“And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” The end of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater is a perfect distillation of how many of us felt about Twitter when Elon Musk bought it last October. But I didn’t know that from reading it, even though I have; I knew that because someone faster, smarter, probably younger, with a better memory (@hayleycampbell), put it on Twitter.
So even though everything I hate is there, so is a lot of what I love. My father never owned a TV, because he said every time you thought you were good at something – cooking, repartee, being alive – on the telly, there’d be someone who was better at it than you. I thought that was just an unlovely overhang of a 40s childhood: the whole point of repartee, and indeed cooking and being alive, is that the more people who can do it, the better. Also, I really wanted a TV.
Quite soon after Musk’s purchase of the platform, more of what I hated was there. Donald Trump was readmitted, having been barred to avoid the risk of further incitement of violence after the ambush of the Capitol in 2021 – and the sheer brazenness of the free speech justification, the tedium of it, was depressing to witness.
Blue ticks were monetised, destroying any trust in verification while generating not much revenue. Some staff walked, some were fired, and the endless pranks of the new owner – walking into HQ with a sink, sending a turd emoji as an auto response to journalist enquires – were, again, deadening to watch. A rich-enough man can erode workplace rights yet talk about the work ethic of his staff; he can drag the discourse into a mire and have you debating that as an inalienable freedom; he can engage the whole world in having the wrong conversation.
And at the user level, Twitter was rubbish. Long conversations I wasn’t interested in, full of anti-trans prejudice and homespun ick about misremembered feminist lore, flooded my timeline. How could this possibly have been curated “for me”, when I blocked all that stuff years ago? Was it just a broad-brush algorithm for the middle-aged, or a more precisely targeted goading?
My direct messages, meanwhile, were full of accounts with pretty avatars touting a scam that was quite novel to me. A young woman who wants to sell you some crypto, but has also just split up with her boyfriend and is drunk: fair play, I’m glad to know this exists as a genre. I’d hate to be the person who still thought internet scamming meant pretending to be a prince who just needs to quickly leave a million dollars in your bank account.
As alternatives to Twitter sprang up, the question moved on: Mastodon, the so-called “fediverse”, was an early migration option and ticked all the right boxes politically. It can never be bought, is democratically moderated, and (with the caveat that I could probably be using it better) is also nothing like horrible enough. There are more mature faults to find – it is more sparsely populated, the timelines are quite repetitive – but the main void is of gleeful spite. Despite hating Twitter, there is something compelling about the horror of it all.
Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival network, tied to Instagram, overcame many of those early hurdles just by having more money and being part of an existing platform: almost overnight, it had 100 million users. People with large armies of followers mourned the fact that they would have to start from scratch, but rebuilding didn’t seem as unrealistic as it did on Mastodon. It was also gratifying to see the new platform work so well, having scooped up so many of Twitter’s disgruntled employees, and more pleasing still to see Musk’s half-hearted legal challenge to Zuckerberg on that basis. It turns out there are still kinks in the winner-takes-all capitalist model; your employees are still free to work for your competitors.
Essentially, all these town-square platforms, the rivalries and differences between them, and more importantly the emotional and intellectual investments we make to build them, make questions that have been building for years more pressing. What makes Wikipedia Wikipedia – an astonishing display of human cooperation and expertise, of both unbelievable richness and winsome peculiarity – and Facebook Facebook – a place where people gather to drive each other into unlovely spasms of envy, delusion, triviality and extremism? What is it about the funding models, the governance and the vision that creates such very different experiences from the same raw material: people, participating? Is it as simple as profit motive; and if so, why aren’t all non-profit platforms naturally, atmospherically, better?
In one way, Musk did everyone who cared about Twitter a favour, teaching us how vulnerable it was to the hooliganism of one ego; but we must figure out some solution better than “boycott and find a hobby”; we don’t need Zuckerberg to teach us that lesson twice.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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