The Arc of Elon Bends Toward Insanity

Elon Musk and the astounding state of pining for Old Twitter.

Despite the many problems it’s had over the years, Twitter has been very good to me. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Twitter is the reason I have a career in writing instead of selling insurance. The ability Twitter gave me to network, promote my writing, and interface directly with influential people was invaluable. The downside, of course, was that Twitter was a toxic wasteland dominated by roving bands of sadists eager to humiliate, swarm, threaten, doxx, abuse, and cancel anyone they didn’t like. If you knew how to utilize the platform as a tool, and had the discipline to avoid treating it as a community, public square, clubhouse, or sounding board for thinking out loud, it worked. But a system that depends on user discipline to function prosocially is a system destined to be antisocial. Too many people could not resist the algorithmic attention hooks amplifying the most polarizing content, fostering outrage, and incentivizing cruelty. Compounding this was the fact that Twitter’s mostly left-leaning employees enforced its rules with a political slant that was more lenient to one side and more strict to the other.

When Elon Musk proposed buying Twitter to address these issues, I thought it was worth a shot, and said as much in print. Musk went on to acquire the blue bird, and in the time since, has achieved the near-miraculous feat of making me pine for the return of 2022 Twitter. The whole fiasco has been an object lesson in the fact that things can always get worse.

To fix what ails Twitter, all Elon Musk had to do was fix the algorithms that bring out the worst in everyone, revise the terms of service to establish greater clarity, and then enforce them in a politically evenhanded way. He did none of that. His big vision instead focuses around reinventing the wheel by trying to make Twitter an all-in-one hub of text, video, audio, messaging, payments, banking, goods, and services — which nobody asked for. Nobody logs onto Twitter and thinks to themselves “Gee, I really wish I could do my banking here.”

Alongside these pointless innovations, Musk has turned Twitter into his own personal toilet wall and petty fiefdom, which he rules by executive fiat while shitposting to nine-digit audiences. As I’ve written elsewhere, Musk has “worked his digital necromancy to resurrect the legions of the damned from Twitter Hell.” The effect of this mass unbanning, which has taken shape over the course of 2023, has been a sea change in the culture of Twitter. The previous far-left mono-(cancel)-culture of bloodthirsty wokesters has been disrupted not by a much-needed injection of normies or moderates, but by a massive influx of right-wing populists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, tradcons, religious zealots, and other far-right weirdos.

All of this has, as one would imagine, driven away advertisers. But Musk is determined to make Twitter a financially profitable enterprise by replacing its business model with a monetized cult of personality revolving around himself. He’s building a two-tiered system where handpicked sycophants get paid to churn out viral content, and where people who pay a monthly fee to subscribe to Twitter Blue gain full sitewide functionality, which is being stripped, piece by piece, from free users. Add to this the de facto shadowbanning of any posts containing links to competitor platforms, such as Substack, and Twitter is diminishing one of the features that enabled its rise to begin with — as a place for creators to amplify their work.

Musk’s latest head-scratcher is his rebranding of Twitter, a unique and globally recognized brand, to “X.” This move, reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Conquistador Instant Leprosy” sketch, has erased somewhere between $4 billion and $20 billion of brand value that will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. That is, unless Musk changes his mind, which is always a possibility when dealing with the mercurial and the impulsive. There is perhaps no better way to describe Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter than saying he is running the platform the way a child would.

Love him or hate him, few people asked in, say, 2021, would have expected this level of incompetence and immaturity from Musk. But Twitter appears to have changed the man. Seven months ago I wrote, “Over this past year [2022], Musk seems to have devolved as a person, growing more juvenile and capricious by the month. The tech visionary of the 2000s and 2010s appears to be gone, replaced by his inner sixth grader.” Musk’s degeneration has only continued in the time since. Similar to Jordan Peterson and the TERF/gender critical movement, Elon Musk was initially unfairly pilloried by haters, only to grow into and eventually embody every unkind thing said about him. In the spring of 2022, he was decried by the left as a Trump-like figure. At the time, judging him by his record of statements and actions, the charge was ludicrous. Now, in the summer of 2023, it’s a coin flip as to who I’d consider less deserving of power. And power itself may be the problem.

While the mentally unhealthy effects of spending too much time online, combined with audience capture and his own autism, appear to have taken their toll, Elon Musk may be also suffering from too much power. Indeed, research has shown that people in positions of power, who sit atop various hierarchies where no one can gainsay, correct, shoot down, rebuke, or punish them, eventually experience a potentially deranging atrophy in certain cognitive abilities. Accountability, it turns out, is a vital check and balance on our own sanity. Without it; without the positive reinforcement of reasonable behaviors and the negative reinforcement of unreasonable ones, the wrong kind of personality can drift away into la-la land.

The Elon Musk Twitter experiment was worth running. The typical structure that large, publicly traded companies have, with shareholders and a board of directors to please, and with every major decision driven purely by profit-based considerations, presents obvious barriers. It creates pressures and incentives that lead to maximizing profit over making the product healthier. Against this tide, few CEOs can swim. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO, publicly wrestled with the problems of the platform and the direction the company was going, but had little power to change course. He was, in fact, routinely cut out of the loop and left isolated in his c-suite like a figurehead. Senior executives joked that “Jack Dorsey was more like the company’s spirit animal than its CEO.” It was worth seeing if restructuring the company to be led by a single owner who purported to have an interest in healing Twitter would lead to progress. We ran the Elon Musk experiment, and now we know the results. Virtually every problem that existed in Old Twitter still exists in New Twitter — either worsened or with its political polarity reversed.

It has been undeniably entertaining and gratifying to witness Twitter’s erstwhile Brahmin caste of lefty blue-checks throw endless tantrums at being stripped of their undeserved privilege to dictate the conversation, but you can only get so much mileage out of schadenfreude. Their replacement by a new class of trendsetters consisting of conspiracist wack jobs, far-right jackoffs, and influencers who haven’t breathed the air outside of Elon’s rectum for the better part of a year are no improvement.

Twitter is now festooned with Musk fanboys and hangers-on eager to do their best impression of Bush-era Republicans by telling critics that if they don’t like it, they can leave. If things continue deteriorating, people won’t need any encouragement. Though he often oversells it in a grandiose way, Musk is right when he speaks about the importance of Twitter. It’s a platform that allows for a kind of interaction, networking, and information flow that, used correctly, adds real value, and for which there is no viable alternative. Not right-wing cesspools like Gab, Gettr, Parler, and Truth Social, nor left-wing ones like Bluesky. Not that steaming pile of mammoth shit known as Mastodon. Not Substack’s own fledging Notes. Not Threads, which, despite the initial excitement, has been aptly-described as “The worst parts of Twitter and Instagram in one very bad app.” I created a Post.news account some months ago — using it is like panhandling on the moon. The problem with these competitors isn’t just that most of them suck, but that there’s too many of them, with more springing up all the time, preventing any from ever gaining enough users to be worthwhile.

I‘ve written that Old Twitter was akin to a gravely ill patient; one that should ideally be healed, or else at least euthanized, and that between the two, we could rely on Elon Musk to get the job done. It seems I was mistaken. It’s clear enough that there will be no healing, but neither is euthanasia on the horizon. It appears there will be no swift liquid death to send Twitter to its eternal slumber, but rather a slow and agonizing torment by a thousand cuts that ends not with a corpse, but with a mutilated and broken ruin. Drip by drip, Twitter, or X, or whatever dick joke-inspired name it will be re-rebranded as in a few months, will slowly bleed influence, users, and usefulness. The most realistic outcome I find myself hoping for is that Elon eventually tires of his toy and sells the platform to someone more mature and competent. Any teenager should fit the bill — and by the time that day arrives, they’ll probably be able to afford Twitter, too.

See also: “How To Deal With Online Mobs”

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