A Land of Contrasts
On Twitter (and Elon Musk)
While Elon Musk is from South Africa, he is a classic American huckster, albeit one who has taken the form to previously unexplored heights. He has a long record of broken promises and outlandish predictions—robotaxis, Mars colonies, hyperloops—that never really come to pass and would probably be bad if they did. The number of people still buying the idea that he is a superhero saving the planet seems to be dwindling somewhat, although he still maintains a devoted, and increasingly conservative, fandom. The extent to which he believes his own bullshit is impossible for us to know, but it is also largely immaterial.
Thanks to this mythmaking that inflates stock values, the labor of his employees, and copious government largesse, Musk is now the wealthiest person on Earth—currently estimated at around $170 billion (although that is half of what he was worth a year ago). He is, for the time being, the CEO of three massive corporations: Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter. This may be the best evidence yet of the preposterously outsized power, status, and compensation afforded to CEOs and rich people in general, perhaps only eclipsed by Musk’s near-constant tweeting. If his time and output are so valuable, why does he spend all day posting the worst stolen memes I have ever seen and inanely bantering with seemingly every vile far-right account on Twitter?
The latter is a particularly disconcerting indicator for how he plans to run his new company. There has been a lot of theorizing about Musk’s true motive for buying Twitter, but I think the most likely reason is exactly what it looks like. He is a bizarre, reactionary billionaire in an echo chamber of like-minded rich people who thought Twitter was controlled by “the woke left” silencing the “free speech” of conservatives, was goaded into making another one of his unserious and attention-seeking promises to buy it at a substantial premium ($54.20 per share, an epic weed reference), tried to back out, then for once in his life was made to follow through.
Just read his oafish text message exchanges that were released in the court proceedings that forced him to honor the contract he signed. Twitter is probably the only place Musk and his friends deal with meaningful criticism on a regular basis. Encountering the idea that the stories they tell themselves about who they are and what they do might be not only wrong, but egregiously immoral, creates an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that has to be dealt with somehow.
Honestly, I thought the basic business imperative to keep your primary source of revenue—advertisers—happy would serve as more of a guardrail for Musk’s worst impulses while running Twitter. I guess one should never underestimate the perversities of a centibillionaire who gets high on his own supply and is undoubtedly surrounded by nothing but sycophants and yes-men. Or, as Ben Tarnoff recently said:
For Musk, Twitter means too much. It is an outlet for his immeasurable ressentiment, an incubator for his reactionary politics, an arena for irony-poisoned meme combat, a stage from which to cultivate a fanbase, a megaphone for marketing his various ventures, a place to get his feelings hurt, a high school cafeteria full of cool kids against whom to take revenge. And this is what makes him such a lousy chief executive. The cool discipline of capital requires restraint.
Musk’s brief tenure helming Twitter has, as Ed Zitron so aptly put it, “a continually chaotic stage play where a 56-year-old billionaire is humiliated thousands of times a day as he runs a company into the ground.” It has been such a mess that it has broken through the mainstream media’s longstanding practice of providing him with universally fawning coverage and uncritically reprinting his outlandish promises. Since taking the company private and saddling it with debt, Musk has fired more than half of its staff. Many remaining workers resigned or have been vocally contradicting his consistently ignorant statements about the inner workings of the social network, both semi-privately on the company Slack and publicly on Twitter itself. Musk has responded in his characteristically tyrannical manner by firing many if not all of these outspoken workers (awful treatment of his employees is a pattern for Musk, as his reigns at both Tesla and SpaceX have been rife with various labor abuses). He has also issued bizarre demands for his workforce to get “extremely hardcore” and submit to code reviews; it is unclear to me whether Musk even knows how to code in a meaningful sense.
For most of its 16 year history, Twitter has struggled to turn a profit; on an annual basis, it only made more money than it lost in 2018 and 2019. But now Twitter’s future is more uncertain than ever. With a newly gutted workforce, the potential for a significant decrease in basic functionality is a growing concern. And Musk’s erratic behavior and terrible business decisions combined with his overt flirtations with some of the worst people on the internet have already driven advertisers away (reportedly 50 of their top 100 customers), and this problem will likely only continue to worsen. Who could have guessed that brand-conscious corporations would not want to be impersonated by any schmuck who pays $8 or see their ads show up alongside virulently homophobic rhetoric?
Because of this potential death spiral on the horizon, many of Twitter’s most active users have switched from regularly decrying it as a “hellsite” to sending out fond, 240-character obituaries lamenting its potential demise. So many people have gotten so many positive things out of it—friends, comrades, careers, entertainment, knowledge—myself included. I have learned so much and been introduced to ideas and people I probably never would have found without Twitter. Unlike say, Facebook, you can regularly stumble onto things or participate in or observe conversations that lead you down new paths you were not even aware of before. Twitter has also served as an important communications tool for oppressed people around the world, disaster emergencies, and semi-democratized news gathering and sharing. There is really nothing like it, and if it goes down there is no replacement for the time being.
I do not like this algorithmic video stuff; give me text conversations with a chronological feed any day (Luddite social media?). Twitter does not have as many active users as Instagram or Tiktok, but it does drive conversation in a way that other sites do not. It is often called the internet’s public square, and there is nowhere else where the winners of our ostensible meritocracy so regularly and vigorously put their mediocrity on display for the world to see. All the best tweets become screenshot fodder for various aggregator pages on other sites; you do not see many Facebook screenshots on Twitter. Every politician and journalist uses it. In other words, to quote Tarnoff again, “Everyone lives in the world that Twitter has made, regardless of whether they’ve ever tweeted.”
With that being said, Twitter certainly has significant downsides. Toxic discourse, unnecessary conflict, rampant misinformation, harassment, doxxing, and much more. The flipside of Twitter’s openness and universality is context collapse; one little tweet can go viral or reach the wrong corners and ruin your day or much worse. Firing off little snippets of thoughts for likes does not easily lend itself to deliberative and meaningful engagement and analysis. And the negative mental health effects of existing social media are by now well-known. These sites are designed to make and maximize profit, and that is why they have huge teams of people working to maximize engagement and make them as addicting as possible.
Does the usefulness of Twitter outweigh its costs? I was not entirely sure even before Musk took over. The more interesting question to me is: what could social media be without the profit motive? I wonder what Twitter would be like if it was a public utility. Could we have social media that was an unambiguously positive force for connecting humanity while mitigating the drawbacks of such a technology? An open source social media site plays a key role in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 science fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, in which humanity slowly but surely repairs the climate and ecological crisis. Perhaps the better question is: could we have an internet that is an unambiguously positive force? I think such an internet is not only possible, but necessary for building a truly collective global humanity—with the caveat that, while the line between online and offline is increasingly blurred, in-person relationships and interactions where we live and work are still the mortar of movements.
However, this will not happen as long as its infrastructure is controlled by and for the wealthiest people in the world. While it is easy to focus on Musk’s individual repugnance, at the end of the day he is really just another billionaire trying to fill the unquenchable void in his heart. I am less concerned about the particularities of this guy’s condemnable behavior than I am about the forces that produce and reproduce people like him.
The process of becoming and staying one of the wealthiest people in the world both selects for and fosters profoundly antisocial, inhuman, and narcissistic traits. You have to not only ruthlessly exploit human and nonhuman nature, you have to be driven to continue accumulating long after you are comfortably set for life. Such people are an inevitable product of capitalism, which will keep making people like Elon Musk, who will keep trying to sell us techno-utopian snake oil instead of ceding their wealth and power and moving past an economic system that is destroying the one habitable planet because of an insatiable drive for expansion.
The only way out is making a world where billionaires are not possible. Musk’s terrible treatment of his employees is a choice, but it is one that is only available due to a lack of union protections and labor policies that favor capital such as at-will employment—not to mention private ownership itself. Public squares, virtual or physical, should not be playthings for the rich or vehicles for profit.