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Journalist David Roth FTW - Best description of Twitter and Musk EVER (amazing blog post)
Last edited Sun May 14, 2023, 03:09 PM - Edit history (1)
IMO. And I've read a lot of those descriptions over the years.
It's on his blog, so you don't have to look at a tweet. But I found it thanks to Twitter, and a Tom Nichols retweet of a Nicholas Grossman tweet leading me to another of Grossman's tweets, about this gem - which should be read in its entirety:
https://defector.com/burning-down-the-house
I'll post an excerpt, but it would be best for you to just click on the link and read all of it, instead of reading any of the excerpt first.
Burning Down The House
10:46 AM EDT on May 14, 2023
Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes also a place where important things happen, more often a place to watch less-important things happen alongside if not truly with other people, always a a wall on which to write graffiti and a periscope that would show you a stranger being weird—it has never been what they said it was. The overheated register in which Silicon Valley types have tended to talk about Twitter—as The Global Town Square, a horizonless agora in which all of humanity can meet to uh engage in free speech together or whatever—is how they always talk about whatever they are selling, right before they move on to selling something else. For better and worse, these people like Twitter—many people do—but they can't say why, or call it what it is. And so it has to bring people together, for the future's sake.
-snip-
This is why Elon Musk was always the worst possible person to own Twitter. Musk has long been one of the thirstiest, corniest, most tiresome posters on the site, which is saying quite a bit. More worryingly, though, Musk has used the site—relentlessly, exhaustingly, constantly—in a way that suggested he had no idea what it did, or how people actually used it, or even why they might. His posts were joke-shaped and troll-scented without ever containing humor or even identifiable trolling; his mentions were filled with supplicants and hangers-on, all talking over each other to promote their various business gambits and themselves, to the extent that any identifiable distinction existed. Musk's account increasingly alternated between fervid re-phrasings of reactionary cable news bugaboos—they're trying to make the Minions woke or whatever— and concerned-seeming replies to posts about the same dumb shit.
-snip-
It makes sense that these users would be drawn to Musk, even to the point of posting like him, because he resembles them in his sour incuriosity, and is aspirational in his impunity and wealth. As it happens, that type of rich authoritarian—distractible, idly vicious, relatable in his proud pissy cretinousness—already has an avatar in American politics. Musk sought out this population of blowhards and temporarily embarrassed grand inquisitors and armchair genocidaires, and they invariably found him, but this is a tough crowd. Where Musk has struggled to keep that constituency happy, it reflects less on his seemingly sincere receptiveness to their hair-trigger credulity, bigotry, and vengefulness and more on the fact that these people are fundamentally unappeasable, and fundamentally opposed to being appeased.
This worldview, as expressed through a sprawling cast of independent operators, is built around not just incubating but selling a very specific type of grievance. Each of those operators is the protagonist of their own dim hero's journey; so is Musk. But there's no community or coalition to find, because the selfishness that defines this politics is inherently so unstable. There are just too many enemies in it for the world to make sense as anything but a concentric field of threats. Musk held some appeal in this context as a potential annihilating godhead, but he was always going to disappoint—not because he is clumsy, or insufficiently brutal, but because this politics is grounded in that disappointment.
-snip-
10:46 AM EDT on May 14, 2023
Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes also a place where important things happen, more often a place to watch less-important things happen alongside if not truly with other people, always a a wall on which to write graffiti and a periscope that would show you a stranger being weird—it has never been what they said it was. The overheated register in which Silicon Valley types have tended to talk about Twitter—as The Global Town Square, a horizonless agora in which all of humanity can meet to uh engage in free speech together or whatever—is how they always talk about whatever they are selling, right before they move on to selling something else. For better and worse, these people like Twitter—many people do—but they can't say why, or call it what it is. And so it has to bring people together, for the future's sake.
-snip-
This is why Elon Musk was always the worst possible person to own Twitter. Musk has long been one of the thirstiest, corniest, most tiresome posters on the site, which is saying quite a bit. More worryingly, though, Musk has used the site—relentlessly, exhaustingly, constantly—in a way that suggested he had no idea what it did, or how people actually used it, or even why they might. His posts were joke-shaped and troll-scented without ever containing humor or even identifiable trolling; his mentions were filled with supplicants and hangers-on, all talking over each other to promote their various business gambits and themselves, to the extent that any identifiable distinction existed. Musk's account increasingly alternated between fervid re-phrasings of reactionary cable news bugaboos—they're trying to make the Minions woke or whatever— and concerned-seeming replies to posts about the same dumb shit.
-snip-
It makes sense that these users would be drawn to Musk, even to the point of posting like him, because he resembles them in his sour incuriosity, and is aspirational in his impunity and wealth. As it happens, that type of rich authoritarian—distractible, idly vicious, relatable in his proud pissy cretinousness—already has an avatar in American politics. Musk sought out this population of blowhards and temporarily embarrassed grand inquisitors and armchair genocidaires, and they invariably found him, but this is a tough crowd. Where Musk has struggled to keep that constituency happy, it reflects less on his seemingly sincere receptiveness to their hair-trigger credulity, bigotry, and vengefulness and more on the fact that these people are fundamentally unappeasable, and fundamentally opposed to being appeased.
This worldview, as expressed through a sprawling cast of independent operators, is built around not just incubating but selling a very specific type of grievance. Each of those operators is the protagonist of their own dim hero's journey; so is Musk. But there's no community or coalition to find, because the selfishness that defines this politics is inherently so unstable. There are just too many enemies in it for the world to make sense as anything but a concentric field of threats. Musk held some appeal in this context as a potential annihilating godhead, but he was always going to disappoint—not because he is clumsy, or insufficiently brutal, but because this politics is grounded in that disappointment.
-snip-
Much more at the link, all of it very readable, and scathing.
Roth's tweet about this:
Link to tweet
13 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The points may be well made but my older brain doesn't like to see 20 lines of text in a single paragraph without some room for breathing. Especially about someone who I don't like to read about anyway.
But I appreciate you thinking of us!!! 
