The Death of the Socials
The death of Twitter in real-time has been a joy to watch – even though it has been a mainstay of my life and a source of huge traffic for Bella – since 2010. So watching its demise was a strange experience of wondering if you would be pulled-down into its vortex and down the plug-hole, but also delighting in the sense of agency that the ‘Xodus’ to Blue Sky felt like.
But then, there is also the feeling that, how can I put this? All social media is shit. Blue Sky may well be, briefly, a more organic and less toxic platform than Twitter became, but essentially it is the same thing, a massive distraction and a massive waste of your time interacting with people you don’t know to the exclusion of people you do. It’s a form of displacement and narcissism. As Naomi Klein puts it in Doppelganger, “What could you have achieved with all that time you were building a brand?”
I mean, she’s right, but she’s also got a huge brand hasn’t she? No Logo indeed.
But the rather miserabilist view of ‘all social media’ I have laid out above has also to be countered by the fact that Twitter has helped small alternative media like Bella Caledonia build a following, drive traffic to our content and been an amazing tool for networking to other writers, activists, and researchers across the world.
At its best, social media is an indispensable tool for connecting people. At its worst it allows us to descend into ‘screen time mode’ – a sort of zombie-form of glaikit fomo – which replaces real-world actions with ‘clicktivism’.
But if we’re talking about Twitter/X in particular, its worth noting its descent has been spectacular and entirely self-inflicted. It’s REALLY fun to realise that ‘X’ is now worth less than 25% of what Musk paid for it, and that figure will surely slide further in the coming weeks and months.
I suppose its possible that it becomes a sort of more mainstream version of Truth Social, but what the global appeal of hanging out with MAGA fruitcakes is, I’m not sure.
The self-inflicted damage to Musk’s social media plaything is hilarious on many levels. The first of which is how it destroys his own highly curated profile as a genius, and undermines the way our society conflates wealth with talent as if, despite overwhelming evidence, we were to believe we live in a meritocracy. The second of which is the direct correlation between Musk’s destruction of Twitter and his elevation of Donald Trump.
As the writer John Paul Brammer has written, this self-destruct has combined a collapse of functionality that has made the user-experience increasingly shit, alongside a flood of far-right garbage, all in the name of a sort of Ratner-like libertarianism:
“While most of my arguments against X could reasonably be classified as ad hominem, that’s not to say there aren’t more practical issues at play. Since laying off a significant chunk of the people who were holding Twitter together and instituting a verification system that gamified engagement, the place has felt downright janky on a user experience level. When I see an actual, human interaction on the app that isn’t some verified account trying to earn a pittance by engagement farming, it feels out of the norm. Yet even still, even still, I might have held on. Janky products are one thing. But that’s not all X is. It’s also a psychological experiment to push the boundaries of how annoyed I can be by one man. It’s not the fact that X is trying to psy-op me into engaging with right-wing talking points that drives me nuts, but that it’s doing so without so much as a whiff of tact. It’s not merely that Musk is a Trump supporter, as many CEOs doubtlessly are. It’s that he’s sensitive, volatile, vindictive, and obvious, and him being obvious is why I know those other things about him, and I know that he’s obvious because I’m on X, the Elon Musk app, where even blocking him offers no respite from X-periencing him.”
“In summary, I have been successfully irritated off the platform. The whole site smells so strongly of Musk’s desperation to be adored that it’s activated my natural tendency to be withholding from people I consider pathetic. I find I can no longer tolerate the cringe. Musk putting his own posts in my face every day because he cares so deeply about his engagement metrics is cringe. His epic memes from Reddit circa 2012 are cringe. His incessant LARPing as Tony Stark is cringe. His pretending to be so above chess because it’s “too simple” is cringe. His obscene, pornographic, highly public sucking up to Donald Trump is cringe. Remember when conservatives accused Jack Dorsey of being too liberal? It’s hard to imagine Jack constantly bleating all day about how if we didn’t vote for Hillary, Trump would send him to prison. One had the luxury of forgetting Jack Dorsey existed at all. Not so with Elon and X.”
“Speaking of Donald Trump, the man for whom Musk murdered Twitter and offered it like a cat offers its owner a dead bird on a porch, their relationship gives us X-ray vision into Musk’s gelatinous spine. Remember in 2022 when Trump said he could have told Musk “drop to your knees and beg,” and that he would have done so? Say what you will about the man, but Trump is a seasoned bully, and any bully worth his salt can sniff out weakness. I’m sure their burgeoning friendship will turn out splendidly for them both. The scorpion and the frog move in together and live happily ever after, if I remember correctly.”
Brammer is spot-on of course, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that one man was able to buy, then destroy, what had become a large part of the global public forum. If you want a snapshot of where we are as a commodified, hollowed-out, diminished world that simple reality is it.
There is a lazy journalism that reduces everything to “social media”. There is no doubt that it has contaminated public discourse, and that we are vulnerable to both the silos of the algorithm and to being fed massive amounts of disinformation. But politics is not all about “social media”. Not every social phenomenon can be explained by “social media”. Everything is not reducible to this.
It’s also not clear the sequence or causality going on. Has the social media experience undermined and poisoned sociability, or had the sense of community and human relations already been reduced and social media is the outcome? I’m not sure. But we have mistaken a network for a community and that’s confusing.
Definitely rambling now so I will shut up.
But maybe the creation of a public sphere means multiple forums. Maybe the collapse of Twitter (if that’s what’s happening) is part of a wider thing that needs to happen, the collapse of totalising systems. There was a sense of Twitter being all-encompassing in the same way as screen culture is all-pervasive. Nilay Patel has written: “Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter.”
“The sense that Twitter was a real-time news feed worked in both directions: people went on Twitter to find out what was going on, and reporters, seeing a real-time audience of people paying attention to news, started talking directly to those people. Twitter knew this and played right into it. In 2009, co-founder Biz Stone wrote that the platform had become a “new kind of information network” and that the prompt in the tweet box would now be, “What’s happening?”
Maybe the proliferation of podcasts, Mastodon, Substack, Medium and a hundred others are the reset (to use a cliched phrase) away from centralised control and have the potential to move towards the goal of a 5th Estate in which ‘the story’ is decentralised and reclaimed. Too hopeful?
What, I think is missing here is the creation of publicly controlled and reliable news and media outlets that are properly resourced and move beyond the marginal and the ‘alternative’, without which everyone’s endless (and constant) OPINIONS need to rely on.
Maybe also, rather than look to endless iterations of technology we all need to move of-screen, offline (this idea is explored by Jessica Gaitan Johannesson in her book The Nerves and Their Endings) and have time to meet face-to-face in the sort of real-world public events that inspired so many people in 2014. A utopian idea I know.
Completely agree with this, but I don’t think Musk cares about Twitter’s loss in value – he’s essentially bought himself a deputy-presidentship, and few people have the resources to do that. For him, I wonder if it’s not a pretty good investment – after all, he has the money to spare!
@Michael Marten, yes, I was thinking that: buying a platform at around its peak, it had nowhere to go but down, and will be overtaken/replaced by something else. Rather it was the kind of investment you describe, I agree.
Incidentally, the non-profit Web Foundation seems to be shutting down to concentrate on the open alternatives where your data remains yours. The farewell letter is linked to in the “A note to our supporters box”.
https://webfoundation.org/
I’d agree with you and add that a further reason for Musk buying Twitter was to eliminate voices that dissented from his view.
Look at uk and Scotland in particular, where is the voice of the 50+ % supporting independence is in a vacum unable to penetrate the mainstream?
People with money and influence don’t buy something like Twitter to make it better for the public, they buy it to control the public!
The right wing media in the uk, including the state broadcaster the bbc, highlight the injustice and how power works against the people!
Agreed. Yes won the 2014 campaign online convincingly and it hasn’t been forgotten.
Well said that man!
I sacked Twitter last month, 10 years after sacking Facebook. I had taken a break for 11 months from home internet before that, which was an interesting experiment in its own right. It had changed in that time, in ways I can’t really explain. I lasted about a month revisiting Twitter before deactivating my account!
Twitter had become a toxic place indeed, but was very revealing in some ways. Whilst we all know about climate deniers, I did find a couple of tree-deniers (!) – men (most likely Americans) who claim that trees have no value and should be bulldozed for a parking lot. A clear sign that the human race is in the decline (to put it politely).
Another revelation is about where Americans get their “socialism always converts to communism – therefore socialism bad” trope from. Apparently, the Russian Civil War and Chiang Kai-Shek’s warlord leadership of China 1926-1949 were periods of socialism, and they both turned communist after that. Therefore, in American binary logic, socialism always leads to communism.
Pfft!
Being a walker in two worlds (the doomosphere and the matrix) I was one of many that collected the dubious honour of being blocked by Michael Mann and Katherine Hayhoe – techno-optimist climate scientists who may be good at their siloed profession, but seem to know sod-all about ecological overshoot. or are afraid to admit to knowing, having too much to lose.
“But we have mistaken a network for a community and that’s confusing.”
Yep, not just confusing, but a downright distraction that suits the divide-&-conquer trickery of the elites.
Goodbye Twitter, it won’t be missed, and no doubt the next distraction (Bluesky?) will similarly become commodified and intellectually degenerated to the bottom line of whoever buys it. I have no answers, other than the consolation that at some point the electricity will become intermittent, which will pretty much deactivate most of these platforms.
I agree with all of the post but there is one aspect of Twitter that I will regret losing. It has been a genuinely global platform. From the Arab Spring onwards it has empowered human rights defenders and independent journalists from the global South to have their own voices communicated directly to an international audience. I don’t want to minimise the limitations of language and internet accessibility, but Twitter hugely opened up opportunities for grassroots activists to shape their own narrative unmediated by Western media or international NGOs. As just one example, if you want to know what is happening in Sudan, you can hear it directly from Sudanese activists.
Agreed
As a writer I hate moving platforms and building a following again. Substack seems the best use of my time, in this new normal. I really miss what Twitter was, but maybe you are right that it never really was the public square, and couldn’t ever have been, not really
Substack app is already becoming unusable, Bluesky just another distraction, so it makes sense to try to retrain the brain away from a constant stream of new information.
Just watched Channel 4 news on live TV for the first time in ages and once I’d got used to the slow pace I rediscovered the merits of well funded on the ground reporting by professionals!
C4 News far from being perfect has consistently been the best and least biased tv news in the uk.
All the more reason in the view of some, they must be privatised, wonder why?
I really don’t understand how folk expect to make a living through anything other than investing their time & effort in the provision of other folks core needs, i.e., food, water, shelter, warmth, protection from the elements & the hazards of industrial madness. If you don’t have those covered god help ye tae be honest & since god’s no going tae help ye, ye better jist wisen up, anyhoo, I managed to hack oot a wee poem whilst cruising the facebook. Sometimes it helps me personally to think someone other than masel might be reading what I’m writing so I don’t leave it abandoned in a condition that might embarrass me later on, many thanks, mark.
Our visit to Crab Lossie
was a very exciting experience,
& a convenience store was ready
to include a free Christmas hamper
for every crab camper we managed
to locate amongst the population
of Crab Lossie. In no time at all
we splashed the cash, tipped
the guard, flashed our pass,
agreed to shoot the working class,
rolled in casks of mustard gas,
burnt them to the very last,
after taking our repast
at Prince of Wales baby sale
tucked away from hail & gale,
drenched ourselves in cheeky ale
then signed on for early gates,
making sure the bairns were late,
taught to smash the ald kirk plate,
chalked their names high up on slate
before they could make good escape
tied them fast in tailor’s tape,
time of capture, last year’s date
– Fight barefoot for heaven’s sake!
Or next year’s prize flight,
wouldn’t you know, once again,
back to Heathrow, press hale steady,
never slow, nothing like
the great crab show, standards set
by those so low – Oh, you know,
you’ll never know, but heigh-ho,
that’s Crab Lossie.
I heard an interesting (and worrying) comment today that for some police forces, investigating complaints of on-line abuse and hatred take up more of their time than any other crime.
As Space-Karen sacks those Twitter moderators who kept the platform safe, our actual police are being tied up in policing a virtual realm, at the cost of our real-world communities and our public purse. Talk about socialising the costs and privatising the profits!
I think what social media has revealed to pretty much anyone able to access the internet is how many right wing nutjobs we have operating under the guise of religious doctrine whichever kirk they claim to belong to or claim justifies their point of view, it would be interesting to ask yer next arresting officer fa he fancies tae win next setirday if ye happen tae bide pretty much onyfar in this horrible place we cry hame
Hi, interesting article.
I was active on twitter during the referendum and just after from 2012-2015. I then lost my password and could never retrieve it. I could engage with it by searching key accounts on Google to get their latest tweets. I couldn’t reply or quote tweet which I think has been a god send. It became a reading rather than interactive tool for me.
My view is Twitter was a lifeline for opinion which didn’t get a fair hearing in the traditional media. Sources like National Collective, “old” wings (i know, I know), radical independence, women for indy, Bella, Kevin Pringle etc could quickly rebutt to the activist base directly. It was positive for a while. There was also humour.
But overall (ive come to the conclusion) we need a traditional media, we need a central zeitgeist to make collective sense of the world. I wanted the alternative media to influence and supplement the traditional media, not supplant it.
We now have various, decentralised podcasts/personal opinion news items masquerading as people’s trusted news outlets. It’s meant peope become less unified in “what reality is” across society.
Ironically, in my opinion, the Emily Maitlisses and Jon Sopels have torpedoed their credibility by personalising the news. They’ve gone into the sewer to attempt a clean up but are seen as just another biased news source by the very people we need them to convince.
The proliferation of news shows as personal named shows is here to stay now but I think there is a case for bolstering the traditional media like the BBC / ITV / Sky. I cannot believe i am even writing this as I am fully aware these channels are biased too… but the thing is they represented a general consensus of what was important, a general bellweather.
Twitter used to push so items would end up “on the news”, now YouTube podcasts/twitter accounts are the news for many.
But the decentralised nature of it means people are living completely different realities and that can be dangerous.
PS blue-sky appears like an attempt to decentralised and ghetto-ise further news and political opinion. Decentralising is part of the problem we have.
There is also narcissism involved. People want their opinion to be heard by the “other side”, have a zinger, a put down, a one-upmanship over the perceived “wrong side”. Blue sky is a symptom of a collective flounce rather than a solution in my opinion. Albeit I can agree twitter and Elon Musk are both possibly nefarious presences in human life.
The mainstream media need to get their act together so the masses have a more trusted, corrective platform.
Mainstream media can get in the sea, decentralization is not a problem regarding not living the same reality, we do require a multiplicity of realities. Consider Doctorow’s enshitification which is essentially capitalist recuperation, any platform where the exit cost is not minimised will always tend into this model. It is all communication and in all these relationships capitalist want to place themselves, because this is where monopoly lives, and the ability to control and project power is a draw for other risible ideologies.
It is over a decade since Aaron Swartz left us and you have RSS built into your website. this is the tool you need for now, each person controls what the subscribe and that relationship must have no intermediary, It is not the editors fault people don’t use this, or that people don’t fund spaces like this, which is another negative side effect of living in capitalism.
If someone expects their communities to communicate over corporate social networks they are engaging in community abuse, Mastodon was mentioned but what are we going to do with this communication, Socially we have been organising for years without these things and some would say it was a lot more successful. Aaron may have been able to tell us how to do it better, if not hounded to death by the US State, so maybe everyone on these platforms need to take their responsibility a bit more seriously, I know that is hard for liberals and colonialists to hear but that is where we are. The means of production have to be seized, are we ready for property is theft yet?
Obviously I’m not talking about you ross.
I liked Myspace. It was great for bands.
Then that auld so-and-so Murdoch bought it and knackered it. It’s been no good since.
there’s a problem as ever in that bands aren’t being paid, same with other proponents of cultural activity, poets, artists, so on and so forth, when the funders & charities step in matters aren’t helped as every organisation has its agenda set by the dominant personality in whichever organisation it is, so trust not & ye won’t go far wrang