Twitter Agonistes

A thought on my personal post-Twitter plans. I've weighed alternatives like Post and S*bstack Notes. I'm open to the new product soon expected from Meta. But my own expectation is that there will be no Twitter successor. The network effect will be lost. Twitter itself ...

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 4, 2023

... are fast ending if not ended. The music has switched to something unpleasant, the stools are being noisily turned atop the tables, the bartenders are wiping the counters and stacking the glasses.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 4, 2023

I'm going to switch away from platform-based social media to creating my own short video content and then sharing it simultaneously across many different platforms. I hope readers here will be interested when that project debuts, probably sometime early in 2024.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 4, 2023

Journalism @theAtlantic; informal comment on videos starting early in 2024; possibly a personal memoir in about 2025. I'll miss Twitter. I would save it if I could. But out of stupidity or malice or a mix of both, the owners are determined to kill it.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 4, 2023

Now that Elmo has well and truly run Twitter into the ground, the encomiums and eulogies burst forth forth like flowers in the spring.

“Twitter we hardly knew ye…”

And it’s all, as Charlie Pierce likes to say, my balls.

I’m not “on” Twitter so all the recent rate limits don’t affect me. I don’t tweet, I just exploit the platform. I do most of these posts (like this one) on my phone. Embedding tweets is easier than typing with my index finger on a virtual keyboard (as my frequent typos attest). But I don’t follow anybody and I don’t care about “blue checks.” I’ve also never been impressed with the intellectual heft of Twitter, aside from one or two threads I keep a tab open for on my phone browser. Because once you get beyond the decent tweet, the replies read like this real fast.

Bluechecks discuss whether Trump shld be allowed to sign the Declaration of Independence. pic.twitter.com/NIigmDZQuy

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 5, 2023

I’m pretty sure there’s more of Twitter carrying on conversations like that, than conversing at the level of the people I regularly embed. I’ve ventured into the replies. They go “Heart of Darkness” real quick, and that was true long before Elmo took over and championed fascist racism.

You see the effect of that on some threads and not on others, at least the threads I regularly read. And most of the effect I see is the people looking for these tweets, v. the people not looking. Twitter was never the agora of ancient Athens nor the salons of 19th century Paris (which were only spectacular in memory and absence anyway). Twitter was always a few thoughts worth considering in a sea of shit. That’s the norm for human history. If you thought everybody in late 18th century America talked like Jefferson and Franklin on their best days, I’ve got some prime swamp land to sell you. Trust me, you’re gonna love it!

David Frum’s metaphor is that the wrong people are in the bar now; that the neighborhood isn’t what it was and the “wrong people” are in the ascendancy. The racists and fascists do seem more abundant, and many of them have been allowed to return thanks to new management. But that’s more akin to convicts who served their time returning to society than it is bikers taking over the malt shop.

Mostly the people who are here dealing in opinion seem upset by things. Popehat decamped to Bluesky, but some Twitterati think BlueSky will go the way of Twitter as surely as sparks shoot. Or maybe because Jack thinks Elmo is doing his best. Or maybe because that’s the nature of internet fora: bad money drives out good, and thoughtless commentators drive out thoughtful ones, whatever the platform. The history of social media, after all, seems to be the churn of old platforms abandoned for new, which are always shinier and don’t have all these “trolls” infecting everything “here.”

Nah; it’s probably all Elmo’s fault. He’s the cause of the collapse and fall of Salon’s “Table Talk” in the ‘90’s, and then of Facebook, and the reason Blogger became such a bad neighborhood everyone went to Twitter, and now…

Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Damned barbarians always come along and ruin it for us civilized people who alone appreciate the finer things in life. Damned barbarians.