The Enshittification of Twitter
Divination by gazing into the entrails of a sacrificed bird (site)
A journalist I respect very much, Laura Jedeed, left Twitter today. She also suggested I start a substack. If you’re reading this, I was flattered and silly enough to hit “publish”.
More importantly than my own ego I find myself, in the fallout of recent events on Twitter, reflecting on the continued musings of Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and digital rights advocate. If you haven’t read any of his writings, I strongly encourage it. His writing is original, inventive, clear and easy to understand, he breaks complex problems down in ways you can follow. He cares about you, about himself, about everyone who wants to create and wants to express themselves. He wants you to seize the means of computation: the core of the internet was thoughtfully designed to be open and empowering and he believes it’s possible to return to that.
You can start for free the way I did- Reading Unauthorized Bread, a near-future… I can’t even call it a science fiction story because I’m so surprised it hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a novella. I could go on for pages about Mr Doctorow, but this is about twitter, about Doctorow’s ideas on enshittification of a service, and of how it applies to Twitter.
The TLDNR of the concept is this: A platform gets in between the user base and the merchant base and acts as a middle man. First it’s good for the users. Then when the users are locked in, it’s good for the merchants. Then when they’re locked in, the platform cashes in and claws all the value of the platform back. It uses it’s stranglehold on the marketplace to minimize value for both the users and the sellers to profit. It makes the barrier not to entry but to exit as high and painful as possible so it can be as stingy as possible with the allocating value to both sides of the equation.
This is not a new idea. Critical looks at capitalism as a system quickly can home in on this idea- it’s an intrinsic feature of the system. But instead of a complex system of balances that take time and effort to rig into a dual-direction extortion system, the internet, the speed of modern computation, and the relative wild west that is digital rights legislation and protection, the process is sped up by orders of magnitude.
And that brings us to Le Twittre. Today, April 7th 2023, Elon Musk’s twitter declared war on substack by filtering out, aggressively, any interactivity with Substack, since it had the audacity to announce a twitter-esque platform called Notes that will ostensibly compete with the hell bird site. The Verge has a good primer on it:
I won’t get too far into the weeds of accounting what has been happening. But in Doctorow’s world, there’s a place for Substack and Twitter to come to an agreement, open up APIs to each other, integrate the two platforms, and drive more business to each, creating an ecosystem of tools to dip into the communications and empower the users.
In the world the Silicone Valley tech bros dream about, Twitter gets lean and mean and reintroduces value to the user base to undercut Substack, to claw the surplus value back at a later date.
But Twitter does not exist in either of those ecosystems. It exists in a new one. In the world of Elon Musk, the world’s premiere billionaire edgelord.
If you’re actually reading this you probably are familiar with the criticisms that Twitter has faced and the beating that Elmo’s reputation has taken. The Cult of Elon still adores everything that he does, but the rest of the world is looking askance. But that doesn’t matter, because Elon may be the first billionaire who has enough money.
That’s not to say that he won’t continue to try to accumulate wealth. That’s just a given. But we’re seeing his new priorities. To crib from Robert Caro, who wrote the Lyndon Johnson biographies, if you give a man the power to do anything, you find out what he really wants to do. Power reveals. Elon Musk has enough Fuck You Money to shoot a car into orbit around Mars and not give a shit. Prior to his purchase of Twitter, he had so much money he could lose 99% of his wealth, and then lose 99% of *that* remanant, and still be well into the top 1% of wealth in the US.
So we get to see what Musk wants to do. And what he wants to do… is shitpost. Desperately. He wants to be dril on twitter so bad you can feel the waves of longing through the screen.
The terminally online from the early 2000’s remember the SomethingAwful forums and Lowtax. If more than 8 people ever read this, some of you are probably already nodding and can predict where this is going. For those that don’t, I give you a Vice article on the oral history of the importance of SomethingAwful to both the shitposting subculture *and* a surprising amount of internet culture at large today.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful
TLDNR SomethingAwful was both an amazing and amazingly fucked up place and was the origin of a lot of terrible fucking aspects of our online culture today and quickly it got toxic and the founder, Lowtax, went batshit, had legal allegations brought against him, and eventually committed suicide to avoid child support.
This history has led many to jokingly refer to the bizarre lurching behavior of Twitter and Elmo as a Lowtax speedrun.
http://www.monyatoma.com/the-lowtax-speedrun/
As funny as the idea is, I’m not sold on this. I think Musk *might* be living his best life right now. He’s a terrible ReplyGuy but now he can manipulate the digital heroin that is Twitter to give him the dose he needs. He can feel like a poster. His power over what is probably his favorite drug is revealing what he wants. Adoration. Relevancy. The reasons why don’t matter but they’re interesting. I can point to Behind the Bastards podcast for his biography, and you can start drawing lines pretty clearly. But again, that’s not the things I’m mostly interested by.
From the outside we think Twitter is in the shitter and Elon is hitting the flush lever. Advertising from what we can tell is down anywhere from 50-80%. Advertisers are wary of even interacting with Twitter now due to associations with racism, antisemitism, and Musk’s relatively recently indulgent excursions into the more stringent persecutions found in conservative discourse. The site breaks constantly in ways it didn’t previously. The Blue check/verification thing is a goddamn disaster when it comes to applying to *anything* that it claims to want to accomplish. It seems like it’s failing as a company on an almost axiomatic level.
We are evaluating Twitter’s extraction of value from it’s ecosystem on a traditional money-based level, and I suspect we’re wrong in doing that. Musk keeps talking about making twitter break even or profitable fast. Everything he’s done undermines that. Elon is also habitually a liar (This is a *woefully* inadequate list incidentally). I don’t think he’s a genius, but I don’t think he or his entourage is pants-on-head idiotic. I suspect that more money, at least from Twitter, is not what Musk wants out of the platform. The value that twitter provides it’s owner is different than the value we expect most companies to look for. I also reject Musk’s assurance he wants to protect the “public square” of the information age. Even a cursory examination of what he’s done with the platform makes that obvious.
Musk wants control. Musk wants relevancy. Musk wants to *be talked about*. His original vision for Space X was to buy a Russian ICBM and put a hamster in the payload cone and launch it to Mars and broadcast that. He loves going for the grand zany gesture to gain attention. It’s his MO- from selling flamethrowers to launching a car into space. And now with Twitter, he can do that almost trivially. The levers of Twitter that can be adjusted to extract monetary value can be tweaked in a different way to extract attention and relevancy, using Trump as the pattern. He is the ReplyGuy to Trump’s SA poster skills.
I think this is why Twitter Blue is a disaster to the public- why it is one misstep after another. Twitter Blue is not intended to provide value to the end users. It is an act of fealty, the digital equivalent of standing up and saying “O Captain! My Captain!”. It’s not even important for the world to know it- Twitter keeps obfuscating the act of paying for a blue check and it sounds like they’re toying with the idea of hiding the fucking thing. The original value of the check has been scooped out and replaced with the gaping maw of Musk’s need to have people believe in him. Most of the proposed features of Blue seem to organize around rewarding people who believe instead of attracting new users. The amount of people who would have to subscribe to Blue to offset the lost ad revenue is obscene, so you’d expect to try to monetize features to drive people the service. I’ve seen numbers suggesting that the numbers would be in the hundreds of millions. But that isn’t the point.
The APIpocalypse that went down recently is another example. Academics and small 3rd party services and software used the low and free tier API access to do their research and run their business. Musk has paywalled all of that, increased the prices *significantly* and last I checked was threatening to basically end all the very relevant academia research that goes on on the hell bird site. It’s replaced with a pay scale that goes from thousands of dollars a month to 210,000 dollars a month for top tier enterprise plans. And the 2 million and change a year that that access would cost *sounds* impressive until you realize that you’d need around 1000-1500 companies paying that rate to counter the ad revenue drop off, let alone make profit. This is not about making money, or even breaking even. This is about making companies tell him how much they need their Twitter IV drip.
Or the verified check going away unless you pay thousands of dollars a month if you’re a business entity. Even assuming that this doesn’t cause bad blood with large content-producing companies, this will not right the ship. This is trying to bail the Titanic as it takes on water with a coffee mug. Therefore, this *can’t* be about the money. It can’t be about enshrining the “digital public square” because he keeps getting more and more restrictive. There has to be something else Elon is getting out of all this.
The substack wars that seem to be heating up are stupid, but they’re just the latest move by the owner of Twitter to extract what he wants- Relevancy. A twitter competitor doesn’t just pose business competition with Twitter, it poses a *relevancy* threat to Musk. Substack is attempting to create a network effect of writers, journalists, and bloggers, and if we look at the cycle of enshittification, we see that Substack is on the way up- It’s still providing surplus value to it’s users while Twitter is in late stage enshittification- It’s trying to claw back value from all parties. It’s at an intrinsic disadvantage before you pile Musk’s ego and needs onto the teetering pile of challenges it faces.
I could go on but I think the gist is pretty apparent there. Twitter is in late stage, possibly even terminal Enshittification. It is squeezing in all directions to extract value. We’re used that. What we’re not used to is that Musk isn’t as motivated by the pure profit as he is by more soft value. And so this all looks totally alien and silly to us.
Ornithomancy is divination by examining the flights of birds. Romans called it Augury. Related is haruspicy, divination by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals. Humans love patterns, and I think the thing the human brain loves more than actual patterns is the act of deducing patterns. It kept the filthy monkey men & women we descended from alive and so our brains reward us when we search out patterns. We are so good at detecting patterns in chaos that when we jump the gun and see a sign from Minerva in the squiggles of the entrails of a sacrificed sheep, we call that Apophenia- which is the human tendency to see patterns where there are none. It is the patron trait of conspiracy theories. It’s also potentially what I’ve spent the last hour or so engaging in.
But when I look into the mess of entrails that is Twitter these last six or seven months, I don’t see a company that is failing despite it’s best interests, I see a company aligning with the needs of the owner, who is extracting from that service an unorthadox value. I don’t see the company “failing” and imploding and going away. I don’t see Musk stepping away either. I see it continuing to potentially atrophy as it becomes a weird little enclave of true believers paying tribute to the ruler of Muskistan, growing more insular as it cedes the initiative and the thought space of small-format instant public communication to other projects.
This feels inevitable because the balance that traditional technology companies have established of squeezing all sides but raising the cost of exiting the platform *just* high enough to keep all parties miserable, chained to the service is a fundamentally different balance than the one where Twitter reaches a new equilibrium. We’re not used to paying the coin Musk wants us to pay. So many of us will leave, and the true believers will remain. And I think on a certain level, as long as Musk can still continue to garner attention, he’ll be okay with that.
Or maybe that’s not Jupiter, it’s might be just a kidney. We’ll see.