Why I don't think Musk's blue checkmark plan will work and how we can help kill Twitter faster

I want to explore why Musk’s proposed business model for Twitter- selling blue checks- won’t work, because I think that it’s a great case study in human nature. I should note that what I write here only applies to the plan as it has so far been outlined. I suspect Musk will eventually greatly modify this plan, probably in multiple different directions, like a fish flopping around for water. Whether he will happen upon a plan that will save him, or at least a better plan, remains to be seen.

Elon Musk’s proposition is:

1. Anyone can pay eight dollars and get a blue checkmark. (Historically the blue checkmark was a symbol meaning “this person is who they say they are”, given to notable individuals at risk of being impersonated. Naturally, it became a status symbol)

2. Everyone with a current blue checkmark loses it- they have to pay eight dollars to get it back.

3. People who pay for blue ticks get boosted by the algorithm, and other perks including half as many ads.

It’s absurd. The whole (admittedly chimerical) promise of Twitter is that it is a kind of meritocracy. Your Tweets get views due to kudos you earnt from past tweets, or due to kudos you earnt in real life. Most users of Twitter are what we might call temporarily embarrassed celebrities- the kind of person who is certain that, at some point, they will be famous for something- probably commentary or comedy of some sort. The other important- though much smaller- class of Twitter users are the actual celebrities, The temporarily embarrassed celebrities and the real celebrities have a symbiotic relationship with each other. The temporarily embarrassed celebrities get the possibility of being noticed, the actual celebrities get an audience.

But blue checks for sale disrupts the whole ecosystem.

First, consider the situation from the point of view of a non-famous person who refuses to buy a blue check. You’re probably enjoying yourself less than you were before because:

1. The algorithm is boosting content they you don’t want to see- the inane thoughts of those who have bought a blue check.

2. Your chances of being ‘noticed’ or of ‘making it big’ are diminished because your content is deprioritized relative to the content of the blue checks.

Now consider the point of view of a famous person contemplating whether or not to get a blue check. There are two really good reasons you might not want to buy a blue check:

1. Pride. As Steven King said, you contribute a lot to the platform in monetary terms- you’re the reason people want to be there! If anything, Twitter should be paying you. Furthermore, you feel the fury of someone who had something and then had it taken from them- even when the object is negligible (a Twitter blue check) the response of the person who has lost something is always more vicious than the response of the person who has been denied something.

2. Protecting your reputation. If you buy a blue check, you are implicitly conceding that you need to buy a blue check in order to be seen. You are effectively outing yourself as b-list. Also, Twitter and Musk seem to be going in a weird direction, are you sure you want the public to know that you’ve made a monetary contribution to Musk?

So you probably don’t buy a blue check.

Now consider the situation from the point of view of someone who has decided to buy a blue check:

1. All the cool people that you hoped your blue check would bring you to the attention of are leaving or going inactive. Your blue check has made you an aristocrat of a shrinking empire.

2. A not insignificant number of people think you’re a wanker for having paid for visibility.

3. The hollowness of your blue-check prize will slowly occur to you.

Can right wing resentment politics save Twitter? No.

But what about resentment? What about people buying a blue checkmark to “own the libs”. Might that not save Elon? Several million conservatives buying blue ticks and hanging out on Twitter now that it’s red-coded. I don’t think so. What conservatives want, desperately, is cultural recognition by the liberal establishment, that’s what they wanted out of Twitter. If they can’t have cultural recognition, they want unlimited scope to abuse and mock the liberals, to their face. If they just wanted to hang out with a bunch of fellow conservatives, more of them would have pissed off to truth social. But they won’t get recognition or targets if they do that, so they don’t.

Think of a kid, maybe five. There’s a sandpit and some cool kids playing in it. He goes to the sandpit and goes to join in. The cool kids tell him to piss off. He complains to the teacher “teacher, the kids won’t let me play in the sandpit”. The teacher tells the cool kids that they have to let him play in the sandpit, so they just walk off. That’s Twitter.

Death spiral

So between all the factors I mapped above, you get a death spiral. Among those not willing to pay for a blue tick, interest in the site dries up because content they don’t enjoy is being boosted to them, and the words they write aren’t reaching an audience. So the users without blue checks drop off. This eventually leads interest in having a blue check to dry up.

Celebrities leave because they don’t want to pay for a blue check, not having a blue check costs them audience, and they find the whole thing very insulting.

And then all of the above categories of people bleed even more people, in response to the previous losses. A smaller audience equals fewer speakers. The loss of network effects- the very same return to scale effects that make social media sites so hard to compete with- drives spiraling decline.

Meanwhile there’s a parallel political dynamic. Liberals have other places they can go, so they do. As the liberals leave, the conservatives get bored.

In my view, the very best possible outcome if Elon continues with this plan is that Twitter becomes a small vanity site- a somewhat bigger Parler or Truth Social.

A proposal: accelerate

Forgive me. I’m going to sum up the case for destroying Twitter using the kind of over-the-top aesthetics and affectations that Twitter culture would hate- hastily written and florid [among Twitter’s many sins is extending the age of ironic minimalism in style].

Twitter has arguably always been a bad thing. It’s a cruelty factory and a narcissism plant. A garden of lies, defamation, harassment and bullying. An interlaced circuit of the seven deadly sins- lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. In the third world, and maybe soon the first, it’s been used to promote many attempts at genocide. It leads people to substitute an interactive illusion for real political action as I discussed in a recent essay on the spectacle of judgment. It seems particularly good for running financial, political and religious scams. As much as I often find it enjoyable, it’s a nasty place that serves nasty people.

Now it’s controlled by a business dude with loose ideas about privacy. A dude who has already tried to use Twitter intervene on behalf of the Republicans in the midterms, using his personal account. A dude who seems to be planning to turn Twitter into a financial speculation and banking hub.

I say we should do our best to help kill Twitter.

A lot of people have started moving to Mastodon. That’s cool, but I want to suggest an alternative course of action for those of us who can’t quite bring ourselves to leave Twitter yet- a course of action that I hope will exacerbate the contradictions in Musk’s plans and #accelerate Twitter towards its demise. I’m not the first person to think of this by any means, but I want to propound the idea.

Block every single account you encounter that has paid for a blue check. Hover over the blue check, determine whether it’s been paid for. If it’s bought, block on sight.

To sum up:

If the blue check’s bought, blocked it be- bootlick Musk and no interaction for thee!

If enough of us do this, it will, at the very least, force Elon to try another plan. At best, it might send the hellsite to hell.

Appendix: “Twitter as a reverse Panopticon” an essay I wrote a while ago

Twitter is a reverse panopticon: The internal agent Foucault in a frankly over cited discussion refers to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon—a hypothetical prison in which one never knows if one is being watched because there’s one way glass everywhere. The possibility of being watched instills behavior similar to if one actually were being watched all the time. Eventually (and this is somewhat my own gloss) the hypothetical watcher becomes internalized within the “watched” person’s own psyche, potentially unreal, but structuring their behavior and attitudes anyway.

Twitter (and I suspect other mediums like Tik Tok & Youtube) is like this, except instead of fearing(1) that someone important might be watching we are hoping someone important might be watching. This hope reshapes all online consciousness, eventually becoming a kind of internal, clout seeking voice. If the superego is an internal disciplinarian that arises from the external discipline of our parents, I call this figure the internal agent and picture him as the first result I found googling “sleazy Hollywood agent”.

The Rosetta stone to Twitter is that most of the accounts you see on your feed are hoping to be discovered. I held back from saying this for a time because I was afraid that it was really only a reflection of my own weaknesses—“most people aren’t as narcissistic as you!” I thought. But I have slowly become convinced. Maybe not by the total number of people, but certainly by the total volume of tweets, far more than half of the people you see on Twitter are like the waiter in Hollywood who wants to tell you about his screenplay. I think we all know of this Rosetta stone at some level, but partly out of good manners (often an enemy of social criticism) we keep our awareness submerged. To reiterate, Twitter is an audition held in a panopticon and there’s probably no one on the other side of the glass.

This has a couple of effects. Firstly, people write in a way which is implicitly dissatisfied with its real audience, and aimed at an audience cooler and more popular than their actual readers. There’s something eerie about the fact that—at least to a degree- they are not talking to you.

Secondly, people have sensibly realized that because it’s a very big audition they’ve got to stand out. Just being very good and incisive as a writer is not a great strategy for standing out. Too many people are playing that game—worse, too many people playing that game who also have something else to offer—e.g. good looks or a compelling life story. So if you want to win you’ve got to find a niche and that niche probably can’t just be “is a good writer” unless perhaps you are very good indeed, but a lot more people think they are exceptional than are exceptional. As a further consequence of point two, people are more hostile because it’s an easy way to stand out.

Thirdly, interactions have a subtly strategic relationship quality. This is most obvious when people tweet things like “favorite this for a compliment” or “I reciprocate follows”, but those seem to me to be just the most obvious manifestations. This air of “you help me stand out and I’ll help you stand out” is pervasive.

But fourthly, and above all, the joy of activity that is within itself -that does not point to some greater ambition—is tapered and in some cases eliminated.

You’ve probably already clocked that each of these four facets makes human interaction less authentic. And all this for the sake of an internal mental observer that, as a general rule, doesn’t reflect anything real.

Footnotes:

(1) We are also fearing that someone might be watching and swoop down to cancel us, but that’s a discussion for another time. To briefly elaborate—not only are we seeking good publicity, we’re also afraid of the bad. The end result is that we’re doing all the work of celebrities with few of the rewards. Though not quite “none of the rewards” because there is a certain pleasure to the celebrity LARPing that Twitter and related offer