The Bluestocking, vol 260

frosted mini picket lines

Happy Friday!

And please accept my apologies for the slightly delayed email. I blame Harry and Meghan—well, and the readers of the Atlantic, who enjoyed the first half of my series review so much that I felt obliged to go back round for the next three episodes yesterday.

I do still have a lot of sympathy for the couple, but it has been sorely tested the sheer amount of airtime devoted to their grievances. Never have two people needed to keep a gratitude journal more.

Anyway, here’s my review of part two, which has the “unfortunate air of a late-night message left on your ex’s voicemail, insisting that you are happy to have moved on, and are having a great life, actually.”

Helen

PS. It’s podcastmas! I’ll be on Blocked and Reported on December 26, giving Jesse and Katie a taste of a traditional British pub quiz (except about mad people on the internet). I’ve also recorded interviews with spicy Australian Josh Szeps, hench podcaster Chris Williamson and self-confessed woke philosophy bro Embrace the Void, all scheduled for the Christmas/New Year period.

PPS. This is in addition to my own podcast, The New Gurus, which starts on December 19 with a four-episode drop. The second round is on December 26.

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TikTok’s Secret Sauce (Knight Columbia)

TikTok’s algorithm treats each video more or less independently to assess its viral potential, caring relatively little about how many followers the creator has. This would be a trivial algorithm change for its competitors. What’s stopping them? Only the fact that their top creators, who collectively determine the platform’s fate, would rebel, because they stand to lose the fruits of the following they’ve built up over years. Stratechery explains that this is why Instagram got into trouble recently with its attempts to change its algorithm to compete with TikTok.

The de-emphasis of subscriptions means that there are fewer superstars, and fewer parasocial relationships. This, in turn, has kept creators from getting too powerful or quite as invested: TikTok pays them a pittance, and didn’t pay at all until 2020. The company has faced criticism for this, and it arguably takes advantage of creators. I don’t hold it up as a model to emulate. But the upside (to TikTok) is that it doesn’t have to worry nearly as much about angering creators as it experiments with its design and algorithm. 

TikTok has received the only true accolade available in the tech industry: Facebook and Google are trying to rip it off. Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts look like a clone of the best bit of TikTok, but this piece explains why they don’t succeed, because of the prison created by apps’ existing design choices.

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nooooo don’t do it save yourself

Our Reporting At Twitter (The Free Press)

“We have a goal here, which is to clear the decks of any prior wrongdoing and move forward with a clean slate,” Musk said in one of many conversations that took place over the course of a week. “I’m sleeping at Twitter HQ for a reason. This is a code-red situation.” (He put it even more forcefully on Twitter, where he said that the company was a “crime scene.”) And so he has been sleeping there on-and-off, claiming a sofa. His 2-year-old son, named X, was almost always nearby. 

Musk, who is a South African native, analogized the work of cleaning-house at Twitter several times to a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what looks to some like truth and reconciliation can look to others like revenge.

If you’re not very online, you might have missed the goings-on at Twitter since it was bought by Elon Musk on October 27. The basic story runs like this: he made a bid for the company earlier this year, at a joke share price, $54.20 (420 is American slacker code for “weed” and Musk famously smoked a spliff on Joe Rogan’s podcast, briefly tanking Tesla’s share price.)

While this might have been funny—to him, at least—it was also probably far more than the company was worth. He tried to back out, but the Twitter board held him to the agreement, and it ended up in court in Delaware. There, in discovery, he had to disclose his text messages, and these were so mortifyingly intimate—ever wanted to see grown men fawn over a billionaire? have a sick bucket ready—that he gave in and just bought the damn thing, heavily financed by other backers and taking on debt.

Since then, we’ve learned that while using Twitter can be a radicalising experience, that’s nothing compared with owning it. In the last six weeks, Musk has taken to tweeting white rabbits (a QAnon symbol), accusing the previous head of trust and safety of being a groomer (based on a misreading of a blog the guy wrote about keeping minors safe on the gay hookup app Grindr) and, just this week, delivering the absolute apotheosis of a Boomer joke that was “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” I mean, this is not even how pronouns work. Prosecute needs to get a better writer’s room for fauci attempts at humour.

Alongside all that, prosecute—ok, he, this is as unfunny as his version of it—gave access to Twitter’s internal communications under the previous regime to the Substack journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, on the condition that they published anything they found first to Twitter. I find this pretty ironic, since Weiss left the New York Times complaining that “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

Nonetheless, I found the piece linked above, by Weiss, to be a notable attempt to put some distance between her journalism about Twitter and its source. She is obviously sympathetic to Musk, and some of the narratives he peddles, but her quotes are interesting nonetheless. Mostly because, much like Harry and Meghan complaining their palace cottage was too small, Musk has a tendency to condemn himself out of his own mouth.

I should say that the “Twitter Files” have been interesting. Here’s Cathy Young in the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative publication:

Ever since Twitter pivoted from relatively untrammeled speech to increasingly intrusive moderation, the lack of clear rules and transparency—coupled with ideological slant—has been a problem. (For the record, I have been writing about this since 2015.) Numerous people have been suspended or permanently banned for vague and elusive reasons. Yes, many of them were people with odious opinions, such as far-right blogger Robert Stacy McCain, whose off-Twitter history includes Confederacy apologetics, defenses of “natural revulsion” toward interracial marriage, and anti-gay rants. But bad people are not an excuse for bad policies. […]

In other cases, as the Twitter Files releases confirm—and as not only the right-wing press but mainstream media outlets have reported before—steps were taken to reduce some posters’ visibility and reach without informing the targeted individuals or allowing them to appeal. The measures could include algorithmic “deboosting” which made the user’s tweets less likely to show up in followers’ feeds and blocking the user’s tweets from trending or showing up in searches.

Not that this was ever a secret, but the Twitter Files also do show the liberal bias of the network (its staff were based in San Francisco, one of the bluest cities in America). Quite often, they are shown earnestly attempting to balance free speech beliefs with the emerging leftwing consensus over the last decade that some speech is “violence” and that, for example, misgendering is a hate crime.

All nerdy, interesting stuff. But come on. “A kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission?” People need to stop larping on the internet because their lives are too comfortable. You cannot honestly compare releasing people’s Slack messages discussing the removal of Donald Trump after January 6 with . . . the end of apartheid. No one got necklaced on Twitter.

Musk has fallen victim to the greatest Twitter trope of all—main character syndrome. Not only does he love to shitpost, just to feel alive, but he has become seduced by the way Twitter makes you feel like the protagonist of reality. That feeling has been the ruin of many a poor boy—think Jolyon Maughan, Jason Stanley, Yashar Ali, and congratulations if none of those names are familiar to you—and now we know what happens when Twitter’s signature blend of sharply polarised attention interacts with absolute power.

Twitter is now the Elon Musk Experience. I’m genuinely unsure where it goes next for a couple of reasons:

1) the lifeblood of the site is liberal journalists, and the belief that no matter how bad the trolling is or how annoying the Main Characters are, they are so addicted they will stay. Is that true?

2) The business model still seems whack. Musk has cut 80 percent of the staff, and seems to sometimes just…. not pay for things if he doesn’t want to? But it is still a debt-financed business, and if Twitter Blue, the premium subscription service, doesn’t take off, then Twitter is still reliant on advertising. And here’s the thing—I have bought several things from Instagram adverts, including some very nice dresses and Jonathan’s Christmas present (ssh). But I have never once bought anything from a Twitter advert. It offers digital billboards, not the more lucrative direct sales ads.

In combination, you can see a scenario where liberal journalists drift away from the site, so it’s no longer the place to go to influence the news agenda (or own the libs) and the site begins to bleed money.

I don’t think Twitter is in imminent danger of collapse. But you can see a future where it’s a smaller, overtly conservative social network—a safe space for the right. I wonder if the arc of history is long, but it bends towards TruthSocial.

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Quick Links

1. “Decades from now, historians may regard the 2020s as a golden age of vaccine breakthroughs. The mRNA vaccines that blunted the mortality of COVID were just the start.” Feeling low about 2022? Derek Thompson rounds up the ten most promising breakthroughs of the past year. (The Atlantic)

2. Evelyn Waugh’s old house is for sale (Rightmove).

3. Scott Bryan rounds up the TV moments of the year, including Huw Edwards’ croissant (Twitter)

4. Twitter World Cup of the Worst Takes of the Year. My personal favourite is “frosted mini picket lines,” just for sheer surprise value.

5. Sam Bowman’s list of consumer products he loves is a genuine treasure. I am about to buy the packing cubes. Amazing to think something so useful could come from someone so committed to trolling that most of his tweets are like “great to be in Italy and try this delicacy they have here called pizza! Yum!”

6. James O’Malley attempts to define “wokeness”. I agree with pretty much all of this (Substack).

7. Talking of larping as a revolutionary because your affluent life is too dull, my colleague Elaina wrote an incredible profile of Marjorie “Jewish space laser” Taylor Greene. What’s next for a bored housewife after getting into CrossFit and an alleged affair? Why, QAnon!

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Thanks to the many nice people who sent me a book; I’ve already cracked into the Strindberg biography and hope to read many more over Christmas—which segues neatly into saying that the Bluestocking will back on January 6. Happy Christmas and a happy new year!

What? You thought I would resist one more plug? Surely you know me better than this by now. The series starts on Monday.