I have a really hard time with Twitter. I started on the platform in ‘07 to mostly promote a board game I was developing. I also had an account specifically for news and info trained on finance accounts for my job at an HFT. Around 2015, I finally abandoned all of my accounts as completely useless, uninformative and un-fun.
Many important and smart people that I respect have come up with arguments about why Twitter matters and why I should care. But I’m just not seeing it. Is the value of Twitter, say Network effect or historical record, such that something else couldn’t be substituted? Are the problems with Twitter technological, ideological or deeply ingrained in what humans are? Is it more than a fad, or the fad of fads?
From my perspective, it’s just another dumb thing the masses have convinced themselves means something but actually means nothing. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow what would we actually miss? What important contributions would we talk about?
I just can’t see why I should put any effort into Twitter (or any Clout game, for that matter) aside from my own ego and that’s a problem I solved decades ago: what I think simply doesn’t matter.
I wrote from 2005-2015 about the aspect of this you mention in the first portion, of those attempting to change the valuation of carious types of capital. I named the group you allude to the Arts & Humanities Tribe (and yes, they behave as a tribe) and tried to describe where they came from and what they are trying to do. I have some familiarity, because I grew up in that tribe I was a 1970s liberal arts major at William and Mary and my family includes authors, magazine and newspaper editors, theater professors and Pulitzer and Newbery Award committee members. I know them in my bones, though I no longer dwell much among them, except for shared arts & literature history. I have not really thought through how it transfers over to Twitter, as I am going off the grid in social media, catching news of it only indirectly, through podcasts, bloggers, and substack.
This instantly rang true and gives me some structure for thinking about it on my walks.
really enjoy reading your content, however classifying jimmy dore or glenn greenwald as conservatives because they (justifiably) oppose/call out the ‘progressive’ virtue signaling/ pandering isn’t an accurate portrayal of their positions, and insinuates these types of ‘progressives’ can’t be criticized from the left, which as elitists, they should be.
It has always been all about cultural capital in the educated progressive space in which I've spent my life. I personally feel the pull, as a result of my conditioning. Chasing dollars and ostentatious displays of wealth was always considered vulgar, though people in this space tend to quietly do pretty well for themselves nonetheless and subtly signal as much.
I do pretty well as a sort of specialized freelance writer (law) but fantasize about branching out as a sort of public intellectual/journalist like what you do. This move would be a pretty straightforward exchange of economic capital for cultural capital, though I'm pretty sure I'd end up with neither ;). So instead I just plug along with my ordinary career and get my kicks from "likes" on Substack comments on the side. It's all pretty ridiculous, but I understand the psychology just from looking at my own irrational impulses. I rationalize the impulse by saying to myself I want to read and write about what I want to read and write about instead of what I'm paid to read and write about, but the ego-driven desire for clout (of which I have precisely zero) is definitely in the mix.
First of all, how the hell does Ezra Klein have so much cultural capital? Has there been a more wrong-headed person to come up out of this swamp in the time since the millennium?
Second, you have convinced me that Twitter needs to be killed. And the best way of doing that is, in fact, to have Elon Musk purchase it. This is due to reasons that you outlined earlier, in that someone needs to show these fools what brute force (money in this case) can do. Will they find another means for this destruction? Of course, but they need to learn the price of playing on someone else's playground.
So what you're saying is that if we take for granted that Biden is correct and no Bill of Rights amendment is absolute, then as a matter of the overall health of our society and the stability and sanity of our nation, we would be better off curtailing the right of free speech through abolishing Twitter than say forming a Ministry of Truth or even curtailing the 2nd Amendment right and abolishing guns. (I'm saying this only partially in jest as I think curtailing any of the rights leads nowhere good, but if we're going to have hypothetical discussions about which one does the most good for the most amount of people in general, such a comparison would be enlightening as to finding the real "root causes," per Ms. Harris, of the problems in this country.)
In a way, Twitter is like shady lobbying entities. Most people who have never been on the site don't realise how much it touches their lives.
I have a really hard time with Twitter. I started on the platform in ‘07 to mostly promote a board game I was developing. I also had an account specifically for news and info trained on finance accounts for my job at an HFT. Around 2015, I finally abandoned all of my accounts as completely useless, uninformative and un-fun.
Many important and smart people that I respect have come up with arguments about why Twitter matters and why I should care. But I’m just not seeing it. Is the value of Twitter, say Network effect or historical record, such that something else couldn’t be substituted? Are the problems with Twitter technological, ideological or deeply ingrained in what humans are? Is it more than a fad, or the fad of fads?
From my perspective, it’s just another dumb thing the masses have convinced themselves means something but actually means nothing. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow what would we actually miss? What important contributions would we talk about?
I just can’t see why I should put any effort into Twitter (or any Clout game, for that matter) aside from my own ego and that’s a problem I solved decades ago: what I think simply doesn’t matter.
I wrote from 2005-2015 about the aspect of this you mention in the first portion, of those attempting to change the valuation of carious types of capital. I named the group you allude to the Arts & Humanities Tribe (and yes, they behave as a tribe) and tried to describe where they came from and what they are trying to do. I have some familiarity, because I grew up in that tribe I was a 1970s liberal arts major at William and Mary and my family includes authors, magazine and newspaper editors, theater professors and Pulitzer and Newbery Award committee members. I know them in my bones, though I no longer dwell much among them, except for shared arts & literature history. I have not really thought through how it transfers over to Twitter, as I am going off the grid in social media, catching news of it only indirectly, through podcasts, bloggers, and substack.
This instantly rang true and gives me some structure for thinking about it on my walks.
really enjoy reading your content, however classifying jimmy dore or glenn greenwald as conservatives because they (justifiably) oppose/call out the ‘progressive’ virtue signaling/ pandering isn’t an accurate portrayal of their positions, and insinuates these types of ‘progressives’ can’t be criticized from the left, which as elitists, they should be.
It has always been all about cultural capital in the educated progressive space in which I've spent my life. I personally feel the pull, as a result of my conditioning. Chasing dollars and ostentatious displays of wealth was always considered vulgar, though people in this space tend to quietly do pretty well for themselves nonetheless and subtly signal as much.
I do pretty well as a sort of specialized freelance writer (law) but fantasize about branching out as a sort of public intellectual/journalist like what you do. This move would be a pretty straightforward exchange of economic capital for cultural capital, though I'm pretty sure I'd end up with neither ;). So instead I just plug along with my ordinary career and get my kicks from "likes" on Substack comments on the side. It's all pretty ridiculous, but I understand the psychology just from looking at my own irrational impulses. I rationalize the impulse by saying to myself I want to read and write about what I want to read and write about instead of what I'm paid to read and write about, but the ego-driven desire for clout (of which I have precisely zero) is definitely in the mix.
Why is political polarization toxic? Why do writers like you universally consider it to be a "bad thing?"
First of all, how the hell does Ezra Klein have so much cultural capital? Has there been a more wrong-headed person to come up out of this swamp in the time since the millennium?
Second, you have convinced me that Twitter needs to be killed. And the best way of doing that is, in fact, to have Elon Musk purchase it. This is due to reasons that you outlined earlier, in that someone needs to show these fools what brute force (money in this case) can do. Will they find another means for this destruction? Of course, but they need to learn the price of playing on someone else's playground.
So what you're saying is that if we take for granted that Biden is correct and no Bill of Rights amendment is absolute, then as a matter of the overall health of our society and the stability and sanity of our nation, we would be better off curtailing the right of free speech through abolishing Twitter than say forming a Ministry of Truth or even curtailing the 2nd Amendment right and abolishing guns. (I'm saying this only partially in jest as I think curtailing any of the rights leads nowhere good, but if we're going to have hypothetical discussions about which one does the most good for the most amount of people in general, such a comparison would be enlightening as to finding the real "root causes," per Ms. Harris, of the problems in this country.)
And thank you for another thoughtful article.