Ode to the Bird
And why its likely demise is nothing to celebrate
Twitter has been a major cultural and political force for a little over a decade now. The website used to have the tagline “Global Public Square,” and I think that was a pretty accurate description of the role that it has played internationally. A decade can feel like a long time when you’re living in it, but it is very short in historical terms. There’s no reason to think that Twitter will necessarily be around in another ten years, nor that it will play as important role as it has to date. Elon Musk taking over the company, apparently by accident, has now triggered a desperate attempt on his part to squeeze money out of the platform using various harebrained schemes that seems very much like the beginning of its end. Although Musk himself has characterized his idea to start charging for aspects of the platform as an attempt to “pay the bills somehow!” his associated oligarchs and unpaid sycophants are characterizing his takeover as the first salvo in some sort of egalitarian revolution. Suffice to say I think there is good reason to be skeptical of these claims.
I’m not really interested in litigating the wisdom of Musk’s purchase of the site, which others, including my Intercept colleague Jon Schwarz, have done quite well. I did want to point out though that despite its many shortcomings, the possible end of Twitter, or its reduction into an unusable paid Facebook-style hellscape, would put an end to probably the greatest shared platform for free speech that we’ve ever had in the world. People love griping about Twitter, but in doing so they take for granted everything that it has offered in terms of making public discourse accessible to a broader range of people. There is a reason that every politician in the world feels compelled to have a Twitter account and issue statements of grave importance there. Dissidents, activists, revolutionaries, and simple normies, many of them anonymous, have used Twitter as a means of reaching out to the world beyond and galvanizing public opinion in a manner what would otherwise have been impossible. The way that power works is mainly through control of hierarchies of information by elites. Twitter has represented a loss of that elite control, to the net benefit of everyone else.
Sitting in an ivory tower sounds great to be honest. In addition to being sequestered from public feedback, you’re also surrounded by beautiful glittering ivory. The advent of Twitter basically pulled elites down from this lovely perch and placed them onto a level playing field with the crowds to whom they were previously accustomed to simply dictating. Upon being brought to earth, what these people often learnt is that their ideas were not always as popular or intelligent as they had assumed back when they were high in the sky and got no feedback. I’m not saying this has always been pretty, or that the crowds are always right, but its been a fundamentally democratic process where powerful people have one some small level been made accountable to the public, or at least had their arguments tested against a broader circle of competitors. It’s been a basically egalitarian process that has shown us that a lot of very smart and charismatic people are not rich and powerful, and a lot of rich and powerful people are often not very smart or charismatic. The most intelligent people I follow on Twitter are anon accounts who frequently impress me with their depth and range of analysis. What they write is often far more interesting than the generic pablum that a lot of tenured columnists produce for great financial reward. Yet were it not for Twitter no one would have ever heard of them.
As someone who came from a working-class background and did not have the networks and connections that would ever place me a hundred miles from any high-status institution, Twitter afforded me an intellectual community that put me into regular dialogue with interesting and intelligent people with whom the average person would have otherwise had to wait their whole life to speak. Twitter gives a chance to talk back to elites, but also, if you’re willing, get a free education from the world’s leading experts in any field that you can imagine. I learnt how to do a lot of things on Twitter, including reading and writing in a foreign language, but it’s also offered me and others a platform to learn about any subject that one would want to dive into. Twitter has also been a way for organic intellectuals to emerge during an era where local journalism has been eviscerated by consolidation and hedge-fund vulture capitalism. I’m still finding random brilliant new people on there regularly who really deserve to have newspaper columns in the New York Times based on sheer intellect and writing charisma. Commenting and posting my writing on the website as a young man also put me in touch with talented and famous people with whom I ended up building a genuine career working in journalism over the past ten years, and I’m grateful for that.
All good things come to an end, and if this does prove to be the end for Twitter we can say that it had a good run. In the long-term new platforms will emerge that will fulfill some of its role, though, despite great efforts, it seems that no platform with the exception of TikTok (not great for political discourse in my opinion) has since managed to replicate the initial network effort that it enjoyed. A few months ago, Balaji Srinavasan, one of the Silicon Valley guys who I think is genuinely very smart, published a great piece on how Twitter might actually be saved as a free speech platform by transforming it from a platform into a protocol. That’s an excellent idea, but it doesn’t seem to be where Elon Musk is headed. It is sad to see the bird that many of us have enjoyed interacting with slaughtered by a rich guy for a hasty meal. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, though, we should not lament too much, because this slaughter is what we call “progress.”
A thought-provoking and compelling read, as always, Murtaza.
I would underscore your point about Twitter facilitating dialogue between different linguistic communities. I think this is one of Twitter’s more significant accomplishments, which everyone implicitly recognizes, but which relatively few people – perhaps only multilinguals – fully appreciate. By some accident of the US education system, I ended up being able to speak and read German at a fairly advanced level by the time I was 18, right around the time I started using Twitter. Fast forward the better part of a decade, and it’s almost as though I have a second virtual life in Germany. Probably 1/3 of my follows are Germany-based commentators and personalities. I’ve had meaningful exchanges with journalists at Germany’s papers of record – Der Spiegel, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and so on – as well as members of the Bundestag. When the US seems to fall into an especially dark period – in the aftermath of a school shooting, for instance – I’ll even take a sort of digital vacation on German Twitter, where the burning question of the day often has to do with something as innocuous as systemic train delays, and where the “crisis” of the 2021 elections was… hour-long lines at a handful of polling places in Berlin. On a more practical note, there’s a whole other world of discourse on Turkey, Ukraine, and other countries in the region that, because of the size and diversity of Germany’s immigrant population, is much richer on German Twitter than what I see circulating in Anglo-American networks. Only a small proportion of those contributions are translated into English or surface in Anglophone networks in a meaningful way. In short, the level of sustained engagement with a foreign people Twitter that provides me has had a profound impact on how I view the world.
Others might take these sorts of interactions for granted, but from a historical and epistemological standpoint, they fascinate me to no end. With a few language classes and a Twitter account, one can “travel” to nearly any country in the world and have meaningful interactions with the common folk there, as well as relatively "elite" individuals. (And Twitter’s “translate” function means language classes often aren’t even necessary.) It’s hard to overstate the social and political implications of that kind of technology. (It reminds me of those 16th. and 17th. c. Dutch and English coffeehouses one reads about in histories of the Enlightenment.) Of course, theoretically, this sort of engagement was possible before Twitter, but my understanding of early 2000s Internet culture is that the virtual public sphere – which consisted mostly of online forums – was, to a significant degree, siloed in terms of language: the Anglo-Americans had their forums, the Russians had theirs, and so on. And Facebook, though I can’t exactly articulate why, never seems to really bring users across the globe as closely together as Twitter does. It’s clear to me that Twitter has done the most to bring the global population together under one digital roof, such that it’s probably not even necessary to qualify or support that statement.
It's for all these reasons that I’d be really sad to see Twitter, as it currently exists, fall apart. Of all the social media platforms we’ve seen rise (and fall) over the last ten to fifteen years – Facebook (virtual landfill), Vine (not worth eulogizing, imo), Instagram (now a diet, quasi-pornographic TikTok), TikTok (CCP spyware) – Twitter stands out, in my view, as the only one to have realized the transformative potential of the internet for a positive purpose. And aside from the odd Luddite or anarcho-primitivist, I think most routine Twitter users would agree that the app *does* bring some form of measurable utility in their lives.
Twitter literally saved my life by showing me the Holy Mother of God tweet by Eric Feigl-Ding, warning of the coronavirus. Sad to see it go, but CounterSocial does it better. Like Twitter replaced Digg, CS will replace Twitter.