk and his avowed politics, if you have it, for a moment. Game out what it would look like if Musk had determined, as I have, that Twitter and a healthily functioning civil society and discourse cannot coexist.
First off, you may object that nobody could simply be willing to light $44 billion on fire. But people die for their country all the time, and while Patrick Henry did not have but one life to give for his country, Musk actually has multiples of that sum. In fact, losing $44 billion when you have several hundred billion does not leave you in any meaningful or material way poorer, since there is literally nothing you can do to spend the money you have outside of business deals once you are a billionaire.
Musk’s critics do not and cannot imagine he or anyone would do this, though — usually not because of the sheer sums of money involved, but because they hold a highly contradictory view of whether social media actually matters. While liberals have dedicated enormous effort to policing social norms and even content moderation policies on social media platforms themselves, they also tend to deride any competing claim that it matters what mass media narratives form and spread on social media. Pro-war opinion magazine articles constitute “manufacturing consent” and false claims are “the threat to democracy from the spread of mis- and dis-information,” but worrying over how Twitter, with its unusually tight grip on so many American journalists’ attentions, might affect the country seems absurd to them. There is, however, no reason to think Musk would share this incoherent double standard on the matter. Indeed, there is every reason to believe Musk regards the overall sociological effects of Twitter and social media broadly on the good civic functioning of the country to be a deep source of concern, one expressed when he posts stupidly about the “woke mind virus,” but one I have also heard he discusses in private in more adult and considered terms.
But what would it actually look like if Musk thought Twitter was an extinction-level threat to the world and needed to die? Would Musk not then have simply used his power as the new owner of Twitter to just… shut it off?
No. What we have all learned since Friendster is that digital communities do not live and die based on just the usability of their interface, or their backend code, but rather based on their “vibes” and the loyalty and magnetism of their user communities. If Musk had switched off Twitter, it would have been easy for some other company to clone it to fill the void. Then Musk would have really martyred his $44 billion for nothing. To kill Twitter, what a clever new owner would have to do would be to slowly, gradually erode the brand and functionality of Twitter to wean Twitter addicts — that most destructive group of people in American society — off their (OK, our) drug, so that any product presenting itself as an alternative couldn’t live after Twitter dies.
Reread the story of Musk’s stewardship of Twitter through this lens, and it’s simple to imagine that is precisely what he has been doing. He started by closely associating the brand of the company with himself as the owner and then began tweeting obnoxious and moronic things, a brilliant ploy to make any fandom hate their beloved IP. Nobody could have gotten Star Wars fans to hate the Force until George Lucas made up midichlorians and Jar Jar Binks, after all. Then he made Twitter users’ fond, nostalgic memories start to disappear by screwing with the way Twitter works and looks and, of course, by changing its very name to something so stupid it is embarrassing and editorially confusing to reproduce. Then he purged that key constituency of journalists who felt Twitter was their special “blue check” realm. And, finally, he made the social features of the site impossible to put up with; from a scroll laden with weird ads to DMs that now don’t reliably work, Twitter just doesn’t function very well now.
Elon Musk, you self-sacrificing, high-minded, off-putting dork, you are a genius. Thank you for your service.
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Nicholas Clairmont is the Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.