Social Democracy

The thing to understand about Twitter is that it is made entirely by its users, not simply in terms of the content but in terms of the interaction around that content. Comparable (and more popular) platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are ultimately narrowcasters whose experience is heavily determined by the feed algorithm. They are social only in the superficial sense that they employ the mechanics of a community - elective association, feedback and ostracism. In reality, they are opaque and controlling environments in which the needs of advertisers are paramount and interaction is limited and of poor quality. Twitter has attempted to pursue a similar path, but it has repeatedly been knocked back by its users (e.g. the preference for the chronological feed over the curated). The platform's anarchic, antisocial reputation arises from the fact that it is the most social environment, and one in which communities are formed less by the algorithm and more by actual social behaviours. The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has been reported mostly in terms of the financials - i.e. whether he overpaid for it and how he is going to ensure it makes a profit in the future - but the real issue is whether it will remain the best (if still numerically inferior) social medium we have.

It's now clear that Musk's intention is to divide Twitter into effectively two social spaces: the checkmarked subscribers and the great unwashed. The former will be spared advertising, the latter subjected to it. The former will be prioritised in the feed algorithm, the latter deprioritised (on the spurious grounds that this will help suppress bots and spam). These two spaces will overlap - the non-blue-tick will still be able to follow the blue-tick - but it is clear that Musk's vision is essentially one of soft segregation in which current antisocial practices (e.g. the mass blocking of the followers of followers, the limiting of replies etc) will become the norm. Unless you pay your subs (and perhaps not even then, if the rumours about pricing tiers prove true) you will be excluded from certain conversations. This development isn't simply the standard premium/freemium model in software pricing: it's an exercise in class engineering. And that class division reflects the prejudices and structural assumptions of the analogue world, particularly as mediated by the traditional press. 

As Janan Ganesh of the FT declared in explaining his decision to quit Twitter (which he did some time ago): "The site reeks of low status. And not because it is free." Despite his protestations, he clearly associates virtue with price: "“The elite don’t tweet,” I want to say, but some of them do, including its new owner. It just happens to cheapen them." So why did Ganesh really quit Twitter? A clue is provided in this claim: "There is no one trait that links all the high performers — in sport, art, politics, commerce — that I have had occasion to meet. But the nearest thing is a slightly humourless amour propre. It is the kind of personality that gets short shrift on Twitter, which is part of the site’s charm but also what leaves it with an anti-aspirational feel." As someone whom he blocked for taking the piss, I can confirm that Ganesh is both humourless and conceited. It has long been clear that the strength of Twitter as a medium for expert dissemination has been in tension with its social nature, and this is nowhere more obvious than among journalists who deeply resent that the public consider them fools or liars.

Musk has recognised that Twitter's USP is the calibre of its users. They may be fewer than Facebook or Instagram, but they generate far superior content, and as has always been the case with online communities, there is a stable ratio between heavy creators, heavy commenters and mere spectators (1:10:100). This means that Twitter has an inherent tendency towards elitism as much as democracy (aka "the mob"), which obviously chimes with Musk's own view of the world. The aim then is not simply to monetise the heavy creators and commenters but to institutionally mute the spectators who might occasionally comment and are thus crucial to that organic democracy known as the Twitter ratio. Whether Musk can effect this change without going bust is another matter, but we shouldn't under-estimate the appetite for such a segregated space among the super-rich who may be asked to bail him out.

Musk is held up as a man of the future: a visionary and a creator of new possibilities. But his ideas are actually notable for being old-fashioned: often the dreams of a bygone age. Musk's original break, in which he turned a small fortune into a larger one, was PayPal: a payments processing system that stripped of the online facilitation was really just another form of credit card, and thus a limited advance on the technology of the mid-twentieth century. Since then, Musk's enterprises have tended to gradually retreat further back in time: the hyperloop is an early twentieth century idea revived, the Boring Company is straight out of Jules Verne or HG Wells, while electric cars have been a thing since the nineteenth century. The mission to colonise Mars is arguably of even greater vintage. For this reason, I think it's fair to assume that Musk's plans for Twitter can best be understood by reading Plato rather than anything produced in Silicon Valley in recent years. His claim to be championing "the people" in rejecting the "lords & peasants system" of the old blue-tick in favour of a paid subscription doesn't take us any further forward than John Locke.

The suggestion that Twitter users will desert in droves to Mastodon strikes me as improbable. Not only is that platform likely to quickly buckle under the weight of additional users and greater content moderation demands, but its federated structure will lead to rapid fragmentation. This is perfectly consistent with its technical architecture, but it highlights that Mastodon isn't a cohesive social space so much as a collection of communities, much like the old blogosphere. There isn't an alternative to Twitter unless you want to give up your critical faculties and simply let the Facebook or Instagram alogorithm wash over you: the "atmosphere of domestic mediocrity" that Ganesh identifries with the bird site but which is really more characteristic of its larger rivals. As a result, I think most users will remain on Twitter and will continue to appreciate its benefits even as they are steadily eroded. In other words, I suspect Twitter will prove far more resilient in the face of Musk's "dumb stuff" than the media coverage currently suggests, and that's because it remains a social space in which collective resistance is possible.