Would You Buy a Used Mars from This Man?
Elon Musk broke Twitter, and he's breaking research communities, too.
Twitter is dying—first gradually, and then all at once. Right now, we’re at the “all at once” stage.
In part, this makes me happy. Like most of you, I’ve spent too much time on the platform and it has at times cultivated some of my worst instincts. It’s bizarre that the curing of this addiction will be carried out by the site itself, but here we are. On a weekend when Elon’s Site has decided to pull off an auto-DDOS and has imposed bizarrely low limits on how much and how often users can access the site, it’s clearer than ever that Twitter will not go out in a blaze of glory but an excess of hubris. Probably shouldn’t have made the site out of carbon fiber that was past its sell-by date.
The wonderful thing about this is that Elon is losing a lot of money, and he’s also getting himself crosswise with investors who will be none too happy that he also lost them a lot of money. Nobody should have $44 billion to begin with, but Elon has done more to take money from billionaires than any DSA caucus has ever imagined. Thanks, Comrade Elon! Between this and the submersible, you’ve done a lot to make clear that “rich” and “intelligent” don’t always go together. (And you’ve also made clear that we need to stop billionaires from having anything more to do with interplanetary colonization. Can you imagine the Mars Terms of Service being rewritten on the fly by this guy?)
The awful thing, of course, is that in lighting his own money on fire Elon has also decided to knock away the good part of Twitter. Twitter has, over the past decade, come to provide invisible but load-bearing supports for researchers and academics. It’s been a great way for those of us at out-of-the-way institutions to bring visibility to our arguments and research profile (and if you think Amherst isn’t out-of-the-way, just ask someone who’s Boston or New York-based to come out—a drive that we would do without thinking is a major imposition for those in the metropole). We know that scholarly conferences spur connections and research productivity; Twitter has been the conference bar or the post-panel chatter available 24/7 and across (most) borders. It’s accelerated research dissemination and it’s brought me and others into contact with people we otherwise never would have met. And it also connected us to editors and publishers in ways that did more to enrich and diversify the discourse than any number of assistant vice provosts for JEDI initiatives.1
It’s ironic that Musk, whose brand for a long time was Big Rich Science Nerd, has decided to immolate this digital Library of Alexandria. You would have thought that he could have understood that Twitter was a commercialized, raucous, and at times dangerous version of the Internet of the 1980s and 1990s, a mashup of Usenet and link rings and weblogs all brought together in a way that somehow facilitated everyone from sex workers to scientists. Instead, having posted himself into this mess, he decided to keep posting through it. And now we’re all suffering for it.
I’m going to miss Twitter. It feels like the end of Web 2.0. Bluesky has been great, even the Alf porn (and if you don’t know, please don’t inquire further). Still, I have doubts about its scalability (in part driven by the fact that its own servers struggled to keep up with this morning’s exodus from Twitter). Bluesky’s long-term vision of federated servers seems to mean we’re all going to have to suffer endless meta-discourse about federating and defederating that will squeeze out every other part of conversation that the protocol will hosts, rather like Mastodon, which is Twitter for particularly strict techno-Calvinists. The vibe of Peak Twitter (ca. 2015-2016) and even of Dark Twitter (ca. 2017-2019) is unlikely to be recaptured.
Little, I think, will take its place. Between the Web itself being different now, the lack of low-interest rate credit to fuel stupid business plans with pleasant side effects for users, and the coming swamp of artificial intelligence-enabled spam, the circumstances for a replacement to emerge are not great. The fact that I’m writing this on an email newsletter—peak 1990s technology!—suggests that retro will be in by default. And retro just isn’t as good as what took its place.
For researchers, this likely means that the traditional means of forming networks will be more in vogue: a soft return to elite gatekeeping and siloing that will impoverish us intellectually. Elon, you maniac: you blew it up.
JEDI, if you don’t know, is Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Yes, conservatives, when you’re banging on about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), you’re already tilting at the wrong windmill.
I'd be curious to on the ways that twitter was better than say the blogosphere/rss days. I can buy that my perspective is too nostalgic here, and if that's a subject you want to cover in any future posts I'd eagerly read it.
I'd imagine that part of it is that the producer time commitment is more manageable and managing a larger set of contacts is easier. I've found these properties useful in twitter for transit advocacy. On the other hand, my RSS reader works for me and on social media I am the product and my attention is being optimized by a central set of engineers towards ends that are not my own.
The late Twitter usefulness you're describing is really a product of the early Twitter culture--essentially before the guys who made it had any idea whether it even could be monetized, they just knew it might be popular and/or useful. Reddit is starting on the same death spiral now--the dumb people in charge now need to try and figure out how to squeeze blood from its rock convincingly enough to make it through an IPO, after which they'll cash in and run. I think what made early Twitter generative compared to the blogosphere/RSS was that it was a new platform (so new entrants) plus you could share and consume high-value information with a light burden in terms of content labor whereas the blogosphere took more work (of a kind largely discounted by anybody who wasn't in it).