At 4am a couple of weeks ago, Ryan Carson, a young activist for social justice, was sitting with his girlfriend at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard in New York. They were on their way home from a wedding party. Carson was suddenly accosted by an aggressive stranger who asked: “What the fuck are you looking at?” and then stabbed him to death.
The murder was captured by a surveillance camera, the video from which somehow made its way to the New York Post and thence on to the internet, where it was seized upon on X, formerly known as Twitter, by one of the social network’s prolific “shitposters” (the ones X’s owner, Elon Musk, calls “creators”). This particular individual specialises in incendiary incidents from all over the world and posts several times a day to just under a million followers.
Dave Lee, a Bloomberg columnist who lives in the same neighbourhood of New York as the victim, doesn’t follow this shitposter, but the platform’s algorithms made sure that he saw the video. The uploader had added an inflammatory comment on Carson’s work in public policy, “as though it had somehow led to this moment, as though he had it coming”, noted Lee.
“As I rode the subway home to Bedford-Stuyvesant,” Lee wrote, “I watched as the video clocked 1m views, then 2m. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands: That’s what you get for supporting woke policies; should have carried a gun; looks planned. By the time I got home, I had deleted the app from my phone.”
Welcome to social media, Musk-style. When he first bought what was then Twitter, the image that came to mind was of a delicate clock being donated to a monkey. That has turned out to be an understatement. In his desperation to find a way of getting the platform to earn enough revenue to pay off the debt he incurred to buy it, Musk has become a pretty malignant monkey. Among other things, he sacked half the staff (including many of those who were responsible for moderating content), alienated advertisers, started charging for premium access – and in July instituted “creator payouts to select accounts”, many of which had followings in the hundreds of thousands (and included some of Musk’s favourite users). The guy who broadcast Carson’s murder might well be one of them. If so, God alone knows how much he would have earned just from that post. Musk, though, does.
Twitter wasn’t that great long before he acquired it, but at least it had committed employees who tried hard to reduce the toxicity of its more malignant users. Under Musk, though, with his fatuous delusions about “freedom of speech”, just about anything goes. At the moment, for example, it seems to be riddled with disinformation about Hamas’s brutal invasion of Israel and QAnon-inspired fantasies about the “stolen” 2020 US presidential election, the role of the “deep state” in persecuting the January 6 insurgents, anti-vax conspiracy theories and so on.
Many observers are puzzled by Musk’s apparent determination to destroy his expensive new toy. How could an ostensibly intelligent multibillionaire be so stupid, they ask? But maybe that’s the wrong question. What if Musk knows what he’s doing – that he sees a viable business in encouraging shitposting and mining the resultant ordure? That, at any rate, is the interesting hypothesis advanced in an entrancing essay by Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell, one of the sharpest dudes around.
Its underlying metaphor is that of the mushroom, a fungus that thrives on being kept in the dark under a pile of manure. Farrell’s point is that “some people are quite happy to be kept in the dark, well fertilised with horseshit. And that is the foundation for a business model. Not a rapidly expanding one of the kind that could allow Twitter’s massive debt burden to ever be paid off. But it can keep on producing its cash crop, year in, year out.”
It’s basically the business model that enabled the infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to become a multimillionaire – at least until he came a cropper in the US courts. But for Musk to pull it off, he first has to ensure that all the users on the platform are mushrooms. After all, it’s much cheaper to run a social media company when you don’t have to employ moderators to keep it clean and legal. But for that to happen, he needs to drive off all the earnest idiots who labour under the pathetic delusion that being on X is somehow essential for the wellbeing or profitability of their organisations.
Think, for example, of the endless list of public events, lectures, presentations, conferences and suchlike that open with the organiser, having explained the arrangements for evacuating the premises in case of fire, then brightly unveils the X hashtag under which they should tweet what are laughingly called their thoughts. Little do they know that, in doing this, they are doing their bit to frustrate Musk’s business strategy. Which perhaps may help to salve their consciences about using a platform even if it enables people to profit from the virality of senseless killing.
What I’ve been reading
War footing
You’re Not Going to Like What Comes After Pax Americana is a sobering essay by Noah Smith on his Noahpinion blog, written after Hamas’s incursion into Israel.
Answering machines
Benedict Evans’s Unbundling AI is a typically insightful essay about the future trajectory of chatbots on his own website.
Pilot episode
A riveting analysis of an aircraft emergency by a very knowledgable journalist is James Fallows’s Grace Under Pressure on his Substack platform Breaking the News.
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