91. Keep Twitter Mediocre 🔗

Football stadium is a better metaphor for twitter than public square. It’s just that the field itself is shrunken to nothing and the spectator sport is watching the stands across from you.

National Sousveillance League.

This is not a freeze-peach buyout proposal so much as a “use the stadium for hockey instead of football” type proposal. But since there’s no actual arena in the center, it amounts to “sell tickets to my kind of people and encourage the current fans to go build a different thing”

It’s a private sports league company, so they can do what they want, and I’ll take my stock cash-out and go, but I am pretty sure that more people want to play the current sport than the one Elon wants to see being played here, which means net shrinkage not expansion

I mean there’s a reason besides technical incompetence that things like Parler and Gab never really took off. A right-leaning thing that panders to free speech conceits of the classical-liberal-to-fascist half of the spectrum is a really boring non-spectacle

He’s a genius and I hodl Tesla, but I wish he’d stick to cars, rockets, etc. He’s a huuuge twitter whale who sees a very distorted imperial-scale-view of the action (he’s in the lowest row of seats that’s where the center of the field would be if there were a field)

You and I are somewhere halfway up stands based on number of followers. If you superimpose political compass on the stadium, I for example am in 50k circle of seats, roughly at 7 PM lib-left position. Most views are like mine: non-degenerate azimuth/altitude. Elon is at ~(0,0)

But what is sending serious alarm bells off in my head is that “free speech” in the last decade has never meant what it seems to. It is shorthand for “people I find annoying should shut up and people I like should get free reach”

The speech/reach conflation runs really deep

The paradox here is that I suspect most people are natural conservatives and the right of center half of the spectrum is actually 70% of the mass. But this is also the reason most people struggle with actual free speech as opposed to lofty mimetic posturing around their monarchs

In its current form, twitter probably serves the left half of the spectrum slightly better, and therefore 30% of the population. In the thought experiment where the game rules favor the other half of the spectrum/70% of the population, I suspect the sport would kinda implode

This is because the right half of the spectrum has odd views on “causing offense” that I think don’t scale beyond a small, homogeneous group that largely agrees anyway. And if they don’t the disagreement is so severe you rapidly get genuinely violent outcomes like war.

Homogeneity is a barbell condition. If you have say, a bunch of 19th century European Christian white guys in wigs arguing, potential for verbal offense is pretty low, until it suddenly jumps high enough for world wars. There’s no middle ground of actual disputation.

Left discourse only seems ultrasensitive to offense because it actually accommodates serious real diversity in a way grifty corp DEI programs pretend to. Despite its limits, twitter is basically the only place where I’ve met people from far beyond my limited circle of homogeneity

Left discourse norms (not far left, plain shallow mediocre virtue signaling leftism without particularly deep convictions or agendas) are the only ones that have been shown capable of scaling to date. That doesn’t mean other norms can’t scale. I just don’t think Musk-norms can.

Musk’s proposal, besides being a Meme Stock Pseudoevent from Hell that has ruined poor @matt_levine’s vacation, is also an actual idea for alt-norms whose outlines are clear from his public behaviors. To his credit it is not pure reactionary fetishization of 19th c European norms

We have to be careful not to conflate what Musk clearly wants from what the Retvrn to Powdered Wigs and Statue Heads crowd wants. There’s elements of the reactionary to what he wants… but he likes jokes, memes, shitposting, and many other things that make modern twitter

Ie there’s four norm sets competing for dominance here

A: Shallow diverse-liberal (incumbent)
B: Musk-weirdness
C: Retvrn to Powdered Wigs
D: Woke Thought Police Stalinists

So basically Musk wants to replace A with B, riding the moral panic C feels over the threat of D

There is a particular risk and a general risk here.

The particular risk is that Elon is not a god. He has incredible strengths and average weaknesses. I hold TSLA and would buy SpaceX in a minute if it were traded. He’s incredibly strong on that sort of stuff.

But on this…

…all the evidence suggests he’s average-weak. He’s not particularly “good” at twitter even as a user, let alone as a social platform designer. He just has extraordinary leverage for ordinary levels of shitposting skill thanks to Other Factors™ that are NOT social.

In fact, his following is built on the spectacle of literal rocket launches

The fact that he memes is irrelevant to the point of being a rounding error.

You and I meme to grow reach. Elon launches rockets.

The general risk is of course that whatever his unique strengths/weaknesses, he’s also a super-billionaire

If you think super-billionaires simply buying up large social phenomena to “solve” them because they don’t personally like the emergent behaviors, you’re a monarchist

… even if, despite all odds, he is successful with twitter (and I hope he doesn’t want to be; this has gotten serious now), it’s a bad precedent.

Even if you concede that twitter is somewhere between poorly managed and mismanaged (I don’t actually), this is a way to worsen it

First, it’s not a “problem” to be solved. It’s an ecosystem to be managed/stewarded. There’s no Mars base or EV transition end game here. Twitter’s value is in sort of continuing and evolving indefinitely like a rainforest. “Solving” it is a pure authoritarian high-modernist goal

Second, because of its unique role as a media thing, a management mode that’s not public in some way is simply not credible. I don’t mind a strong board/leadership and activist investors. I’d just like it to stay publicly traded.

I mean look at the NYT.

In general, it is bad for liberal democracies if the actual challenge of keeping them liberal and democratic is outsourced via privatization to an eccentric individual billionaire to do illiberal and undemocratic things with.

I do think liberal democracies and their institutions (and twitter is one, as are literal football stadiums) can get trapped in local minima, and sometimes need an external kick in pants to break out. I think things like space programs and pandemics serve that kind of function

A monarchist believes in a very particular source for the “kick in the pants” external force liberal democracies need: identify god-emperors to elevate above the rule of law. There is a certain deep appeal to this “solution” that hooks Straussian Great-Man theists in particular.

Me, I’m much more in the Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes camp: anti-monarchist on principle. He’s descended from a guy who assassinated the last king of Ankh-Morpork, turning it into a neoliberal shaky weak rule-of-law oligarchy that only works because the top noble Vetinari is wise.

Elon Musk is talented, but his talents are not exactly those of Lord Vetinari, which would be the minimum I’d look for

I mean if you think you need to take Twitter private to “solve” it and it’s supposedly the town square, logically you’re just delaying the actual big move: taking Congress private to “reform” liberal democracy… which is what Putin did to Russia and Trump wants to do to the US

If you can’t fix Twitter while it’s public you can’t fix the larger problems twitter’s are a microcosm of anyway. So why bother. Let twitter remain the true microcosm of larger problems at least.

Aside: good evidence of my “70% are natural conservatives” is actually Facebook, which is far larger and solves the scaling problem by letting people atomize into relatively homogeneous groups and messaging groups, rather than actually discoursing in one big public space.

Also 70% is actually only reflects the US. Most of the world is 80-95% trad. Non-white countries like India are way more trad-conservative. Immigrants here are far more conservative than you might think, and tend “left” in the US mainly out of anti-majoritarian fears, not values.

This makes this reform “solution” even more dangerous on a global scale, not less.

Maybe this is worth saying explicitly — ownership is a kind of speech. Public ownership is a kind of free speech that is more important than mere words.

However nominal, the ability to own even a minuscule fraction of a company and vote with your dollars is partway to just being able to vote in an election. There’s room/need for things in all positions of the spectrum from completely privately owned things to public utilities.

The notion of free speech in a world where everything worth anything is privately owned is sort of vacuous. It’s empty blather at best, and something that will get you thrown in a Putinesque prison at worst.

If you give people the right to say absolutely anything they want, while taking away more and more of their right to do anything of consequence because all the means are in private hands, have you created a free speech utopia or an empty speech dystopia?

I see some comments along the lines of if nobody can technically be thrown out via terms of service etc (eg trump) you get some sort of true utopia. It parallels the bitcoin maxi type argument. In practice, when the terms of service are absolutist, you get a lemon market.

Ie, bad actors chase out the good. In economics, bad money chases out the good. The place to fight for freedom is at the level of the whole society, ie government. Any subset like Twitter that tries to larp “rule of law” through terms of service simply enables lemon markets

Exit vs voice applies. People only fight to create healthy cultures of voice under if they can’t easily exit bad ones.

The place to fight free speech battles is Congress/Supreme Court. If you lose there, what you get is an actual refugee crisis of people exiting entire societies

If you disagree with things like privileging CDC statements over random “do your own research” advice… I mean, there’s a way to address your concern: run for office, get a bill through to reform/dismantle the CDC etc. To his credit, Trump took his grievances to the right arena.

I’d say 70% of the actual issues this crowd is moral panicking about is just work-in-progress large scale monitoring-and tagging algorithm design, weak/understaffed due process for appeals, and a feed algorithm with weird biases that don’t map clearly to political lines

It’s a case of an Altavista era of social waiting for a Google-level algorithmic innovation, not a shadowy woke cabal seeking Total Societal Control. If you want to solve the problems twitter is a microcosm for, run for office. If actual twitter problems, study algorithm design.

Tldr: Elon is gonna Elon. He’s a force of nature. But you get to choose your ordinary mortal reaction and whether you want to live in a god-emperor world or one where ordinary people get to muddle through as best they can, bickering collectively.

If your answer to every difficult question is “shut up and take my money Elon” (substitute member of your personal pantheon of Great Men and Women), well.. I guess we deserve the world we live in.

I’ve lived almost my whole 47-year-life in a world enthralled by Great Men/Women, starting with Reagan, Thatcher and Welch. In this entire period, believing ordinary people — only capable of and desiring ordinary lives — had a right to exist was the most unspeakable sin.

The idea that rule by/for/of the “people” in the sense of mediocre people of mediocre abilities and ambitions, had any value at all, came under relentless attack, to the point that we now seem to think we need Great Men to tell us how to put on socks in a Noble, Optimal Way.

A world that relies on Divine Intervention to function at every level is one where ordinary people increasingly degenerate to a guilty, apologetic, shame-ridden learned helplessness where their fundamental worthlessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wasn’t going to go to this inside baseball level but why the hell not, since a lot of this just normification of NRx by people who may or may not know the term, as others have observed…

So let’s go there. Thread after-party begins here 🤣 tweet^[1]

You see, the reason NRx and Woke hate each other is that they recognize they’re essentially the same thing: People with a deep-rooted Fear of Being Ordinary (FOBO) in denial of their own mediocrity BIRGing idealized greatness to recast themselves as At Least Chosen by Greatness

To be NRx is to believe Great Men like Musk can Save Us, and that you can transcend your own mediocrity by at least recognizing that fact, with some help from Straussian priesthoods interpreting the esoteric greatness in exoteric ways for your small mind.

To be Woke is to believe Great Principles like Social Justice can Save Us, and that you can transcend your own mediocrity by at least recognizing that fact, with some help from Straussian priesthoods interpreting the esoteric greatness in exoteric ways for your small mind.

In either case, what you get is a “get out of hard thinking jail free” via much simpler kind of gamified thinking within a Great Discourse whose point is to prove to yourself that you are Saved and Chosen via Proof of Recognition of Greatness.

Great Principle or Great Person is a distinction without a difference. In either case the Easy Thinking Games™ are administered by a priestly class gently educating you on right-thinking. What’s the proof? Doing it right gets you Proof of Chosenness via esteem of friends.

Each side can see through the self-congratulatory fictions and easy-thinking games of the other side, to the essential mediocrity being denied, but not their own. What neither will do is simply cheerfully accept mediocrity and ask how one can live well and build a world with it.

You know why? Because to actually think about hard problems is to constantly be reminded of your mediocrity. It constantly triggers your FOBO. Why not just trust distant Greatness and enjoy chosenness instead?

What makes supposedly Great Men great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but run into exactly the same FOBO problems outside, and flail and struggle and fail in thoroughly undignified and ungodlike ways that destroys the illusion

What makes supposedly Great Principles great is that they are unreasonably effective and extraordinary in a narrow domain or two, but fail spectacularly when naively overextended to Universal Truth status without lots of ifs and buts and compromises.

What kinda works is mediocre people who recognize they’re mediocre working with rules and laws they recognize as janky work-in-progress hacks that are at best imperfect heuristics for a time and place. Muddling through, committed to the infinite game of simply continuing to play.

This is why the Woke vs NRx battle, which has dominated my corner of social media for a decade now is so damn silly. Great People above Great Principles or Great Principles Above Everybody are both equally wishful fantasies born of FOBO… that there are easy answers.

Even the fact that NRxies (and their non-western equivalents like Hindutva types in India or Juche in North Korea) are usually ethnonationalists with genetic privileging of a Chosen People, while Wokies are in principle about everybody being Chosen makes no difference. Why?

In both cases the actual principle of Chosenness is the same: acceptance of Greatness, denial of the existence of mediocrity and ordinariness (let alone statistically tautological dominance of it), and violent repression of behaviors in themselves and others that trigger FOBO.

We have now wandered very far from should-Elon-buy-twitter, but we’re still circling the same broad question: should the ordinary be reduced to abject helplessness, in thrall to apparent greatness?

Or should the ordinary be let alone to simply do it’s best to continue existing?

I stan weaponized mediocrity wielded by the unchosen, who shrug off FOBO and simply half-ass life one day at a time, trying to live to half-ass another day, making do without religions of greatness, accepting that they’ll die some day, at which point it’s not their game anymore

I guess I’ve been on this rant all morning because Twitter has been one of the few places left where it’s still okay to be ordinary. It’s a haven for mediocrity that FOBOists used to hate and avoid. 🤔

In fact I invented the term FOBO in an old thread about people going off waldenponding to do Great Deeds. In that thread I recommended that people shouldn’t waldenpond.

I hereby reverse the recommendation. If you have FOBO get off twitter. Go be great, chosen ones🤣

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.

Mediocre people live ordinary lives here and you might catch it. Seek greatness elsewhere.