The Twitter Question

We've all heard the modern adage of how spending five minutes on Twitter (I will not call it X) will make you want to take a two-by-four to Elon Musk's head. It is very clear that the website is not all it's cracked up to be and absolutely nowhere near what he promised it would be and so, like the group of nicer people they are: those who wanted to actually talk to each other flocked to other places. This left Musk and his bot accounts to fester in the wild - which became an entirely new problem of its own.

I was one of the strange people divided; I stuck around on Twitter but I also have one of the aforementioned 'better' social media accounts: BlueSky. At the behest of a good friend I have had for many years, I trundled over to the site expecting the same debacle that we received when the mediocrity of 'Thread's reared its unwelcome head. But, no. BlueSky in fact is a place of genuine contact and connection with there being a far more pleasant atmosphere that has not been compressed into people simply shouting at each other, arguing with bots or worse: shitposting.

Jordan B. Peterson recently spoke of a phenomenon on one of his podcast episodes called the 'Woke Right'. I am still grappling with what this might mean but I think he was correct in stating who these people tend to be and what they are bringing about. Usually characterised as using the same politically correct 'theology' to control a cultural narrative, the woke right tends to be a cause for concern at the moment because of the recent spurts of book banning within state schools in the USA. Putting age ratings on books which clearly don't belong within a young child's reach I can understand, but the way in which the USA has attempted to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee in some schools shows that there may as well be an American Dark Age on the way.

Is this exacerbated by Twitter? Well, of course it is. In their book Character Limit, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac discuss the downfall of Twitter under Musk's leadership. The argue that simply letting the shitposting roam free has devolved the quality on conversation on the platform. Now, I think we all understand that under Dorsey's leadership, Twitter was burning through money faster than it could make it back. But is this really the only way forward we have? Must we sit back and watch the various problems with our society burst outwards in their thousands?

Do I think Elon Musk is a quasi-Hitler-statesman figure? No. But do I think he is possibly the worst person to run a social media platform? Also no. Here's what I believe about Elon Musk: he is a lot smarter than people give him credit for. But being smart does not always mean you are de facto a good person. We have witnessed that throughout history, one who is 'too smart for their own good' is often someone who commits to things on the basis of narcissism and desire. I do not however think it is 'malicious intent' as many might believe.

In this article I will identify two major problems I have witnessed since the 'Twitter Takeover' by this cultural persona non grata. I will attempt to refer to some articles that possibly support the arguments I am writing about though this is not an academic article. The idea is to make a comprehensive account of the issues surrounding this social media-based rampage ex libris the cultural stratosphere; I hope you and I can at least agree on something.

Part 1: Pseudo-Intellectual Millennial Men

It is almost universally understood by now that Twitter's depths are in fact, the hell-fire of pseudo-intellectualism. These people are often: middle-class millennial men, arguing on end about their misguided opinions on literature, culture and politics, misusing 'big words' to make themselves sound intelligent and devolving all conversation into a one-upmanship instead of fostering genuine connection. These are also the people that are most active in the Twitter realm after the bots.*

*As involved in #BookTwitter as I am, for the life of me I cannot understand how you are getting any reading done when you are posting to Twitter multiple times a day; not counting how much you reply to other people giving you a misdirected pat on the back for advertising that you like to read 'difficult' novels.

It definitely makes for a rather rubbish place to hold a conversation if you want actual answers and not some idiot's thought-piece on a weird tangent he's made in his pedantic small-mindedness. With a character limit that spans only a sentence or two of any kind of thought (forget anything nuanced), these men have resorted to using the "🧵" symbol to signal that they would like at least one person to travel down their disembodied idiot rabbit-hole which usually foams at the mouth with Linked-In-esque arse-licking.

If you are doing any of this, you are by definition a terrible person to socialise with.

Why?

Well, if the main goal of social media is to socialise then you're not doing quite that. Instead of starting a conversation you are dying on rather oddly shaped hills, doing exactly what the 'algorithm' wants you to do whilst you profess that you are 'too smart' for it as you provide a mediocre analysis of how to further yourself (mindset, philosophy etc) and thus: get angry at things that don't concern you. You get angry at things you have no idea how to solve - but you like to think of yourself as a savant and spew your shit anyway. As I am aware mostly of the conversations within the hellscape of #BookTwitter, I will use this as the main example.

The example exchange is a model of many. Usually a 'thoughtful' discussion about philosophy (notice how the word 'thoughtful' is doing a lot of heavy lifting whilst the word 'philosophy' remains unread, like many of the philosophical texts discussed by the two idiots in conversation). It is followed by one or two people making a point where 50% of these halfwits will then die on some weird hill to defend it and others with all of their 4 IQ points will fight with all the vitriol of a temperamental toddler against it. Neither is actually able to hold an apt opinion. They are basically rants by people who think others are listening to them.

I think here I should say something about our good friend Mr. Konstantin Kisin. I don't remember exactly when he said it, but he said something along the lines of when you gain followers (or listeners in his case) it can go to your head pretty quickly and you can start believing your opinion is fact and worse, believing others want to listen to what you have to say on everything. It's quite an important point because it explains what is happening on Twitter.

With the bot accounts basically everywhere and following people ad nauseam every day, what did we think was going to happen? The worst of us now have the loudest opinions, shirking their coat of imposter syndrome (because they are definitely not smart enough to have an opinion on the things they speak about), for the coat of narcissism instead. Elon Musk has very much made mockeries of all of these people.

All in all, conversation usually devolves into two parties or more being very confidently wrong and yet, showcasing how with all of their 'follower count' you can find yourself at the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger scale very quickly. If you think you're an expert because you have an edgy opinion, a suave Twitter handle and profess to like some 'intellectual activity' (which you blame and shame the younger generation for not being able to do without any understanding of their quite terrifying upbringing) then please realise that you actually may have an IQ more on par with a dying goat than that of a genuine intellectual thinker. There is something wise about holding two thoughts in your head at the same time. It seems the majority of these pseudo-intellectuals struggle to hold one.

Part 2: Mindset Bro Narcissism

I really should have done this one first, which is the way I had initially planned it, but no - I chose the one I'm more passionate about and so, you're getting a rather disjointed rambling. For that, I apologise. But this does connect well to the 'pseudo-intellectual' point beforehand. Low quality engagement often propels the amount of engagement happening on a platform, I think that is something we all understand. Many of us have even seen multiple accounts repeat verbatim what other accounts have posted. But that is very clearly therefore a bot and is not what I am here to write about.

As I have been saying, the very quality of conversation on Twitter has perhaps reached a circle of migraine that even Dante and Virgil couldn't descend to. We know why this is: it generates money for Uncle Elon. And so, enter: mind-set bros. If Reddit and Linked-In fostered the baby from Eraserhead it would perhaps grow into a 'mindset bro' eventually.

So, what is a mindset bro?

Have you ever seen those rather cheap looking videos which have text across them, perhaps some greyscale lions moving around in the background with the voice of Andrew Tate adjacents narrating the rather bleak landscape? Well, you are in luck - I believe you may have encountered a mindset bro. Welcome to the group entitled: 'everything is mindset' which is perhaps just the male version of middle class feminism's pilates and juice-cleanse wellness cults.

Midset bros are usually characterised by their interests in social media fads associated with 'making it big'. The wannabe yuppies of today without doing any of the hard work and absolutely none of the actual intelligence, they act as shills for the newets NFTs, the 'cryptocurrency' train or now, ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence. They idolise men such as Tyler Durden, Joaquin Phoenix's Joker and Patrick Bateman along with other fictional characters where they didn't read the book and thus, failed to understand the point. They often misquote actual philosophers and writers that they haven't read such as: Aristotle, George Carlin (if he counts but they do the same to him) and Oscar Wilde, whilst also professing that the arts aren't worthy subjects on the world stage.*

*This is usually part of their AI worship. They can't create art and so they hate people who can. They can't write well or read well and so hate everyone who can. When it comes to AI, they can at least pretend. I think we all know where I'm going with this.

And so, the mindset bro grows in their sense of narcissism. Like the pseudo-intellectual they engage in 'thoughtful' discussion with likeminds where both sides of the argument have the IQ of a wet paper bag and the reading age of an unborn child. But they still manage to fill Twitter with content that is low-quality, high narcissism and more than most of the time, based on rage towards the 'woke left' which got up and left for 'bluer' pastures about two years' prior.

All in all, this is a person who believes themselves to be not only an intellectual but also an extremely talented human being. As they are purposefully anti-social, Linked-In would not even help the wound that festers in this Twitter space and so, we can only assume that if it continues, Twitter will be unusable by much sooner than the end of the decade.

Conclusion

Well, Twitter is dead - so what do we do now? Do I honestly think that with the state of Twitter we can reach some sort of agreement in which we sit and watch this unfold whilst keeping our mouths tightly shut. I admit there are bigger problems on Twitter, but perhaps they are being perpetuated by two of which I have mentioned here today. I do not think that the world's richest man requires even more of a passive income but I also do not believe he would take this teetering quid pro quo we offer in which a lot of high quality engagement is traded in for returns to Twitter's previous form. For we cannot have that either.