Can Elon Musk Break Twitter? I hope so.
I’m not accusing Musk of being a lurking agent. The man loves Twitter. He tweets as if he was created by the bluebird and the “failure whale” — the cartoon that appears when the social network runs into technical problems.
Three days before closing the deal on the platform, Musk snapped an unflattering photo of Bill Gates and, alongside, an illustration of a pregnant man. “In case you need to snap fast,” Time’s 2021 Person of the Year told its more than 80 million followers. Musk believed that Gates was short selling Tesla stock. It received over 165,000 retweets and 1.3 million likes. This is a man who understands what Twitter really is.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of the social network, always wanted it to be different. Something that wasn’t, and couldn’t be. “Twitter’s goal is to serve public dialogue,” he said in 2018. Twitter began “measuring the health of the conversation” and trying to tweak the platform to improve it.
As sincere as the effort was, it was like the beverage ads that advise moderation. You don’t make people drink less by selling whiskey. Likewise, if your intention was to promote healthy conversation, you wouldn’t limit thoughts to 280 characters or add like and retweet buttons or tweet quote features. Twitter can’t be a home for healthy conversations because it’s not meant to be.
So, what is Twitter for? It was built to turn conversation into a game. As C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, wrote, it does this “by offering immediate, vivid, and quantified assessments of the success of a conversation. Twitter gives us points for speech; it scores our communication. And these game features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological power. Twitter is addictive, in part, because it’s so good to see the numbers soar.”
Nguyen’s central argument is that games are enjoyable because they somehow simplify the complexity of life. They make the rules clear, the punctuation visible. That’s good when we want to play. But sometimes we end up in games, or game-like systems, where we don’t want to trade our values for the designers’ values, and we don’t even realize we’re doing that. The danger, then, is what Nguyen calls “value capture.” This occurs when:
- Our natural values are rich, subtle, and difficult to express;
- We are placed in a social or institutional environment that presents simplified, often quantified, versions of our values back to ourselves;
- The simplified versions dominate our motivation and deliberation.
Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. If we don’t, it doesn’t matter – no one sees what we’re saying anyway. We become what the game wants us to be, or we lose. And that is what is happening to some of the most important people, industries and conversations on the planet today.
Many powerful Twitter users are from the political, media, entertainment and technology elites. They –us!– are particularly susceptible to “gamified” discourse on the topics we are obsessed with. It is difficult to make political changes. It is difficult to create great journalism. It is difficult to fill the ever-increasing need for validation. It is difficult to mark the arc of technological progress.
Twitter offers the instant and constant simulation of doing just that. The return is immediate. The opportunities are endless. Forget Max Weber’s “hard and slow drilling of hard boards”. Twitter is a powerful drill, or at least it looks like one.
At this point, the answer probably seems obvious: “Log off!”. We can, and many do. But it comes at a cost. Logging off is losing a lot of what matters, in sectors where knowing what matters is essential. It has become cliché to say that Twitter is not real life, and it is true. But it shapes real life by shaping the perceptions of those exposed. It shapes real life by shaping what the media covers (no wonder the New York Times now urges reporters to disconnect from Twitter and re-engage with the world outside their screens). It shapes real life, giving the politicians and business titans who dominate it control of the attention agenda. Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important attention market there is.
There’s a reason why Donald Trump, with his uncanny knack for making people look at him, was Twitter’s most natural and successful user. And he shows how the platform can shape the lives of those who never use it. From 2017 to 2021, the White House was occupied by what was actually a Twitter account with a cardiovascular system, and the entire world suffered the consequences.
I’m not an automatic critic of Musk. He has done remarkable things. He transformed the electric car market from a backwater for hippies into the unquestionable future of the auto industry, and he did it in the only sustainable way: he made electric cars amazing. He reinvigorated American interest in space, and he did it in the only sustainable way: by making rockets more amazing and affordable.
He’s made big investments in solar power and battery innovation and at least tried to think creatively about mass transit, with investments in hyperloop technology and tunnel drilling. He co-founded OpenAI, the most public-spirited artificial intelligence company among the big ones.
Much of this has been built on public subsidies, government contracts, loan guarantees and tax credits, but I don’t consider this a landmark against him: he is the best argument of the modern age that government and the private sector can do together what neither can achieve separately. In fact, I fear that Twitter will distract Musk from more important work.
Nor is it surprising that a résumé like Musk’s coexists with a tendency toward manias, obsessions, grudges, union repression, and vindictiveness. Extreme personalities are rarely on the edge of the curve just because of benevolence. But Twitter unleashes your worst instincts and rewards you with attention, followers and money – lots of money – for satisfying them. The fact that Musk has so deftly bent Twitter to his own ends doesn’t absolve him of his behavior there, any more than it absolves Trump.
A platform that rewards those who behave cruelly, or just irresponsibly, is a dangerous thing. But all too often that’s what Twitter does. Twitter rewards decent people for acting indecently. The mechanism by which this happens is no mystery. Engagement follows sharp responses, bold statements and cruel plays.
“I am frustrated that Bill Gates would bet against Tesla, a company aligned with his values,” is a silly tweet. “Bill Gates = Horny Killer” is a viral hit. The easiest way to accumulate points is to make your speech worse.
Twitter survived and thrived because it was never quite what I described here. Much of what can be found there is funny, smart, and kind. Many on the platform want it to be a better place than it is and try to make it that way. For a long time they were accompanied in this search by the business class of Twitter, which wanted the same. They liked Twitter, but not very much. They believed in him, but they were also a little shocked by him. That fundamental tension — between what Twitter was and what many believed it could be — held the balance. No more.
Musk’s stated agenda for Twitter is mostly confused by his modesty. He proposed an edit button, an open source algorithm, crackdown on bots, and doing something to ensure free expression. I tend to agree with tech writer Max Read, who predicts that Musk “will strive to keep Twitter at the same bad level, and the same way it always has been, because for Musk, Twitter really isn’t bad.”
Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by the way he actually acts on it. You will get to know him through his tweets. He wants it to be what it is, or even more anarchic than that. Where I might disagree with Read is that I think it will be a bigger cultural shift for Twitter than anyone realizes to have the owner of the service act like Musk does; to have the platform owner embracing and personifying its excesses in a way that no previous leader has done.
What will Twitter look like to liberals when Musk is mocking Senator Elizabeth Warren on the platform he owns and controls as “Senator Karen”? Will they want to enrich you by contributing free labor to your company? Conservatives are now cheering Musk’s purchase of the platform, but — what if — in the face of an ever-deepening crisis of electoral disinformation, he goes into evil mode against right-wing politicians who are dashing their hopes of moderation, or who threaten your climate change agenda?
What will it be like to work on Twitter when your boss is using your account to go to war with the Securities and Exchange Commission or fight a tax bill he doesn’t approve of? Unless Musk radically and implausibly changes his own behavior, I suspect his ownership will increase Twitter’s contradictions to an unbearable level. What would follow is not the collapse of the platform, but the correct scaling of its influence.
Or maybe not. Betting against Musk has made many look like fools in recent years. But I still consider myself a cautious believer in Musk’s power to do the impossible — in this case, expose what Twitter is all about and correctly scale his influence. In fact, I think he’s the only one with the power to do that.
Musk is already the best player on Twitter. Now he’s buying the game room. Everything people love or hate there will become his fault. Everything he does that people love or hate will be raised against the platform. It will be Twitter. He will have won the game. And nothing loses its shine like a game that has been won.
