[AE.Personal] Twit and Twitterability
So, this is not the newsletter I had planned to put out next, but events have continued to eventuate in a way that has taken up a lot of my time and attention in some spectacularly fruitless fashions, and I need to address both one of the events and the way I've responded to it, so far.
I'm talking about the Twitter board deciding to accept Elon Musk's offer to buy the company outright and make it a privately owned company solely controlled by him, or by the legal entity constructed to let him pull together 40 billion dollars with a minimum of time, effort, and exposure to risk.
If you want to know my feelings about this, they are identical to my feelings about Elon Musk in general: hey, fuck that guy a lot.
I believe he's genuinely concerned about free speech the same way I believe a guy angling to be the first Landlord of Mars is genuinely concerned about saving the Earth or that the guy aiming to corner the market on a particularly expensive way of adding more car lanes to a city wants to solve traffic problems. Simply put, none of it passes the smell test.
But I'm not here to make an anti-Musk argument. Actually, I'm here to do the opposite. I don't see the point in it, and I'm publicly acknowledging the lack of point so I have something I can refer back to when the urge strikes me.
If I believe I am correct that he will misuse his position of power over the platform -- and I do believe that -- then I must face up to the fact that I can't change this by being bitter about it on Twitter. The people who are cheering his pending takeover either explicitly don't care about freedom of speech, or are lying about caring about freedom of speech, or have a sincere belief that he is, has been, and will remain a champion of free speech.
I believe the balance of the evidence is against that, when you compare his deeds to his high-minded words, but I have no ability to make anybody else who lives in the same world as I do and has access to the same evidence see that, particularly not when they are a victim of motivated reasoning and are in possession of a narrative that says I am a Critical Woke Leftist Communist Whateverist whose clique rules Twitter moderation and that I'm afraid of losing my power to silence all the people who constantly harass people like me.
They believe a version of reality that neatly explains away anything I might say to them or show them, and even without that conveniently sorted out in advance, it's a fact that the human mind can simply choose to reject whatever it wants without any such reason.
This is not my declaration that the truth doesn't matter or that the reality of this is subjective in any especially meaningful sense; it's an acknowledgment of my limitations as a human being. I only have so much time on this earth. If I believed I could make a difference by spending my days verbally jousting with an interchangeable army of Musk fanboys and fanbots, I'd do it. But all that does is use up my time and energy.
So here's the perspective I am consciously adopting.
Well, first, let me give a little bit of a disclaimer. I was reminded last night that people can read things I didn't say into things I did say, so I want to make it clear that when I say something like, "If Musk completes his takeover," I am not entering an opinion in either direction about the likelihood of that happening or not. I don't have a prediction. I am not in a position to make a prediction. I know people who are sure it's a done deal with no chance of falling through or blowing up. I know people who are sure it's doomed and/or was never intended to succeed.
I have no opinion on either take. Until it either happens or doesn't happen in a sufficiently final way, I have to proceed with the assumption that it could happen.
So, with that out of the way: if Musk's takeover bid is completed successfully, there might come a time when I have to leave Twitter, whether because I'm banned for dissent or because new "authentication" measures would require me to compromise my safety or because the platform has become completely unmanageable due to unchecked abuse, or for some other reason.
But I have no intention of leaving Twitter now, not before anything has actually changed and not before I've been given a concrete reason.
This is not a judgment on anybody who isn't waiting around to find out. It is not a recommendation for what anybody else should do. It is not a call to arms or a call to action. I am describing my current course of action (wait and see) and my reasoning for that.
Twitter... hasn't been as valuable to me as a platform as it once was for a while now, and I mean that in basically every sense of the word "valuable". A lot of my income has been tied to my visibility on Twitter, but that visibility has been declining for a while now, and I find it harder and harder to slip into the frame of mind that knows how to dance the magic internet dance that makes money happen.
So if I do say goodbye to Twitter, it might not be the worst thing. I've been trying to transition to the next phase of my life and my weird, decades-long career of being a person who is professionally online. It might be that clinging to Twitter is holding me back. I don't know. I can't know until I let go, but I'm not letting go prematurely.
And because I'm sticking around... I have to make my peace with the fact that no amount of tweeting at accounts with names like Firstnamebunchanumbers or Red Hat 45 Dot Eth is going to change anybody's minds, much less change anything about the situation. I do it because I feel like something must be done, but it's not actually doing something.
If I successfully back off and disengage from the fray, it might be that I'll find my way into a more productive groove for dealing with it. But even if I don't, that's not a net loss since my "doing something" now is doing nothing.
In the meantime, I've got stuff I want to do. Stuff that brings me joy, a sense of personal fulfillment, and ideally, some money. Engaging with random Muskovites not only uses up the time I spend typing up a tweet (which is negligible) but it keeps my mind engaged with the whole mess as a topic.
Anyway, that's where I'm at, for now. If things change, I suspect it will either be slowly and with a lot of warning, or dramatically all at once. Either way, I'll let you know.