Let us use it against him!

I am here fulfilling my obligation to have thoughts about Twitter’s change of ownership. I mostly find the “black hole of discourse” surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of the company hilarious. Such nonevents as a corporate takeover should primarily amuse us if we take note of them at all, especially when they are accompanied by such hysteria and hypocrisy. There’s a great Evelyn Waugh novel waiting to be written about this whole thing.

I’m struck that the two best things I’ve read about this come in the form of lists—in one case, theses. I present these as reading recommendations and conclude with one actual personal thought.

First, a friend passed along a post from Matt Yglesias’s blog Slow Boring entitled “Twenty-three theses on Elon Musk and Twitter.” Yglesias considers the odd transformation of Musk into the left’s current Emmanuel Goldstein, some technical problems of both Twitter and Musk’s Mars colonization project, and what consensus, moderation, and free speech mean in a medium like Twitter. I don’t agree with all of it, but Yglesias brings some seemingly unconnected subjects together in an interesting way and I’ve been pondering his post for several days. A sample:

The concept of “free speech” on Twitter strikes me as inherently problematic due to the platform’s reliance on algorithmic amplification and suppression of certain tweets. There are completely valid and understandable business reasons for operating that way, but free speech is fundamentally about neutrality with regard to content, and the fact is that Twitter is not a neutral platform, not a dumb pipe, and not a utility-type information-disseminator. I would in some sense like them to operate that way, but they don’t. And given that they don’t, the question of what they do and don’t promote is a valid thing to scrutinize.

Second, via Alan Jacobs’s blog, novelist Robin Sloan posts a shorter, broader list of thoughts on the same topic. Unlike Yglesias, who notes both technical problems presented by the way Twitter works as well as his own enjoyment of the platform in spite of it, Sloan is overtly critical of Twitter as a medium and a technology. Yglesias notes Twitter’s tendency to become a time sink; Sloan condemns its narrowness, the stranglehold it gets on the imagination of those who take up residence there:

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

Precisely correct. Twitter is not real life.

Sloan asserts that the best-case outcome for everyone is the “MySpace-ification” of Twitter, the “total abandonment of the platform.” (Jacobs on his blog a few days ago: “Elon Musk could become the world’s greatest hero by buying Twitter and then immediately shutting it down.” Endorsed.) I gave up Twitter cold-turkey five years ago this fall and Sloan tells the truth when he writes that:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

As it happens, the Coen brothers have shown us what to do when we unwittingly invite this kind of creature into our homes. But of course Musk is not going to destroy Twitter, and it may be decades before it gets MySpace-ified.

Read both Yglesias’s and Sloan’s pieces. I’ve gotten a lot out of them.

I can’t add anything to the political and culture war over Musk’s purchase of Twitter that hasn’t already been said, but let me note my support for free speech and my skepticism of technology, much less “content moderation,” as a solution. Everyone arguing about this seems to flatter themselves with the thought that Twitter will be good as long as they, the good people, have or take it under their control. But the problem isn’t misinformation on Twitter, the problem is Twitter. The temptations of a technological medium like this one, regardless of who owns or controls it, are part of the problem. For a parallel case of the temptations presented by technology, read Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Bomber Mafia, which I reviewed here last year, and take a while to think about it.

In the end, what all of this sound and fury sounds like to me is just so much debate over, having decided not to destroy it, how best to use the Ring to defeat Sauron.