13.07.2023
Elon Musk’s Twitterdämmerung
The flashy launch of Threads demonstrates the web’s tendency towards monopoly, argues Paul Demarty
A few weeks ago, in one of his many increasingly desperate publicity stunts, Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a fight - an actual, real, physical fight.
Indeed, Dana White - the top dog at Ultimate Fighting Championship, the world’s largest mixed martial arts franchise - jumped in opportunistically to arrange the whole thing, and gave a bunch of interviews hyping up this clash of the century. We take it that Musk is not, in the end, serious about his challenge. (Both men know Brazilian ju-jitsu, but Zuckerberg is 13 years younger and - let’s be honest - in rather better nick.) Yet the whole ridiculous episode, however it turns out, is a picture of Musk’s whole reign at the top end of the social media business: a series of absurd stunts - each supposed to be funny, but none as funny as his tantrums. He can dish it out (sort of), but he cannot take it. Even the purchase of Twitter itself was imposed on him in the end.
It has come to look even more foolish, now that Zuckerberg’s Instagram brand has launched its own Twitter clone, called Threads (we do not know if the name is a nod to the notoriously fiddly threading mechanisms on Twitter!). Five days after being opened to the public, it had garnered 100 million sign-ups, which is roughly half Twitter’s monthly active user base. Those are two rather different statistics, of course, but it is a worrying sign (especially given that Threads is unavailable as yet in the European Union at all - a matter we will discuss later). Instagram itself, of course, already has following/follower mechanics, so the new product’s social graph is easily seeded from the existing Instagram one. The network effect (the fact that a site is only useful if people you know are on it already) is the main ‘moat’ for the incumbent social networks; Meta and Instagram are well placed to pose an existential threat to Twitter, since they can easily solve this bootstrapping problem.
Why now?
A few questions are posed by all this: above all, why now? The fact that the main incumbent microblogging platform is presently under the chaotic management of a prickly buffoon with the emotional age of 12 is, of course, part of the story; but it is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter has been in decline for many years.
A chronic malady has become acute since the Musk takeover; its pre-existing set of intractable problems must now be solved with a fraction of the workforce, and now with a billion dollars of debt interest to pay out every year, on top of its already out-of-control costs. Its power users are notoriously contemptuous of this app that consumes so much of their lives (the ‘hellsite’, as it is known). Was there really no opportunity to eat Twitter’s lunch before now?
Counterfactuals are a dangerous game, but surely this exceptionally vulnerable incumbent could have been disrupted. But it is a risky business, disruption: Facebook may have ground MySpace into dust in the space of a couple of years, but the attempts of big-tech companies to brute-force their way in have a high failure rate - remember Google+? Of course you don’t! (You could also throw Zuckerberg’s ‘Metaverse’ white elephant in here.)
For all the guff about innovation, the major tech companies are not especially innovative - a point made by the liberal anti-monopolist, Cory Doctorow, in relation to Google:
Google is a company that made one successful product. They made a search engine and it was really good. And then they just had no other ideas. Everything they tried in-house was a failure … Their whole ad tech stack, their whole video stack, their whole server management stack, their whole mobile stack, docs, calendaring, maps, road navigation - these are all acquisitions. So Google is like, ‘We are Willy Wonka’s Idea Factory; we’re geniuses who come up with ideas’, but the ideas that they actually come up with - Google+, Sidewalk Labs, the floating Wi-Fi balloons, even their RSS reader - they’ve all failed.1
That is not to say that Google has failed. Its acquisitions have been enormously profitable. The same goes for Meta: it picked up Instagram early doors for basically no money, and used the vast resources generated by Facebook to create yet another social media behemoth. Instagram has been quick enough at cloning its rivals’ features to avoid being eclipsed (Threads, we suppose, being the latest entry in that particular series - stealing from Twitter in the same way that ‘stories’ stole from Snapchat and ‘reels’ from TikTok).
Purchasing Twitter would - all things being equal - be preferable to re-implementing it. The official reasons given are weak-tea indeed - that they want to keep a sunnier, ‘Instagrammier’ vibe to the new product, and leave behind Twitter’s Grand Guignol malevolence. Threads is to be less focused on the news (above all, it is the failure of journalists to find a new home that has kept Twitter relevant during its decline). Its management hope thereby to avoid the absurd polarisation, circular firing squads, mob-handed polemical assaults and other cheerful entertainments that are so much a part of the Twitter experience.
The idea is not very plausible, for reasons we will get to. Threads will kill Twitter if it can accommodate the journos and politicians; if not, what the hell is the point of it? You can already screenshot some text for an Instagram post. (People are beastly to each other there too, if you know what to look for.)
The real reason is, primarily, that a purchase at anything close to its real market value will be impossible, since it will impose far too great a haircut on Musk and his fellow investors; and, secondly, that the vandalism of the Musk era poses real issues in technical due diligence; and, finally, that it could well trigger regulatory action on the part of a marginally more aggressive Federal Trade Commission than we have known for many a year. Evidently the calculation at Threads HQ is that Twitter is circling the drain and it is more important to be a real alternative when the Twitterdämmerung finally comes than to have the perfect product. (The other obvious rival - Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky - is still in an invite-only beta; Jack will have to get a move on if he wants a piece of the action.)
Monopoly
If it does ‘win’ - indeed, given the fact that victory is so obviously plausible - Threads is a renewed demonstration of the power of the tendencies towards monopoly in capitalism. It is, in a certain sense, a limit case: after all, the internet was supposed to be a new American-style frontier, but this time a truly limitless one, where the yeomanry need never be supplanted by the robber barons. Anyone with a rudimentary level of technical expertise might stake their modest claim. So, indeed, it began in the early days of the ‘world wide web’. Then services like Geocities started to supplant the myriad personal websites, and then Myspace, Friendster and the rest of the first generation of social networks began to replace the millions of privately hosted forums and e-lists; and then Facebook swept all before it.
It was never really scarcity that drove monopolisation in the pre-digital economy, but the power of more sophisticated divisions of labour in creating greater returns on investment. So it turned out online as well. Indeed, the fact that the growth of the mass-popular internet coincided with a historic period of cheap money, exacerbated after the 2008 crash, sped up the process considerably by funnelling vast scads of institutional investment money into tech companies of various kinds, including the social networks.
It was already clear a decade ago that Twitter’s growth would never justify a valuation on the level of the ‘hyperscalers’ (Amazon, Google and Meta). From that time, its card was marked. According to Elon’s rhetoric around the time of the purchase, Twitter was a financial basket case. But that was not true - it was not profitable, but was potentially so in a way that (say) Uber will never be. It had a stable, locked-in user base that generated revenue. In the strange, warped world of modern finance capital, that would never be enough. There would always be pressure towards consolidation - either by acquisition or by being eaten alive.
That is not to say that Meta and its various tentacles are in great shape either.
We mentioned earlier that Threads is not yet launching in the EU. The obstacle here is clearly the General Data Protection Regulation, which has already been enforced aggressively against Meta companies multiple times. (Though the UK Data Protection Act implements the GDPR, enforcement is so comically lax that plainly Meta is not bothered. Hooray for those sunlit uplands!) The underlying business model of all Meta’s brands, for practical purposes, is selling targeted advertising, by means of creepy, intrusive tracking. It is a model that has come under adverse pressure in recent years, both regulatory and ‘private’. The GDPR was one disaster, but another came when Apple imposed an opt-in system for data tracking on its devices (rather than some uncharacteristic act of altruism on Apple’s part, this appears to be directed towards the launch of its own adtech business in due course).
Perhaps these obstacles can be negotiated: a deal struck with Apple, a few corrupt precedents set in the European courts. What is the consequence? Well, precisely, that all Meta’s businesses remain what they are: psychopathically user-hostile. Tracking data is a volume business. You win by having more of it (hence Twitter’s mediocre performance). That means having more people, more engaged, more of the time. Which means engineering dependency. Each social network seems to have its own characteristic pathology: Twitter encourages persecution mania, Instagram eating disorders … but they all have (at least) one.
So the idea that Threads will somehow avoid the toxicity of Twitter by means of the cloying, coercive positivity of Instagram’s culture should be presumed false: Instagram was already quite as toxic in its own way. I may be too poisoned by decades of polemical writing to see things clearly, but I think I prefer Twitter’s war of ‘all against all’: it is a more truthful instance of the inevitable consequences of commodifying attention than its more successful rivals.
Slavoj Žižek used to argue that Ayn Rand’s partisanship for free-market capitalism was so cartoonish and inhuman that her works are best understood, despite her intentions, as satire. Twitter, in the same spirit, is something like a satire of Facebook and Instagram.
We will miss our hellsite!