On Friday November 11, it was Veterans’ Day, when we honor our veterans, including those who died in service. And I checked my cellphone as I was getting out of bed, and found out that Kevin Conroy, the definitive Batman voice actor, had died. Not only that, Gallagher died.
Gallagher doesn’t die. I always thought that 50 years from now I would be dead and cremated and Gallagher would still be touring the clubs, his skeletal arms lifting the mallet to crush watermelons with maniacal focus, his remaining hairs wisping behind him like the angry ghosts of better comedians.
It’s like when I found out Lou Reed died. Once I was watching a concert video with him and somebody asked, “Who is that old guy? He looks like he’s dying, like he’s starving to death.” And I said, “No, he’s not dying, he’s just Lou Reed!” Lou Reed doesn’t die, he just gets homelier and homelier! And then he really died. Wow. Man, when Lou Reed died, it was a sad day for trans junkie hookers everywhere.
But at this morbid moment, I can at least take solace in an impending death that will actually do the world some good.
Twitter.
People have been bagging on Elon Musk for a while now, and his latest tilt towards the LOL Right has only confirmed why so many people hated him in the first place even as the rest of us admired his entrepreneurial moxie. But his latest and biggest mistake was sealing the deal to buy out Twitter even as he’d found out early on that it wasn’t profitable enough to be worth the investment. And so he is apparently deciding to make it an actual business. And in the process he is doing more to destroy the Twitter brand than he could if he were trying to liquidate Twitter on purpose, and I can’t prove that that isn’t what he’s really doing.
The first thing Musk did was to fire its previous executives including its general counsel, cause I guess Twitter had too much content supervision. Apparently, Elon’s takeover was so poorly done that the Twitter company got locked out of its own account for 12 days because login details had not been shared for the transition.
But the biggest policy change Musk made was to the status of “the blue checkmark.” For most of Twitter’s history, having a blue checkmark next to your account name marked you as the verified user and protected against fakes. To get it, you had to fill out a form. Most public figures’ accounts, like the accounts of the President (and the individual who is or used to be the president) are verified this way. I did not know this until recently because I don’t give a rat’s tail about Twitter and until now it really didn’t matter. But now Musk, officially “Chief Twit”, decided his main goal with the site was to monetize a communications medium that he’d sunk $44 billion into. He told everybody that in order to keep their blue checkmarks, they’d have to pay him $20 per month. And a lot of those verified posters pointed out it was their traffic that built the site, with Stephen King saying “Fuck that, they should pay ME.” So Musk haggled himself down to $8. But then he said that with the monthly fee service, which he christened “Twitter Blue”, you got to use after-post edits and other features that previously weren’t in Twitter before. That’s good. Although most of these features are on Facebook for free. But the company seemed more concerned with monetizing something that had previously been free but optional than with screening out spam/bot accounts, which everyone agrees are a problem on Twitter and that Musk has promised to address as highest priority. Since anybody could “verify” they were who they said they were by paying for the privilege, you had a whole bunch of people doing Elon Musk clone accounts and saying goofy things to demean his image, which meant that Mr. Free Speech banned a whole bunch of people and specified that any such fake account that is not specifically labeled “PARODY” will also be banned. But that wasn’t it. You had another guy who has taken the handle of Jesus Christ (‘Carpenter. Healer. God’), and somebody who took a verified Nintendo account and used it to post an account picture of Super Mario giving the finger.
Of course, if I was running Nintendo and I were running their Twitter account, showing Mario giving the finger would be exactly what I’d do. But maybe that’s why I’m not running Nintendo.
If you believe in free speech, that means you protect the integrity of free speech. Even for corporations. We have a right to state our opinion and not have it mistaken for someone else’s, or have someone else claiming to be us and giving us issues. Like, with Eli Lilly having to explain that insulin ISN’T free now.
Somewhat predictably, Elon backed off the Twitter Blue spiel once it became clear how much legal liability it was creating.
Not to mention, Musk is so hopped up on cost controls that he is basically filling all the executive posts by himself while expecting his people to give up work-from-home arrangements and go without days off. Which is further evidence that he’s running things into the ground deliberately, but then he wouldn’t be making things so hard for himself in the short term. The Occam’s Razor explanation would be that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Somebody joked, “Hey Elon, you should buy Chik-fil-A and Hobby Lobby next.” The difference being that those businesses are actually making lots of money. Which among other things means that they wouldn’t have been vulnerable to a takeover because they don’t need a buyout.
As much as I hate to say, maybe liberals were right about libertarianism. Because a totally free, unregulated society still requires some level of implied rules that everyone voluntarily agrees to, and the reason we have all the damn rules we have is apparently because some people need to be told the obvious. Like “Don’t shit where you eat” and “Don’t be a racist moron.” The lesson with Twitter is that however much you believe in free speech and a marketplace of ideas, if your institution doesn’t adhere to a minimal set of principles and make them clear to everyone who wants to participate, then any jokester or opportunist can take over the medium and undermine it to the point that no one can trust it or take it seriously. Y’know, like what happened with the actual Libertarian Party.
Once again: Nothing is a priori. Nothing in this world sprang fully formed and equipped straight from the head of a god. People assume that Twitter is or should be some ideal public medium that fits their standard of what the ideal is, when Jack Dorsey and his people just built it as a small-scale, personal post platform, and because of that very informality, it took off. It was never really intended to become a profit instrument, much less the world’s “town square.” But that is what the community did with it.
And just as some in the community think of Twitter as an objective communications medium when it was never really intended to be such, Musk seems to think that because he paid many billions of dollars for Twitter that it ought to turn a profit. Again, Twitter only has value because of the people who are on it, and that value doesn’t necessarily translate directly into money. Remember what they say about social media: If you’re not paying for the product then you ARE the product. Someone on Pajiba pointed out, “If Twitter goes down, so does the easiest method Ukrainians have to inform the world of Russia’s war crimes, and an easy way for labor unions, dissidents, and other folks without much power to organize efforts. Twitter may have more problems than solutions, but it does have value. Or it did, before Musk’s ongoing crises gave him reason to smash it.”
A while ago, I concluded my opinion of Twitter with the following: “media critic Matt Zoller Seitz was quoted (from Twitter) saying “I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it now: if a superior alternative to Twitter appeared tomorrow, I’d be gone from here in a heartbeat.” My advice to Seitz would be to get together with like-minded people and come to a consensus about what “a superior alternative to Twitter” means, and then find people of means to finance it and experts to create it. My personal goal is to make enough money to where I can buy out Twitter with the specific purpose of destroying the website. Either that, or use the space for something more ennobling, like bumfights or fetish porn.”
Somebody still needs to figure out what a better alternative to Twitter would be and whether it would be more feasible as a profit site or a non-profit medium. As it is, I’m predicting Twitter bumfights and porn any week now.