The lizard republic contemplates moving its capital
Regarding Twitter & Threads
The chattering classes are all agog about Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s brand new alternative to the original microblogging platform Twitter. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter eight months ago, its users have been declaring it dead in the water and promising to switch to a different app like once a month, and finally a potentially viable alternative has been presented to them. The drama and gibberish and reviews and debates are ongoing. I’d like to share some quick, tossed-off thoughts on the matter.
The whole thing calls to my mind, for whatever reason, a passage in Douglas Adams’ So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish (the fourth book of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy) about a world ruled by lizards. It’s too good not to share in full.
What’s motivating the following conversation is the occasion of a spaceship crashing into England and the emergence of a giant robot that demands “take me to your lizard.” Watching the news footage, Ford Prefect tries to explain things to Arthur Dent:
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug. “Of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again. “Some people say the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
Here’s the thing about Twitter. Everybody hates Twitter. Everybody hated Twitter years before Musk bought it. Heavily active Twitter users hate Twitter most of all, but they also believe Twitter is indispensable and inevitable.
I’m on Twitter. I was one of the early adopters back in 2008 or 2009, when it was a fun little gimmicky website that I joined with some friends and acquaintances from an old message board in playing around with. (For a hot minute, so few people were using it that whenever somebody tweeted, an applet at the top of the page would register their location on a map of the world.) These days I’ll sometimes peer at it when it’s a slow day at work, or when I’m sitting in front of my laptop at home and conscientiously putting off doing something useful. Maybe I’ll tweet something or link to something I’ve written recently. I tend not to spend much time on Twitter because I hate using Twitter.
When you’re a random anonymous person who starts a Twitter account, what’s there to do? You begin by browsing a feed of hot takes and memes issued and propagated by celebrities, journalists, CEOs and founders, influencers, media industry producers, and armchair politicos. You got on with life perfectly well before you invited them to dump their opinions and brainstorms on you in rapidfire shortform, but now you’ve inserted yourself into their virtual house party and you’d prefer not to stand and eavesdrop in the coat closet. You tweet some jokes, a link to some article you found interesting, and say something about the latest episode of the streaming sensation du jour. Nobody replies to you. Nobody hits the like button. You stick topical hashtags in your tweets, but to most savvy users, it makes you look like a desperate rube. You follow some of the people the app puts on your timeline, but they don’t follow you back because (1) who the hell are you? (2) having a high followed-by to following ratio is an indicator of clout, and the amassing and projection of clout is Twitter’s raison d’etre.
Usually the best way to make a splash on such a platform is to polemicize about some cause célèbre or other. The character limit doesn’t give you much room for nuance, but there’s ample opportunity for performance. Histrionics, shit-talking, pillorying your opponents, repeating political mantras, weaponized smarm, and combining your hot takes with abstract internet in-jokes all get attention, and attention gets you likes, retweets, and followers. Be provocative. Go on the attack. Act above it all and/or be sycophantic when appropriate. Maintain a high level of output. Even when you don’t have much of an opinion about a hot issue, act as though you do, and be confident about it.
It’s probably only a little different if you come to Twitter as a media professional who can get followers just by copying LinkedIn contacts. It just means you’ve skipped a few steps between installing the app and permitting it to become an incubus squatting on your chest.
Really, I probably don’t need to say much about why Twitter is so despised. The fact that its users hate it has been the institutional elephant in the room for a very long time. Twitter is the hellsite. Nobody is ever happier after spending time on Twitter.
The reason for Twitter’s outsized clout in spite of its relatively small userbase is that it became the platform of choice for the media industry. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is as much a part of your career as filing stories on time. If you’re an aspiring novelist, part of your job is desperately trying to impress the literary agents on Twitter. If you’re a literary agent, part of your job is advertising your authors and your industry on Twitter. If you’re an academic, having your name and ideas known to the popular media pimps on Twitter can make it easier to get your articles published. If you’re some manner of entrepreneurial knowledge worker—a consultant, a business or life coach with a philosophy to sell, something like that—recognition is your bread and butter, and you can get it on Twitter.
As I said before: Twitter is about clout. It’s where you go to build up and maintain a reputation. Naturally, it helps to go into it with some preexisting clout—like the journalists who were awarded blue checkmarks in the pre-Musk days—but even if you’re a staff writer for Slate or a freelancer published in New York Magazine, your career trajectory depends on who knows your name, who’s impressed by you and wants you in their corner, who’s reluctant to trifle with you, and whether your colleagues perceive your personal stock as rising, falling, or remaining in place. Twitter is invaluable for this sort of thing because everyone in your field is on Twitter. And everyone in your field is on Twitter because everyone else in your field is on Twitter.
Since I’m punching this out on Substack, special mention should be made of the condition of the writer. Electronic media in general and the internet in particular have made the public less amenable to buying and sitting down with books, magazines, newspapers, etc. Too many other facets of the culture industry are vying for the public’s eyeballs and attention, and readers have generally fallen out of the habit of wanting or expecting to pay to read anything. The supply of writers far exceeds the demand for them. If you’re an author of fiction or essays, you’re not in the position of having to compete for a cabin on a luxury liner; you’re fighting for a seat on one of the lifeboats. If you’re hoping to pen stories for more popular and lucrative media products like video games, you’re going to be facing staggering competition for positions that probably aren’t going to be posted on Indeed or Monster. In any of these cases, you’ll need all the friends you can get. I use the word “friends” loosely here; what you actually need are randos who find you entertaining and people in the industry who recognize you, look kindly upon you, and see a possible benefit to themselves in doing you a good turn.
None of this alters the aforementioned imperatives of being combative and smarmy, performing outrage and hurt and magnanimity, reducing complex issues to flippant memes, and punching out items throughout the day as though an audience is demanding your input. But that’s precisely why the site appealed to members of the culture industry and knowledge worker castes to begin with. They’re in the business of making things to be seen, articulating opinions, and of pushing agendas (even if one’s agenda happens to be “I want a career in media/academia/politics”). These industries attract people who crave to be seen and heard, and are disinclined to doubt that what they say has value. The emergent social media platform whose design resembled a standardized homepage (as did Facebook and Tumblr’s) or message board (Reddit) less than it did a virtual soapbox and a bullhorn mic was bound to be where their like congregated and eventually came to hold each other captive.
That’s why the chattering classes can’t just up and quit Twitter. The whole thing is competition for status under a thin façade of collegial conversation. Quitting the app doesn’t mean you’re no longer competing for clout—your career still depends on it—it just means you’ve chosen to work at a disadvantage by making yourself less visible and available. You’ve taken yourself out of the loop in a milieu where being au courant is an important form of social currency. Good luck with that.
In all the writeups about Threads published over the last few days, any discussion of its functionality is pretty much beside the point. However it behaves in its capacity as a Twitter clone matters precisely to whatever extent that it might nudge people towards switching platforms early on—and in the long term, nobody’s going to migrate to Threads because its UX is smoother than Twitter’s. They’re waiting to see if the combination of Threads’ availability and Twitter’s mismanagement results in the siphoning of clout from the latter to the former.
The preeminent microblogging platform, whatever it happens to be, is and must be a fucking reptile zoo. Those who use it will hate it. The form in which it crystallized through Twitter, and which informs its use as a networking engine and a signaler of clout, is unalterable at this point. In the context of the war of all against all in a nominally meritocratic capitalist society, it is both weapon and battlefield, and in neither aspect can it be voluntarily surrendered. Having called it up, we’re unable to put it down.
To circle back to the planet of the lizards and throw it onto the pile of metaphors: what we’re witnessing now is the occasion of the reptilian aristocracy, along with is its circles of attendants and trains of hangers-on, contemplating the possibility of relocating to a different city and making it their new capital. Maybe they’ll migrate. Maybe they’ll stay put. Maybe for a time there will be a pair of rival courts, as there was during the Western Schism. But the continued existence of the reptile zoo, its dominance over the culture industry and its internal conversations and politics, and its station as the place where creatives, thinkers, and politicos mud wrestle and wriggle and preen to build their invaluable personal brands are emphatically not in doubt.