Twitterpocalypse Now: Beings of Earth

Welcome to the latest installment of Twitterpolcalypse Now, an ongoing conversation where Nick Hanover and Kim O’Connor theorize the impending collapse of America’s least favorite website. For the archival records of the slow and steady decline of our biological neural nets, you can read Part 1 at Loser City, Part 2 here, and Part 3 at Loser City. 

Kim: Nick, we seem to have entered a new stage of the Twitterpocalypse, and we’re here today to try to make sense of it. It feels like there’s a way in which it was always coming to this: the day that Kanye West hailed Hitler on a livestream with Alex Jones and got suspended by Elon for tweeting a swastika [or posting that Ghislaine Maxwell pic?]. There’s the inevitability of it all, where Ye himself has become the zeitgeist incarnate. Bigotry, nationalism, gross spectacle, conspiracy theories, celebrity dysfunction—basically every bad vibe we’ve endured as a culture over the last decade has accumulated in this man, and now he’s spewing it back onto us.

But at the same time, there’s a way in which this all feels disorienting. It’s in the same vein of how I felt when Trump won the election, that dialectic of “I can’t believe this fucking guy is the president” and “of course he was always going to be president.” Even though I understand and agree with the popular notion that Kanye’s been spouting extremist views for years, it felt like today was the point at which he finally became his own inverse. I’m old enough to remember when Kanye told the world that George Bush doesn’t care about Black people, which I saw live and may have been the single most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen happen on TV, including 9/11. So these two pop culture spectacles are very weird bookends on the last 17 years of American history. 

Kanye’s antisemitism is vile and dangerous, and he’s obviously responsible for it, but I think the consensus that we should draw a hard line between his ideology and what appear to be catastrophic mental health problems is wrong. It’s maybe more useful to think of him as a walking Pepe meme: a really ugly, empty vessel that has been appropriated by people with ill intent. 

As usual with the Twitterpocalypse, none of this has any meaning, yet all of it is meaningful. There’s a fundamental incoherence that makes talking about it difficult, but I want to ask you about how you see the broad political implications of what’s been going on. Lately I’ve been around relatives who watch MSNBC and the sentiment in the mainstream seems to be that we’ve reached a point where Trump’s actions have finally caught up with him and that his dinner with Kanye and Nick Fuentes was a “political nightmare.” I…do not agree, nor do I agree that he’s being used by the far right as a ploy to make their key players seem more moderate by comparison. But I’m very interested to know how you’re reading the mood and the meaning of this particular moment in time. What do you see?  

Nick Hanover: As weird as this might sound I think Kanye has once again forced a do or die conversation in national politics, albeit in the polar opposite way he did with the Bush moment you mentioned. I don’t think either of us want to get into a discussion about his mental state at all other than to say whatever he is experiencing right now has amplified his historic lack of a filter and that the GOP players who clearly sought to exploit that are realizing too late that they couldn’t control him and he made explicit what they probably intended to just be (louder than usual) dogwhistling. I agree with you that the GOP did not intend for this to be a situation that made them look more moderate, I firmly believe they wanted Kanye to be aggressive and controversial they just didn’t expect him to go full “Hitler is cool, actually” and now it’s causing a lot of groups that are anywhere left of alt-right to not only unify behind shutting down Kanye but also finally recognizing that maybe Twitter does need some kind of governing body.

Right as we began this conversation today, President Biden himself used the platform of Twitter to unequivocally call out everyone who shares Kanye’s Holocaust denying beliefs, and he also seemed to suggest he felt that the platforms that enabled this misinformation were a major problem that may require government intervention. I could be reading too much into Biden’s statement, only time will tell, but even if the government does not step in directly with Twitter, Biden sent a very clear message that he and the party he leads consider the ongoing rise in antisemitism to be a major concern. More cynically, I can’t help but feel that Biden and his team are probably relieved that Kanye and Musk would fuck up so badly right now as the Democrats are facing blowback to their response to the railroad workers’ demands for better treatment.

One of the biggest obstacles for the progressive movement in America has always been the unwillingness of most people to “take a side” or involve themselves in conflict. You see this throughout our history, whether it’s WW2 or the Civil Rights Movement; we just generally avoid getting involved until the situation is either right on our front steps or too disturbing to look away from any longer. And I think in his typical chaotic way, Kanye just forced a lot of Americans to acknowledge that Nazis are definitely back, they are definitely not kidding and they really do believe Hitler had the right idea. And worse than that, the world’s richest man is directly aiding these Nazis and wants Twitter to be their greatest propaganda weapon. 

You said you don’t feel that Trump’s actions have caught up with him, so my question back to you is do you mean that in the sense of within the GOP or the culture at large? Do you think this situation with Kanye going full Hitler is going to help or hurt Trump in the long run?

Kim: It’s too early to tell. My own sense of things is that Trump is currently in a better spot than most people seem to think he’s in. He has in some ways reset the outsider/underdog status that served him so well in 2016. Historically, people have underestimated Trump and especially underestimated the degree to which his most racist and horrifying actions and words stir up his rabid base. Key Republicans are obviously starting to distance themselves, and DeSantis has emerged as a plausible rival. But does DeSantis have dragon energy? No. No, I don’t think he does. That is supposedly his advantage! But I’m not so sure. 

Outrage remains a very powerful political currency and it doesn’t always unfold in straightforward and predictable ways. So we have this situation where Trump and Twitter and Kanye are on the national news every night. We’re hearing “condemnation from all sides.” But is what we’re seeing the American public finally rejecting fascism once and for all? Or the launch of the most unhinged presidential campaign of our lifetimes? What have Republicans even got without the sheer force of Trump’s terrible personality? Deeply unpopular ideas and beliefs?? 

So I don’t know, we’re obviously a long way out, but I think Trump’s still in play. At the end of the day, if Republicans feel that he’s their path to power, they will line up behind him like they always have. If their path to power is some guy who’s not Trump, they’ll do that, too—but that seems harder. 

Going back to your point about progressive Americans being conflict averse, the obvious corollary is that regressive Americans are not. As we watch what’s happening with hate speech on Twitter, my question is how much more purchase are these people going to find now that the subtext has been made text?

Nick: Literally right after you responded, Trump announced that he was using Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi’s questionable “Twitter Files” stunt as yet another pretext for demanding a 2020 recount/redo. It doesn’t seem to matter to a not-inconsiderable portion of the American population that the “Twitter Files” unveiled nothing that would be considered election fraud, nor does it seem to matter that everything Taibbi “revealed” happened before Biden was president not during his presidency, these people are running with it as reason enough to go to war. 

I’m sure you are just as tired of bringing everything back to Hitler as I am but it’s hard not to feel like history is repeating here and we’re heading towards a similar situation as the decline of Hindenburg after his final re-election that paved the way for Hitler to seize control. Over and over and over again the Democrat leadership has been generally unwilling to take this nu-fascist party seriously but they have specifically failed at fighting back against Trump’s continued distortion of reality. Even the way Biden condemned the rising antisemitism shows this– rather than directly name Musk or Kanye or even Trump as fueling this hate movement, he vaguely stated what the facts are and even more vaguely suggested someone should probably do something about it. As great as it is to see him condemn antisemitic rhetoric and identify it as a major problem, this response is still the definition of too little too late and I truly believe we’re heading towards a new version of the Reichstag Fire where the Democrats help the GOP pin the blame on the Democrats themselves.

There is no way out of this mess without shutting down or seizing control of the propaganda vehicles these nu-fascists are using, and that includes Twitter. But how do you even do that now without playing right into the “deep state” conspiracy these terrorists continuously yell about? Similarly, sending Trump to prison now rather than right after January 6th is only going to embolden that movement. Our “lesser evil” party has failed in every possible sense.

I’m also extremely concerned about how quickly and loudly Musk is using Twitter as a means to get around the donation and advertising restrictions that are in place for elections. On his Substack, Matt Taibbi revealed just how much involvement Musk had in shaping that story, making it abundantly clear that Taibbi is a full blown political operative now instead of anything resembling a journalist. Taibbi has already promised more “episodes” of the “Twitter Files,” but with Musk gloating about how he views his acquisition of Twitter as a license to dredge up whatever private correspondence serves as ammunition for his political aims, we are undoubtedly going to see the most chaotic and disruptive political contest of our lifetimes and possibly of the entire American lifetime. What do you predict will be next? Who else do you think is going to reveal themselves to be a Musk crony? How long before Matty Y gets his own “Twitter Files”?

Kim: I mean, I’m pretty worried! Trump is never, ever going to jail; I’ve always been sure of that much. The Democrats are as impotent as you say. Maybe worse, they’re overconfident because they didn’t fail as badly as expected at the midterms. Post-Obama, scraping by or just not losing egregiously is what they count as a mandate. And the superior smug shrill tone of the pundits on MSNBC throughout this latest series of episodes with Trump suggests that the center thinks this has been some sort of turning point. Which is what they always think.

 

 

 

I agree with you that what Musk is doing with the Twitter Report(s) is scary and so far it seems that almost everyone is underestimating the significance of that, too. Just because we don’t care about Hunter Biden’s laptop, “lock[ing] her up,” etc. doesn’t mean it’s no big deal. It literally doesn’t matter that there’s nothing there of substance. As we’ve talked about, content matters, but meaning is vestigial. “Hunter’s laptop” is like a fight song at a sporting event. Matt Taibbi’s credibility doesn’t matter because he’s singing their song. His background at outlets like Rolling Stone is an asset in the same way that Glenn Greenwald’s background is an asset when he goes on Tucker Carlson. So far as I can tell, there is no one who seems more credible to the other side than a media personality who has defected from their party. That’s true on both sides, actually. That’s half the anchors on MSNBC. So those are the types that seem like the obvious candidates for joining Taibbi at Musk News. We already know he approached Bari Weiss. Alex Berenson? Any of these anti-establishment types who pander to the right. Probably not Greenwald, but he’s a spiritual advisor. The script writes itself.

 

I agree that shutting down the propaganda is the lever here. I don’t know if there’s a way to go about that on the federal side, just in terms of their practical tools. The government has stayed way behind on regulating Big Tech, so the idea that they could find a timely way to deal with these new developments is pretty far-fetched. I know some people think that Musk is going to be in deep trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for not complying with its consent order, but that seems real shaky to me. 

 
So that brings us full circle, back to our original questions about where we even are with the Twitterpocalypse. Namely, when is Twitter gonna die? And how? The existential threat seems to have been all but forgotten on the timeline, but the company is plainly still in serious financial distress. The service is spotty, but working better than I expected. And as of Saturday night (when I’m writing this response) (…because I’m cool), Musk claims that advertisers are coming back. While his posturing may contain a seed of truth, reports say that Twitter’s revenue is nowhere near normal. So what do you think, is the Twitterpocalpyse still on track? Or do we need to reconsider?

Nick: I think the Twitterpocalypse is definitely still on track because the platform continues to hemorrhage active users and is boosting the activity of other platforms in the process, even massively uncool platforms like LinkedIn. On top of that, there are the ongoing security and public safety concerns, which are now amplified since Musk publicly admitted to sifting through private correspondence for ammunition. If 2024 doesn’t go the way Trump and Musk want, I think Musk has placed a giant crosshair on himself, too, and if Twitter isn’t a rotting corpse by then he will almost certainly carve it up as much as he can to save himself. I don’t exactly trust his claims about the return of advertisers, either; even if Apple has come back the odds that they are still putting as much money into the platform as before are next to nil. If Twitter was actually doing well and entities like Apple were not as much of a concern, I don’t think Musk would be spending as much time as he has been promising everything is just fine.

At this point, what I’m most curious about is who else Musk is going to suck into the vortex with him. The Kanye reinstatement experiment flamed out even quicker than expected so I suspect Musk is desperately trying to find a more malleable toxic celebrity to enlist because he seems to rightly assume Twitter’s best asset right now is its status as Must See (Trash) TV. What could be next? A New Year’s Eve Twitter Circle Extravaganza featuring Louis CK, R Kelly and Bill Cosby and exploding Teslas in place of fireworks? The sky’s the limit!

Kim: Maybe Dave Chapelle will do a special! Men’s rights terf comedy is probably Twitter’s most viable path to solvency at this point. 

 

Well, I think that about sums up where we are in the Twitterpocalypse. To quote Ye, “It ain’t funny anymore.” Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t left Twitter yet, you can follow Nick Hanover @nick_hanover and Kim O’Connor at @shallowbrigade.

Twitterpocalypse Now: The Wheels Are Falling Off

 

Kim O’Connor: Nick, since we published our last conversation about Twitter around 36 hours ago, some 4,500 contractors have been fired. Elon Musk provoked a U.S. Senator, made bizarre false claims about Twitter and its reach, and accused his ghosts of stealing food. Oh, and reports broke that a rogue Tesla Model Y maimed or murdered five people in China?

All to say we’ve had a relatively quiet Twitterpocalypse news cycle, and I want to take advantage of the lull to pose a somewhat philosophical question.

I’ve been thinking through the idea of “influence” and how it’s adjacent to, but ultimately really different from, power and money. Historically, it seems that influence, much like Twitter itself, has been hard to monetize. The people we talk about as social media “influencers” are mostly grifters or guerilla marketers. The influencers who actually shape the world we live in—trendsetters, artists, intellectuals, “the Russians,” etc.—are a lot more important. But they don’t necessarily get paid.

There are people who talks about Musk’s designs for Twitter as colonialist or fascist. It seems to me that his agenda (insofar as there is one?) is a lot more selfish and idiosyncratic and poisoned with Chad memes than that. Yet I can’t ignore that he talks constantly about making Twitter an “everything app.” For a lot of reasons, that ambition seems absurd on its face. But it’s also my belief that when the richest man in the universe talks about making an everything app, he shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. The tech world is still very much moved by unhinged gambles and cults of personality, despite the constant stream of press on Silicon Valley snake oil conspiracies.

All Elon on Elon quotes from @bestofdyingtwitter

So let’s just set aside for the moment the very real possibility that Twitter will stop existing sometime soon. Is it even possible that a platform that’s influential in the real sense of shaping the world (not just selling pink sauce) can be well and truly monetized? Can Twitter’s influence be harnessed, or is it inherently unruly? Or has its influence been grossly overestimated, just in general?

Nick Hanover: I’m glad you brought this up because Alex De Campi had a thread about this the other day that I felt hit the nail right on the head. Alex argues that Twitter’s real problem, as far as profitability, is how broken its approach to ads is, specifically in terms of metrics. As Alex mentions in that thread, brands and publications and influencers all still cling to Meta because of how robust its metrics system is and how easily it allows you to effectively market to users. But everybody in those worlds also hates Meta because of how often and how brazenly it lies about those analytics– the biggest, most catastrophic example of this would be the pivot-to-video push Meta was behind that ended up being a lot of (ultimately fatal) smoke and mirrors. Every client I work with on this sort of thing, be it a musician or a food service company or a publication, is desperate for pretty much anybody to offer an alternative to Meta. But because of incompetence or misaligned priorities or whatever, Twitter has continuously shit the bed on this front.

Musk’s takeover has, perhaps more than anything, illuminated how poorly the tech world at large understands what Twitter is, what it could be and how it can be profitable. No one wants Twitter to be an “everything app” any more than anyone wants Facebook or Instagram to be an “everything app,” they just want to hang out in these spaces and have a reasonably civil experience. The best way I can think to frame these platforms is that they are basically digital bars– Twitter is the neighborhood dive bar where you catch up on gossip and debate news with friends and select coworkers, Facebook is the somewhat sterile family friendly bar where you’re more likely to run into family members and former classmates and Instagram and TikTok are the nightclubs where you don’t go to be able to have conversation but to see glamour and style and maybe a few drunken fights/embarrassing situations. Where these platforms fall apart is in attempting to ape one another and integrate things that really only work on the other platforms– no one goes to the neighborhood dive bar to scope out the latest fashion trends and no one goes to the nightclub with their family in an attempt to talk out their differences. Likewise, you aren’t going to have a profitable experience if you get rid of all of the cheap beer at the dive bar and try to get everyone to sip on overpriced syrupy cocktails instead.

So if you want these things to be profitable, you have to moderate and control the experience properly for the environment you have. Musk, however, seems to want to force Twitter to fit the experience he and his cronies want to have and in the process of doing that he is making an environment that is too toxic for advertisers and too chaotic for a normal ass person. I don’t think “fascist” is the right framing for his approach, it’s more like the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone, where a petulant child has incomprehensible power but pretty much only uses it to bully and break people. As the texts from the lawsuit show, Musk and his partners have wanted to buy Twitter for a while just to punish its users. There is no plan here other than “I want to be able to direct my horde of unhinged followers towards whoever I don’t like at the moment but I also don’t want anyone to be able to criticize me” and that is the sort of plan that will never make money no matter how many resources you throw at it.

It’s especially bad here, though, because Twitter is in a way a sentient organism itself and it is actively resisting efforts to shape it into anything it isn’t, and this isn’t new to Musk (this is also why I don’t think its influence is overestimated, if anything any platform that is this autonomous and resistant to forced change under the hostile ownership of the world’s richest man has probably been underestimated). There is clearly a societal need to gossip and talk shit and Twitter remains the best platform for that so if you want to make money off Twitter, embrace that! Stop putting more money behind bloat, stop laying off the engineers keeping the quality of life stable, stop encouraging what are basically drunken hooligans to storm the dive bar. Put the energy and money instead into fixing your metrics systems and into better moderation because that is what advertisers and users both want– they want the app to work, they want to be able to be seen easily, they don’t want to deal with paywalls or “shadowbanning” or whatever other nonsense Musk thinks is a road to success.

Kim: It’s such an interesting question, what level of user experience Twitter needs to maintain to keep its users (and attract new ones). One way to interpret these crazy rounds of layoffs is that Musk has been Benjamin Buttoning the platform. He’s taken a mature, functional service and is stripping it down to the studs, moving backward toward a minimum viable product. It’s like a reverse startup? Which is an enormously risky approach, even if it weren’t being executed in such a haphazard and unprofessional way, under unfathomable financial duress.

I mean, we could talk all day about the very plain deficiencies in Musk’s understanding of how anything works. There’s his total lack of insight into the advertising and social media businesses, as you mentioned. There’s also his outrageous plan (perhaps former plan…?) to throttle engagement for users who won’t pay for a subscription. That would repel droves of people on, like, the level of neurochemistry. It’s bonkers!

It seems worth noting that Facebook made a lot of money not because of Mark Zuckerberg, but because of Sheryl Sandberg (who has, notably, abandoned ship in the transition to Meta). There does not seem to be anyone in Musk’s life to play that role. His lieutenants are a rogue’s gallery of Robert Greene wannabes, plus that one lady who sleeps in the Twitter conference room. Musk should be surrounding himself with normie pragmatists, not people who describe themselves as alphas who found “spirituality” at Burning Man. The idea that those are the people you want on your team to realize One App to Rule Them All is so funny.

A good leader must listen, reflect

But…Silicon Valley is still chasing unicorns, which is why Musk is who he is. His belief that Twitter has a lot of bloat – that it should be focusing on a lean payroll and minimum viable product rather than integrity or network effect – is on some level rational. Historically, Musk is a person who has been enormously successful with this notion of minimum viable product. Look at Tesla! Year after year, on a material level, it has jerked and burned its way toward massive profitability. (I am wandering well outside my expertise here, but it seems like to me that bringing MVP to the luxury car space…is the most American innovation in history?) Musk’s main lines of business have been in manufacturing more than tech. But he has shown this huge capacity for successfully translating tech startup principles to the material world, which is experience that seems relevant.

Again, setting aside the real possibility that Twitter will simply break in the near future – is there a world in which Musk could succeed without a Sandberg-like figure at Twitter? Or, put another way, how much does reality matter? lol

Nick: With Tesla, and SpaceX, the main difference is that Musk is selling a philosophy/status more than an actual product. People buy from Tesla because they want to be seen in a Tesla and/or they have bought into this idea of Musk as the “savior of humanity” and thus buy his products to support his quest. Tesla and SpaceX neither aspire to nor want the average person to be able to consume their products. That approach is of course antithetical to a social media business, because social media only really works when it is embraced by a large number of people as well as by celebrities who need the adoration of the masses. So no, I don’t think there is a world in which Musk can succeed at any social media platform that he himself is in charge of unless he goes through some kind of process that puts his ego in check.

Employees are for betas 

This is also why every attempt to make a more closed off form of Twitter– be it the various libertarian hell holes or on the other end of the spectrum, federated platforms like Mastodon– never really goes anywhere. This is also why I think that Musk’s emphasis on “going lean” is so catastrophic, because a giant ecosystem like Twitter can only really function if there are a lot of people involved in checking its engineering systems and keeping it stable, as well as doing the thankless work of moderation. Even Meta and Google understand this to a degree, and that’s why Facebook and YouTube sustain entire content moderation industries, like sharks carrying remoras.

To me, all of this has become less of a question of “will Musk kill Twitter?” and more of a question of “will Twitter kill Musk?” What has surprised me the most since Musk took over Twitter is how much it is resisting him and also how much it is wreaking havoc on his finances, the stability of his businesses (and honestly the entire market) and the very notion of him as a genius. Maybe I’m reaching here but it legitimately feels like this Twitter takeover is helping destabilize Silicon Valley in general, because we are now seeing simultaneous breakdowns at Meta and Amazon and in the latter case we even have Bezos trying to figure out an exit strategy for himself. Yes, these companies and this industry were having issues before this but I think the Twitter situation, and the intense scrutiny Musk has inadvertently brought down on his fellow billionaires in the process, has rapidly escalated a fierce public turnaround on these figures and the parasitic businesses they front. Bezos in particular seems to now grasp that even the billionaires can’t stop the return of a labor movement in America and that the “eat the rich” shouting that has intensified over the past few years might become a very real threat soon.

So I guess my question back to you is even if Musk were to find this mythical Sandberg-esque figure, do you think he or anyone can stop the avalanche or is this going to take down this entire god forsaken industry or am I perhaps crazy for thinking it might?

Kim: I think grift culture is fundamental to American business, finance, religion, everything, and it genuinely cannot be overestimated. Trumpism, the self-help industry, Silicon Valley, evangelicals, etc.—these are powerful and intertwined forces in society. The nature of their grifts keep getting more complicated and abstract, as we have seen with the “Soylent Green is people” business model of social media platforms and the cyber Ponzi schemes of crypto. And many of the grifters themselves seem to have been growing emboldened to share their message of white male supremacy.

Approaching the singularity 

So I really don’t know. I think you’re more optimistic than I am. The layoff announcements at Amazon belie the reality that the company is still growing, just not fast enough by the standard of modern greed. Still, I take your point. I agree wholeheartedly that Musk has been showing his ass in a truly spectacular fashion. I agree this could effectively be the end of him. And I agree that there’s a growing sense of hope, in the way that people talk about labor in general and the outcome of the U.S. midterms, that eyes are opening to the fact that the emperors have no clothes.

It’s such a potent metaphor that so many of these guys are pouring their resources into space and AI and virtual reality. They really do operate outside reality a lot of the time. They often seem to transcend its laws. But let’s look at some facts without spin: Bezos donned his cowboy hat and spent about 10 minutes from launch to landing, only approaching the edge of what most people consider space. His fortune sent him there. But the laws of gravity brought him back.

And with that, we'll conclude the second installment of Twitterpolcalypse Now, a series where Nick and I dust off our defunct blogs to discuss the delightful and unsettling implosion of twitter dot com. You can read the first installment over in Nick's part of town, aka Loser City. As of this writing, you can still find Kim tweeting about Todd McFarlane @shallowbrigade, and Nick Hanover at @nick_hanover.