On Social Media & the Allure of Outsourcing One's Thinking
Which social media site will tell me what to think now? I mean, I guess I could go full Instagram but I like vaccines ...
At least once a month, I marvel to myself about how the Atlantic once thought it was going to be perfectly cromulent to give a platform, professional credibility, and money to a dude who thinks that women who get abortions should be hung and their bodies displayed as a warning to others.
Originally, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was all, "Critics should embrace the opportunity to engage with ideas we find threatening. Also, this cat assured me it was a one-off comment he doesn't really mean." Except it turned out that this dude was repeatedly on the record all, "I really do think the government should murder women!" and upon the discovery of those receipts, it turned out his maybe-some-people-feel-threatened-by-death-threats? ideas were not worth engaging with via The Atlantic.
You know, a totally normal thing for a civil society.
Two insights derived from that five-year-old fracas are worth considering:
One: Don't ever put your editor in a position where he's going to look bad when he defends you.
Two: This whole "You're hiring WHO? And he said WHAT?" incident became a culture-wars flashpoint for 48 hours because the pro-murdering-women crowd was furious at being deprived a broader audience at a respected publication like The Atlantic.
As Jon Schwarz wrote in the Intercept's "What's Really At Stake In the Battle for 'Ideological Diversity' At Elite Media Outlets":
The right will never give up because they understand the most shocking and significant part of this whole dumb story: It actually matters who writes for The Atlantic.
As stated 1,500 words ago, few regular humans will care about which particular ink-stained wretches are hired to opine by the elite U.S. media — let’s say The Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. But they should.
That’s because the people who truly own and operate the United States — from right-wing billionaires all the way over to centrist billionaires — don’t have time to consider politics in any depth. They’re too busy bribing state officials to hire their hedge fund or straightening out supply chain issues in Kuala Lumpur. Instead, they outsource their thinking, just like they outsource their janitorial services.
Human beings all do this. We just can’t, even with the best of intentions, examine more than one or two issues in any depth. Instead, we look to our peer group for signals about what makes sense — and the superrich consider elite publications their peers.
It's one thing to have a marketplace of ideas, but as retailers are all too happy to tell you -- any good retail outlet targets a specific customer base. Fairly or unfairly, where ideas take hold still matters as much as what those ideas are, because of who is paying attention.
For a while, Twitter was the global public square where it mattered who was paying attention. When the social network granted blue-check accounts to public figures, journalists, news organizations, societal institutions, government officials and departments, political parties, etc., it was signaling who mattered in a reality based on verifiable and empirical evidence. In other words, Twitter's blue-checkerati provided a first step in outsourcing thinking, especially among the people who create or manage things.
That all changed with the advent of the Elon Musk buy; he quickly devalued the blue check by completely missing the point and making it pay-to-play. It was stunning how quickly elite posters and organizations fled the site. Once the elites and the elite reputation were gone, Twitter soon spiraled into a place where people stopped outsourcing their thinking — unless you consider Twitter’s Nazis to be your peers.
Related: There is a popular theory about how Twitter's lost cachet because it's basically a Nazi bar now, per the old Twitter thread that if you see a Nazi come into the bar, you have to kick them out early, or else the next thing you know, you got a Nazi bar.
Look, it’s a paid blue check gathering!
You may be asking, "Why are you banging on about elites and 'outsourcing thinking' when you could just be like, 'Twitter's a Nazi bar now?'" and the answer is, Because the elites loooooooved Nazis until it became too downmarket to be associated with them.
It wasn't just a Mitford sister or two who thought fascism was a jolly good time; Susan Ronald's excellent book Hitler's Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941 details the Third Reich's decades-long drive to woo the hearts and minds of the British and American elites and how extremely willing those elites were to be wooed. A big reason the Nazis lost currency was because Kristallnacht appalled enough people where the elites realized they had to ix-nay it on the azi-Nay inner-day arty-pays.
It does not matter if Twitter is a Nazi bar. What matters is whether elites are cool with Nazis.
Right now, elites who are dependent on favorable audience engagement are publicly taking themselves elsewhere. You don't see any of them setting up social media shop on Parler, Gab, or Truth Social. The lack of A-listers and the audience they attract has actually been a problem for all the right-wing social media alternatives: Their constituency is super-mad that the libs aren't coming on to these sites to get pwned. As Alex Shepherd wrote for The New Republic back in October 2022:
The category error at the center of all of these Twitter alternatives is that right-wing shitposters don’t actually need or want a safe space to play together. They want to be a part of a battlefield. This isn’t a thing that a right-wing version of Twitter can provide, so there just isn’t a point for any of these sites to exist.
So these same posters are now double-mad about the absence of elite institutions, publications and A-listers to abuse via Twitter, and they're extra-triple-furious about the rise of alternate social media options that do attract Twitter's erstwhile thought leaders, like still-in-beta BlueSky and Meta's recently-launched Threads.
This is one of the reasons the owner of Twitter spent the past weekend being extremely online and hyperfocusing on a fellow billionaire who also owns a microblogging service. He's now threatened because he's seen the ugly truth: Threads is hitting big because a majority really dislike the Musk-era Twitter. They see no value in it. They're not going there for thought leadership.
“Why has my Twitter timeline become so terrible?”
It's not that people love Meta and its products all of a sudden. They just hate what Twitter has become more.
I don't know whether this visceral response to Twitter will be enough to sustain Threads in the long run. What is clear is that the outsourcing of today's thinking is no longer taking place on Twitter. The customers in the marketplace of ideas have spoken, and they don't want what Twitter is selling.