What Was Twitter Anyway?

00:00:00.000 | I want to talk about an article from the New York Times from April 18th, the day before I'm recording

00:00:07.040 | this show. It's an article from the New York Times Magazine written by an editor over there

00:00:11.360 | named Willie Staley, and it's titled "What was Twitter Anyway?" I don't typically love

00:00:19.600 | Twitter reporting as a self-critical reporting on Twitter. I don't usually love that format.

00:00:26.400 | I don't always care what sort of in-the-weed Twitter users have to say about Twitter because

00:00:33.520 | I don't know. It's like talking to the alcoholic about the difference between different brown

00:00:42.960 | liquors and the buzz they create or something. It's like someone whose life is so involved in it,

00:00:47.280 | it can be kind of weird. This article was great. It was a Twitter article. I was waiting for a

00:00:52.240 | journalist to write because I think it is incisive at getting at, here is how Twitter unfolded.

00:00:58.960 | Here is why me, reporter William Staley, and everyone I know is using this so much, and here's

00:01:04.000 | what's happening now, why that party is coming to an end. I want to go through this and then react

00:01:08.480 | to it a little bit. Now, if Jesse was here, we would load this up on the screen. He's not here.

00:01:12.640 | I don't know how to use technology, so I have it printed out. I'm actually just going to be

00:01:17.200 | reading things. You can, however, watch me reading this article at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. This

00:01:26.160 | is episode 245. You can also find this episode at thedeeplife.com. If you just click on watch and

00:01:31.840 | go to episode 245, you'll find the video there as well. I have a couple of quotes I want to read.

00:01:36.400 | Let's start with who William Staley is. As he says early in the article, "I am an editor at

00:01:42.960 | the New York Times Magazine, but I think it should be stated clearly up front that I have something

00:01:49.040 | of an acute problem with Twitter." He puts that up there right up front. He gives an interesting

00:01:55.760 | anecdote about getting involved in a pylon. It was a little bit hard for me to follow,

00:02:03.120 | but I think what happened here is that La Crusade that makes the enameled cast iron cookware famous

00:02:10.800 | for wedding registries everywhere, sort of expensive French cookware, had advertised

00:02:15.360 | something about Star Wars themed La Crusade cookware. He thought that was incongruous.

00:02:23.120 | He thinks about that as something that people who are really refined people into cooking care about,

00:02:28.240 | and Star Wars he thinks about maybe comic book geeks. He wrote a tweet that said,

00:02:34.880 | "The Star Wars La Crusade pots imply the existence of a type of guy I find genuinely unimaginable."

00:02:40.960 | He sent it, went back to work. Then around lunchtime, he says, things started happening.

00:02:47.360 | He talks about this huge pylon of people quote tweeting again and again,

00:02:50.960 | all of them pointing out problems with this tweet that he sent, such as, "I enjoyed that this tweet

00:02:57.520 | manages to be sexist on multiple levels. Newsflash, women cook and like Star Wars. Imagine a woman.

00:03:03.920 | Hi, have you met women? Women like Star Wars, men cook. My husband is a huge Star Wars fan and is

00:03:09.440 | the cook in the house. He bakes too. Sorry to blow your mind." And onward and onward and onward

00:03:13.920 | for a couple of days. He pointed out this is not a major thing, right? Here's how he describes it.

00:03:22.560 | It was low effort clowning that felt charged only because it was traveling along such high

00:03:28.720 | energy vectors, sexism, homophobia, Star Wars fandom. The platform can coax this exact sort

00:03:34.240 | of response out of its users with an incredibly small amount of effort. It's only on the receiving

00:03:38.320 | end where all these messages collect in one place that it feels oppressive. That's actually really

00:03:45.120 | good writing by the way. It was charged only because it was traveling along such high energy

00:03:51.920 | vectors, small amount of effort, but on the receiving end, they collect, it feels oppressive.

00:03:56.080 | I like that. Very clear writing. He says you could in this situation quit or turn off Twitter,

00:04:02.160 | but he says in theory, you can just log on, wait for it to end, but no one does that.

00:04:05.200 | All right. So I think right up front, we get an interesting and I think incredibly apt description

00:04:11.360 | of what is this pile on dynamic that dominates Twitter at the moment. It's this notion of things

00:04:17.120 | get put out there and then they can very quickly, people can take turns and test things out and see

00:04:22.880 | if they can gather attention with who can clown or dunk on the person even better. And they have a

00:04:27.440 | certain energy to them because they often, in order to gain attention for my dunk to perhaps

00:04:33.040 | gain the applause of others, if you can connect it to what he calls a high charge vector, that

00:04:38.080 | is successful. But for me sending that out, I'm just saying like, let me try something here.

00:04:42.240 | This guy talking about Star Wars, let me try something here, connect to this or that, maybe

00:04:46.400 | it'll get some applause. Very little effort, but for the person on the receiving end, it all adds

00:04:50.480 | up and disproportionately, it feels like your whole world is coming, collapsing in on you.

00:04:55.440 | So I thought that was a really apt decision of what it's like to be on Twitter right now.

00:04:58.720 | So he's like, that's what Twitter, this is sort of what Twitter has been like recently.

00:05:04.640 | And then he says, then we get the Musk's takeover of the platform.

00:05:09.360 | And he says, this has strained the sense of conviviality that made Twitter feel like a

00:05:17.040 | party in the first place. The site feels a little emptier, though certainly not dead.

00:05:20.160 | Most like the part, more like the part of the dinner party where only the serious drinkers

00:05:24.400 | remain. Whiskey is being poured into the wine glasses. He steps back and has sort of

00:05:28.800 | ends this section with reflection. What exactly have we been doing here for the last decade and

00:05:34.640 | a half? All right, so that's the setup to this piece. He's about now to go into the evolution

00:05:39.120 | of Twitter, how it got to this place. But I think this is a very accurate sense of the last year.

00:05:44.080 | Twitter had become this place where this is one of the primary interactions happening as a sort of

00:05:49.520 | often mild, sometimes intense pile on type of dynamic of quote tweeting and trying to dunk on

00:05:56.000 | each other, typically trying to dunk on your ideological enemies or dunking on someone in

00:06:00.080 | such a way that signals your, the approval might solicit the approval of your, your crowd or signal

00:06:07.920 | that you're a dunking on a representative of the enemy crowd. And as, as Musk took over and

00:06:13.840 | journalists who don't like Musk have been leaving Twitter, then it's been having this sort of empty

00:06:18.400 | sense of like, it's still going on, but some of the, the marquee names that really put an energy

00:06:24.480 | into what's going on because these big name reporters and personalities are on here as they

00:06:28.640 | sort of leave. It's not many people, but it creates an outsized effect. And I think all that is true.

00:06:33.200 | I think that's a really good description of what Twitter feels like. I think it really is true

00:06:36.960 | right now that even just a small amount of sort of these mainstream news organizations and reporters

00:06:42.560 | and personalities moving away from Twitter does give it that into the dinner party feel you're

00:06:46.480 | still there. You're still pouring your drink, but the table's not as full and it changes the mood a

00:06:50.880 | little bit. All right. Staley then goes on to give a history, which I'm going to very briefly just

00:06:55.280 | hit on some highlights. So he talks about how it got started. Jack Dorsey wanted to call it status

00:07:04.560 | or statuses. And Dorsey was really keen on this idea that the point of Twitter is to report what

00:07:12.000 | your status is. I am doing this. I feel like this, right? That was the original idea of Twitter.

00:07:19.120 | He got into an ideological battle with Evan Williams when he got involved with the company

00:07:23.040 | as well, where Williams thought this should be, people should be tweeting about stuff that's

00:07:26.640 | happening. And Dorsey said, no, it should be tweeting about me, what's happening to me.

00:07:33.280 | And so the famous example was if there's a fire over at some address is the tweet,

00:07:37.760 | I am seeing a fire at this address or is the tweet, there is a fire at this address.

00:07:44.800 | According to Staley, Williams was a big fan of the opposite of the ladder. And Dorsey was a big

00:07:50.560 | fan of the former Williams won that out. And the prompt changed from how are you feeling or whatever

00:07:56.000 | to what's happening. And a big turning point there was actually the miracle on the Hudson.

00:08:01.440 | There's someone, the tweets around that news event, Sully Sullenberger landing that Airbus

00:08:06.240 | A380 on or A330 probably landing that on the Hudson and how the tweets were more informative

00:08:15.040 | than the formal news was sort of this turning point of wait a second, this can be a place to

00:08:18.720 | actually discuss what's happening, not just what's happening to you. So that was a big change.

00:08:23.280 | The next big bullet point comes in 2009. Here's a key quote. Twitter's takeover of the media class

00:08:29.520 | was rapid. In April 2009, Maureen Downe interviewed Williams and Stone, telling them that she would

00:08:36.640 | rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my

00:08:41.920 | eyes than open a Twitter account; she signed up three months later to promote her column.

00:08:47.520 | Another good sentence. And then it became, I'm quoting Staley here, absolutely irresistible to

00:08:55.200 | journalists. Okay. So, this is another big turning point. People were starting to use Twitter to talk

00:09:01.840 | about things that were happening and ideas that were interesting, not just what they felt like

00:09:05.920 | or what was happening to them. It was no longer the Facebook status. It was a micro blogging type

00:09:11.280 | platform. This became very appealing to journalists. And now you get all the journalists

00:09:16.560 | on there because information and articles are being passed along and they want to know

00:09:20.240 | what is happening. There was around this time, and I'm quoting here, an enormous expansion in

00:09:26.240 | web media with Buzzfeed, Vice, and others pouring truckloads of venture capital into the field. And

00:09:30.480 | though Twitter never drove much traffic, it was nevertheless important for journalists to be

00:09:34.880 | there because everyone else was there. This was where your articles would be read and digested

00:09:39.760 | by your peers and betters. It was doubly important because of how precarious these new jobs were.

00:09:44.800 | Your Twitter profile was your calling card, potentially a life raft to a new job. The

00:09:49.360 | platform was an extremely fraught sort of LinkedIn, one you would use publicly to waste company time.

00:09:55.440 | So that's the next phase of Twitter is we have all the journalists get on there.

00:10:00.560 | They want to know what's going on. They want to promote their own articles. They want to be a

00:10:04.640 | part of the conversation. They wanted to build up some sort of new media credibility that they

00:10:09.920 | could use if their venture backed web based mobile news startup failed, that they could

00:10:17.040 | point towards, I've got these followers and make it easier for them to land at a new publication.

00:10:23.520 | Once all the journalists were on there, this again changed the character of Twitter. So here's

00:10:28.800 | Staley. But this journalistic swarming instinct made Twitter an ideal place for activists to get

00:10:36.400 | a message out. So once we figured out, wait, the journalists are on here and they're getting story

00:10:42.160 | ideas from here and they're quoting tweets in their articles and they're using, since they're

00:10:47.600 | on here trying to promote their things and what other people are writing, trying to see what news

00:10:51.760 | is going on, they might want to write about. It is as if there was a single bar in Manhattan

00:10:57.040 | where all of the top editors of the main newspapers 50 years ago were all gathering to drink every

00:11:02.720 | night. If that happened, then if you wanted to spread some news, you would go hang out at that

00:11:07.040 | bar. Twitter became that bar. And this is where we began to get more of this activist energy.

00:11:13.280 | And I'm using activists in the general sense here, anyone who had some sort of message to spread.

00:11:18.640 | And a lot of this was beneficial. A lot of this was actually grassroots message spreading,

00:11:22.240 | but also anyone who had an ax to grind or an ideology that they were obsessed about.

00:11:27.280 | So then it became a place to try to influence the public sphere. It was still useful for people to

00:11:34.480 | be on here. Here's a quote. "If you're good at this game, it could be good for you both on Twitter

00:11:38.640 | and off. People got commissions and book deals. Not many, but enough. Some people lost their jobs.

00:11:45.520 | Not many, but enough. A couple of people got TV shows out of it. Once someone told a story so

00:11:50.640 | wild, it was turned to a feature film. Hell, one guy even went and got himself elected president."

00:11:55.360 | But after a while, this focus, and obviously Trump probably pushed this the last bit of the way

00:12:02.720 | towards this new configuration, but this focus is what in the last four or five years

00:12:10.480 | turned Twitter into the Coliseum, the way I've been describing it in most of my recent talks

00:12:16.080 | about this. Now that all the journalists were on there, now this is where the agenda was being set.

00:12:22.560 | Now this is where ideas were being tested and the feedback could sway how companies operated and how

00:12:30.560 | things were reported. This importance that was concentrated into this one homogenized social

00:12:36.560 | internet tool inevitably turned it into a Coliseum. And it became a battleground. You're either one of

00:12:44.720 | the 1% of users responsible for 75% of the tweets waging war on here, the ultimate ideological,

00:12:53.360 | and I mean that not just politically, gladiatorial battlefield. And you had to take down and dunk on

00:13:00.080 | your enemies. And you also had to be very careful about curtailing your near allies to make sure that

00:13:08.800 | the proverbial or conceptual Overton window did not shift even a little bit. So if someone shifted

00:13:14.320 | a little bit on the Overton window, you had to get everyone on that person fast because a little

00:13:19.520 | shift is how Overton windows make big moves over time. It wasn't the guy saying the crazy thing.

00:13:24.240 | It was the professor who's more or less aligned with you that's like, "Hey, maybe you have some

00:13:27.600 | questions about this." No, no, no, no. We got to get on that because this is where sense is being

00:13:31.920 | made. And William Staley, editor from the New York Times Magazine is on here and he's going to see

00:13:36.720 | that and it's going to affect what they say or don't say in the magazine. And all this was happening

00:13:40.080 | from all sides on all sorts of issues, political, non-political, sports, entertainment, whatever it

00:13:44.160 | was. Then it became the Coliseum. And for the last three to four years, the primary, I think,

00:13:49.040 | addictive quality of Twitter for the average user, which is not one of these reporters, not one of

00:13:53.120 | these partisans, but a non-posting observer, is that it's fun to watch important people hit each

00:14:00.000 | other with sticks and to say, "Ooh, this guy ducked under it, spun around and escaped. This guy got

00:14:10.080 | nailed in the head and then everyone else swarmed on him. He never got up. This guy was like the

00:14:15.600 | final battle against Magwa at the end of Last of the Mohicans where he swung his hatchet in the

00:14:22.480 | older, wiser man with his sword, somersaulted under the hatchet, spun backhand sword to the back,

00:14:31.680 | right through the spine." You got to watch the final scenes of Last of the Mohicans.

00:14:35.680 | If you don't know what I'm talking about, Michael Mann, all right, we're talking DDL,

00:14:41.120 | Daniel Day-Lewis, must watch. You can find it online. And then that's what it became. And that

00:14:45.360 | was inevitable. And then Musk took over. And when Musk took over, the journalist, especially for the

00:14:51.600 | mainstream left-leaning journalist said, "This party, we're at this nice dinner party." And it

00:14:58.400 | was getting kind of raucous. And then the host said, "By the way, I sold my apartment to someone

00:15:02.720 | you don't like and now it's his dinner party." And so they're like, "We're going to kind of leave."

00:15:06.800 | And that's where we are now. And we find this question, what was Twitter anyway, being the

00:15:13.840 | headline? And my response to all of this, beyond just saying this is a well-written, very perceptive

00:15:19.760 | article, and I really enjoyed it. The link is in the show notes and I recommend it. My response to

00:15:25.680 | all of this is, and I say this with all modesty, I told you so. I've been saying this for years.

00:15:34.080 | As one of the few people who is orbiting this world, but has never been an active Twitter user,

00:15:41.760 | I'm telling you from the outside, this metaphorical dinner party got weird a long time ago.

00:15:48.960 | This metaphorical dinner party became less an Algonquin round table and more shades of eyes

00:15:55.440 | wide shut. It's weird. The rich guys are putting on masks. I don't know what's happening here,

00:16:01.360 | but it's weird that you're defending this so strong. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the

00:16:06.240 | world, but why is everyone using this? Why were so many editors and journalists and academics

00:16:11.280 | saying, "Of course I have to be on here." I was like, "No, you don't. This is weird."

00:16:18.480 | It's entertaining, but this is weird. This should be much more niche than it is. I used to say,

00:16:23.440 | and I stand by it, Twitter should have been like Game of Thrones, something that a non-trivial

00:16:28.960 | group of people were very into, but most people could care less. It somehow fought above its

00:16:33.680 | weight class. Again, this is yet another example from news reporting I've been talking about in

00:16:39.520 | recent weeks where I'm glad to see this sort of retrospective distancing from this platform.

00:16:46.400 | I don't think it's evil and I don't think you're bad if you use it. I just do not think it should

00:16:50.400 | be ubiquitous. I do not think it should be necessary, a precondition to be part of the

00:16:55.360 | conversation. I was so happy to see the Washington Post move their nationals coverage off of live

00:17:01.760 | tweets and into really nicely designed websites. I was happy a couple of weeks ago when I talked

00:17:06.080 | about, for whatever reason they did it, NPR saying, "We're not tweeting news. Come back to NPR." I

00:17:11.760 | think this is all healthier. I think we're going to see more and more retrospectives like William

00:17:17.600 | or Willie Staley's where people look back and say, "Not my proudest moment, what I was doing on

00:17:24.640 | there." Not as essential as I was telling everyone that it was. I think the haze is lifting. I think

00:17:33.600 | the fog is dissipating and we're going to gain back hopefully a more diverse, grounded public

00:17:42.160 | discourse. So let's knock on wood. But that was a great article. It was a good history. I think

00:17:46.240 | seeing Twitter's evolution in those phases, that was interesting. It's not something I'd seen before

00:17:49.680 | laid out so clearly. So check that out and hopefully join me in my cautious optimism that

00:17:56.720 | Twitter's not going away, but it's no longer being mistaken for the town square. We now see

00:18:03.040 | that it's devolved into a coliseum. I want to see the demolition derby sometimes,

00:18:06.400 | but I don't want the demolition derby to be at the core of how the discourse...

What Was Twitter Anyway?

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