🐦 The Platform is Dead. Long Live the Platform.

The other night outside a disco in Brooklyn, my friend and I picked up conversation with some fellow party-goers in the time-honored tradition of part-time dancing queens catching some air. We began with the classic openers—“Love your outfit!” “Isn’t it hot in there?” We then turned to another reveler’s refrain: “Is this your first time at this party?” followed by “Is the vibe a little different tonight?”

The subtext of this line of questioning is obvious. Nothing lasts forever, and awareness of this fact produces anxiety. It is only a matter of time before the regulars move on, before the DJ gets priced out of the neighborhood, before the event is colonized by wanna-be pickup artists, or simply buckles under the pressure of its own popularity.

This feeling of anticipatory nostalgia lurks in the corners of our consciousness. As surely as we know we will one day die, we know that at some point, whether in a month, or a year, or a decade, the party will be ‘over.’ It may not happen all at once… in fact more often than not we find ourselves slouching towards Bethlehem. How do we know when the party is over? For some people, it already is. It’s a personal revelation. The day comes when you realize, it’s just not fun anymore. In tautological terms: it’s over when it’s over. 

Earlier this month, cringe innovator Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account, contradicting both a lifelong ban for inciting the January 6th insurrection, and his own declared policy of convening a council on content moderation before making such decisions.

The party is over.

Musk later tried to blame “activist groups” for his decision—saying they had broken some kind of promise not to “starve [Twitter] of advertising revenue.” This is, of course, utter hooey. Advertisers have pulled out because they’re worried about brand safety, because of the catastrophic paid verification rollout, and generally, because they’ve lost confidence in Twitter’s credibility since Musk took over. Twitter has eked out profits in recent years, but not in its last reported quarter as a public company: in Q2, it recorded losses of $270 million. Musk is flailing, as anyone with eyes can see, and bankruptcy is a real possibility for the company, whether Trump deigns to start tweeting again or not.

The vibe is absolutely rancid.

While outlining this piece, I tried to identify exactly what makes Twitter special. I also tried to identify what isn’t so special about Twitter, or rather, what is universal or largely a function of the network scale that Twitter incidentally happens to command. The fact is, Twitter is far from irreplaceable. While a literal shutdown is still unlikely, a decline seems inevitable. Like MySpace and Tumblr before it, Twitter has lost its spark. Some segment of users will remain, while most will (eventually) move on. It may be premature to call this a post-mortem, (“what is dead may never die”) but the writing is on the wall. So… what exactly have we lost?

To be clear, I have been an ardent Twitter user. Its simplicity and hackability has made it a perfect home for both nerds who want to crack jokes and nouveau-philosophers generating procedural poetry. In the early days, I tweeted at cartoonist Scott McCloud about his book Understanding Comics, and McCloud actually responded! And in the pits of my pandemic depression, I developed a small army of Twitter bots poking fun at my own mental somersaults, programmed to respond to keywords from my main account.

I have several friends who have been on Twitter for years, who love Twitter. One tweets baseball stats, another tweets mostly about movies. Yet another tweets almost exclusively about their latest carpentry projects. Most of my friends, that is, the people whose content I will miss most by leaving Twitter, tweet for a small audience (like I did).

I can’t speak for them, but when I find myself tweeting, it is to perform the function of something between a journal entry and an asynchronous conversation. There are a number of factors that go into an act of microblogging: I have a thought that I think is worth communicating; I’m alone, so I can’t just say it out loud to someone; I wish to preserve it before I forget it; and the promise of finding an instant audience online promotes tweeting over say, writing it down on an index card.

This last one seems like the most essential compulsion of Twitter, and even that is not entirely unique. In an earlier time, I used Facebook statuses for the same reason. But where Facebook distributed my adolescent mind-jumbles to people I knew, Twitter’s user experience coalesced around the “retweet”—suggesting that any thought could “go viral” if I achieved the right alchemy of wit and relatability.

Humans are social animals; we like seeing and hearing each other. To varying degrees, we want to be seen and heard. Writers and artists build their identity around this, but the instinct is hard-coded. As a not-very-successful writer, I feel that I haven’t found good answers to the following questions: “Is this thing worth saying?” …and if it is, “How can I get people to listen?”

In other words, “Does anyone care about the thoughts in my head?”

Or simply, “Do I have an audience?”

With a few likes or the gift of a retweet, my friends can assure me, “yes!” But the questions remain, and the answers still elude me. I have yet to find an audience for the writing I have already completed—the substantial works I decided were important enough to pour hours of my life into over the past decade… but it’s easier to tweet than grapple with projects in various states of failure to launch.

If this seems needlessly self-effacing, my point is this: Twitter promises an audience, even if it doesn’t always deliver. It’s an addictive quality; perhaps the addictive quality upon which Twitter has grown its network. Tweet, and be heard—this promise has attracted a diverse range of short-form wordsmiths, who could collectively be considered the soul of Twitter. Independent journalists, comedians, and yes, even politicians have built careers upon that promise. For the rest of us, there was a time when we could interact directly with our favorite authors and luminaries, and many of them enthusiastically acknowledged us and answered our questions. 

Things have changed. The dynamic between creators and consumers on the platform is guarded at best, openly acrimonious at worst. When right-wing pundits aren’t whining about the woke youth, the woke youth are canceling trans video essayists. The poem cast upon the plaque outside Twitter HQ reads: “Give me your tired takes, your poor analogies, your blue-check fascists.”

Let there be no uncertainty: Elon Musk is a fascist. I don’t believe he is ideological; in fact I believe he is primarily an egotist reactionary who has been repelled by criticism from the left, preferring his conservative-leaning base of fawning admirers. Others have observed that fascism is less threatening to his designs. After all, labor laws, regulation, and progressive tax reforms would impede his ability to exploit workers, roll out dangerous new technologies, and accumulate ever-greater wealth. Whatever the formula, the result is the same: a fascist of convenience.

This process has only accelerated since his takeover of Twitter. Just last week he said the ban on 45’s account following January 6th was a “grave mistake” (it wasn’t, unless you support fascism). He fired Vijaya Gadde as a matter of top priority, who was guiding Twitter’s content moderation policy with a remarkably even hand. And he also tweeted, “What do you think of the culture war?” which is about as transparent a dog whistle as they come (“the culture war” is incendiary language to describe liberals and minorities advocating for a more egalitarian society, and is designed to whip people up without actually saying “great replacement”).

Of course, it does not exactly follow that because Elon Musk is a fascist Twitter must die. But because Twitter is the major communications platform that it is, it's especially dangerous to have him at its helm. Fortunately Elon Musk is all but flying the company into a cliff. Twitter has lost half of its top advertisers, and at least half of its staff. He has reinstated the account of notable election-denier Marjorie Taylor Greene and notable antisemite Ye. And in recent weeks 2FA users were locked out of their accounts and videos stopped buffering due to the various infrastructure services he hastily shut down in the name of cost-savings.

While I would happily continue using Twitter (well, maybe not happily) if Elon Musk were to be visited by three ghosts in December and emerged on New Year’s Day with a strongly worded condemnation of anti-democratic policy and a serious plan to combat misinformation and radicalization on the platform—that doesn’t look to be in the cards. For one thing, because of who he is as a person, but for another, because the platform may literally be unusable.

I’ve already said that I think it’s unlikely that Twitter shuts down for good, so what do I mean when I say unusable?

I mean that your inboxes are filled with spam and your favorite creators’ replies are full of hate-speech.

I mean that your friends have left or are leaving, and new usage is driven by engagement with Musk’s sham referenda.

I mean that its essential promise is proved to be broken.

For me at least, it’s time to find my audience elsewhere. And a real audience, this time, not just the promise of one. Maybe here… wherever I’ve ended up publishing this. Maybe on the next platform, or the next. There will always be another platform. All it need do is give people a voice, and find the right frequency to amplify it. Perhaps Twitter is not so much the town square, but the latest depleted watering hole—and we the wildebeest migrate from one to another… never knowing if it is heaven or hell that we are running to, but migrating all the same, while the land chokes around us.

In the season 2 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Sunnydale is plunged into an alternate reality, Giles prepares to end the spell when Anyanka threatens him thusly: “Trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this one?”

Giles replies, “Because it has to be.”

There has to be a better platform than this one. The land is choking.

Indeed, the one thing I am most certain of is that there will be a succession. Even if no heirs have yet made themselves apparent, the AI-like self-generative nature of digital trends will produce something suitable given enough time and a power vacuum. I’d wager it isn’t Mastodon (it has had plenty of opportunities, and its model of federation is a user experience nightmare) or BeReal (I remain boggled that this gimmick has raised almost $100 million in funding), but it will be something. As we mourn the death of the old, we can take solace in the promise of the new.

But it says something that when this flood of words came to my mind, my first instinct was to tweet them. Twitter has wrapped itself and its users in an illusion of essentiality. Just as the mediocrity of the most recent Star Wars trilogy seemed to bask in disdain for its critics, Twitter slavers at the prospect of hosting its own wake—though, at least the Star Wars films made money... Nonetheless, I agree there's something self-defeating (as the new CEO is quick to observe) about using his platform to announce its demise.

So I won’t tweet. I’ll simply observe that, to my way of thinking anyway, the party is over. It was fun while it lasted. But it’s only a matter of time before a new DJ hits the scene.

We can always find another place to dance.