All Hail King Musk! May His Reign Be Long And Unprosperous
Elon Musk bought the “public square” everyone! 44 billion shekels of silver and the “national conversation” is his. Now he's going to stomp and shit all over our immaculately arranged “discourse” like an autistic water buffalo.
Good.
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The problem with social media, and Twitter in particular, is the pretense that it could become something other than a total shit-show. Musk will smash this pretense like a narcissistic sledge hammer. Long may he reign.
The belief, rooted in the techno-optimism of the 1990s, that the internet was not just a material tool but a piece of social technology that would build up people's rational faculties and nurture their humane impulses was always naïve. Which is fine. There should be a pollyanna at every table, world-weary misanthropes need their assumptions challenged too. The thesis may even have some merit given a long enough time horizon. God knows.
In the era of social media, however, the techno-optimists conceit has been moderated and crafted into a narrative that placates the desires of the companies, advertisers and users. The bug narrative claims that when algorithms designed to maximize engagement( i.e. promote conflict, the shocking, etc.) produce content that is unpalatable to advertisers or users that this is an aberration. A glitch. A deviation from the service's true form which is useful and informative for the user – and is fit to host fucking expensive advertisements. This glitch just needs to be patched out with some tweaks to the old algo and a few additions to the cornucopia of moderation teams.
Total bullshit of course. The bug narrative isn’t a challenge to the future, it is a dopey excuse for the present. “The discourse” you would find in any “public square” worthy of the name would require gatekeeping and paying the participants. Context would be established, facts agreed upon, and the basic rules of logic respected. The social media honcho's will to maximize users, engagement and precious advertisements requires that there be no gatekeeping and unpaid participants. His algorithm has little use for facts or logic and considers context to be a hateful demon. This isn't a bug, it is the foundation of how these companies work.
Actual public square:
There's nothing surprising in any of this. Jack Dorsey's soul may have belonged to Asimov but his business didn't. The kind of porno and/or scam advertisements that keep the lights on at open circuses like 4chan don't buy fancy offices or make shareholders very happy. “Toyota” isn't a word you see written on the sides of bathroom stalls very often. The Coca-Cola Corporation doesn't want its polar bears sandwiched between posts from @fucklibtards and someone live tweeting their bleeding anus. Or maybe it does, there's a lot of eye balls there. The bug narrative creates the permission slip here. If a major company's advertisement is found near content deemed offensive by enough people, that is, in and of itself, enough to deem the ad placement a mistake. Send in the Human Rights Team(RIP) for emergency clean up.
The bug narrative also assuages users. Shitposts are fun. Slap-fights are fun. Gossip, E-girls, brainless zealots, mud wrestling rage junkies – all fun. They're certainly the best thing about Twitter.com. But there's also the sinking feeling that an hour spent in Twitter's bog is, at best, a complete waste of time and, at worst, destroying civilization. Both a deadening Bermuda Triangle for the soul and a ravenous demon slowly transforming all of us into the Tasmanian Devil's asshole.
There's a sense of Christian guilt that comes with whittling away the hours on social media. Every moment not spent on things that promote virtue and vitality are the devil's workshop. The bug narrative allows one to believe that there's an important “national conversation” happening on social media if only the liars and nazis can be swept out of the “public square.” This task may need your participation, the app will become not stupid if you use it more. The natural state of social media is a relevant and enriching “discourse” which has been temporarily sidetracked.
Social media is occasionally informative and can be used to find actual experts. There also good causes( Slava Ukraini!) and the occasional troll army to be battled. But these things occur randomly in a system that normally outputs chitchat and piffle. They are the Jerry Springer guest who suddenly turns to the crowd and delivers a cogent summary of Anna Karenina before going on to explore its impact on 20th century literary modernism[1].
Virtue and vitality don't usually come with thrown chairs, the things that lead to them are often arduous and boring. Christian guilt understands this and that's why it is a meme that will be around for millennia after Jack's learn-while-you-play, porch talk MMO has hit the dust bin of history. Acknowledging this could go a long way.
There's also a major concern that if social media does promote vitality, it's vitality for complete assholes. Because assholes are good at getting attention[2] and social media is an attention economy, the asshole attains a high position. People emulate those with status. Such a “national conversation” is merely a prelude to a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by po-faced blue hairs, cheesy grifters, and college Republicans who think Kim Jong Un is “based.”
But this is only true if we buy into the primacy of engagement. Which is a choice. People willing to drink the worm get a lot of attention but are not held in high regard. The bug narrative internalizes the primacy of engagement by setting the terms of debate around who does or ought to receive engagement. The basic idea that engagement is both very important and a decider of social status goes unchallenged, in fact, it's reinforced.
I have no doubt that Elon Musk grasps the economics and technical issues associated with content moderation much better than I ever could. From this perspective, it's easy to see how Musk views Twitter's endless sea of community managers and special moderation teams as nothing but a weird byproduct of a San Francisco based company's relationship with a group of political activists who happen to be powerful in that neck of the woods. They do nothing for the vast majority of Twitter's user base. Get out the ax, it's free money.
Public square of old:
From the literary perspective of the bug narrative, however, these are essential workers. They are the priestx tasked with the maintenance and promulgation of the necessary illusion that Twitter is on the cusp of becoming a fulfilling, useful and advertiser friendly information source. Musk is poised to heedlessly pwn this illusion whether he intends to or not, and he is going to lose a lot of money.
Inshallah. Lies are rarely as useful as they're made out to be. Twitter is a little like a “public square” and a lot like a bar. It should be reconceptualized as such.
“The national bar stool” could be understood as designated place for goofing off and time wasting. Relaxed standards of personal conduct would be the norm. People share useful info and have productive debates in bars all the time, but it isn't to be expected, it's not some kind of goal. The antics of local drunks would be enjoyed and pitied. The advertising would be garish and a bit sleazy. It would create a brighter tomorrow if shitposts and slap-fights could be freed from constant whinging about “the discourse.”
This isn't to say that there would be no rules. Bars have rules, people get kicked out of them all the time[3]. So sure, report Pepe1488, just understand this is like calling in a noise complaint on hurricane Katrina. Do it for the right reasons( spite, revenge, etc.) not some misguided belief that it will actually change anything.
God bless you Mr. Musk and I hope you have a couple billion left when it's all over.
Given the large number of guests appearing on the Jerry Springer show, it is reasonable to assume that one of them was actually capable of doing this. Jerry didn't ask. I see you Jerry.
Dozens of people have been cordial to me today but I'm still fixated on the gum smacking, eye rolling cashier. I will spend a good portion of the rest of the day plotting her downfall.
As a former bouncer, I would recommend us to Mr. Musk as the nations leading experts on “I know it when I see it” asshole behavior. You know who you are, and you know why.