Context collapse collapse

It’s been a little over a year since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, and I’m prepared to admit that--on at least one count—I was wrong as shit. In April of 2022 I wrote that I didn’t “put too much stock in the idea that Musk is out to transform Twitter on some fundamental level”:

I want to propose a third possibility, which is that Musk will not implement any significant changes, and in fact will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all. […] Why would he welcome Nazi trolls back on the website if it scared away the journalists he relies on to give him coverage? Why would he fix the product in ways that might mean he shows up in fewer timelines? Why work through the contradictions when the contradictions have been so very good to you, personally?

As it turns out, Musk has transformed Twitter on many fundamental levels: he fired a huge swath of the social network’s employees; he broke the both the technical product and the entire social ecosystem; he scared off all of the platform’s most valuable advertisers; and, not only did he welcome Nazi trolls back to the site, he seems to have become one of them himself:

Elon Musk agreed with a post on X that said Jewish people hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people, eliciting a new round of criticism that he promotes antisemitic views.

Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, responded to a user’s post Wednesday that espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory with: “You have said the actual truth.”

The lesson, I suppose, is not to overrate Musk’s rationality or strategic intelligence.¹ In terms of the prediction matrix I laid out when Musk took control last November, we are squarely in the future where the culture of the platform has died while the business--for now--lives on²:

You can sort of imagine a different future, where Musk’s plan/threat to demote and downgrade the accounts and posts of unverified users is fully enacted as described, and his steep cost cuts aren’t totally damaging to the site’s function. People protest, but Musk holds firm; if you want to get engagement on Twitter, you need to pay. Employers generally refuse to expense the cost of verification, and many of the super-users who think of themselves as above pay-to-play quit to start newsletters or Discord chat rooms, all of which get abandoned in less than a year. The incentives and economics of the platform turn even further toward porn, nutrition supplements, crypto scams, and “content creation,” and the vibrant culture of semi-anonymous shitposting on Twitter is all but wiped out. Twitter ends up in a weird space between Substack, YouTube, and AM Radio, populated by a mix of camgirls, boomer-politics accounts and MLM-adjacent inspiration business posters. Month after month the top users are OccupyDemocrats, CatTurd2, and Gary Vaynerchuck; everyone is pretty sure the numbers are faked.

Some of the specific texture here is wrong, but I think the broad strokes are right: Paid verification, and the policy of cutting checks directly to high-engagement posters, has turned every thread and every viral tweet into a squirming ratking of bait, fraud, self-promotion, and, worst of all, unfunny jokes.

So where does this leave the rest of us? More than a decade ago, the scholars Alice Marwick and danah boyd coined the phrase “context collapse” to describe the way social media platforms “collapse multiple audiences into single contexts.” The phrase is usually invoked to explain the particular vertigo-inducing weirdness of using platforms where you are encountering friends, coworkers, family members, breaking news, propaganda, Brazilian Dua Lipa fans, foot fetishists, etc., all at once. But in the case of Twitter, the “single context” into which all the others collapsed was often quite useful, especially the journalists: a means of understanding yourself, your work, and the social and professional positions you occupied. This remained true even well after it became clear that Twitter was “not real life,” and at best presented a warped mirror of the world outside of Twitter. (Up until Musk’s purchase of the site last year I would still search URLs for this newsletter’s posts, to see how the columns were being received and shared.)

That single context has now disappeared. Just on a practical level, it’s much harder to get a sense of where your pieces are being read and in what ways. This is particularly dismaying for the dying culture of #longreads, and magazine writers who relied on Twitter power-user “dutch ovens” of circular praise to enforce a sense of vitality and relevance, however narrowly confined. Someone recently asked me what I thought of [REDACTED FAMOUS MAGAZINE WRITER WITH MAJOR TWITTER PRESENCE/PERSONA]’s piece on [REDACTED SUBJECT OF WIDE POPULAR AND TWITTER INTEREST] and I realized I had no idea that the piece had even been published, even though it was a few weeks old at that point. I’m sure the piece was good, and likely successful by whatever metrics publications are using these days, but just a few years ago it would have been shocking to think that a piece by this writer, on this subject, could have completely passed me by.³

As a matter of software the replacement of Twitter with “X.com” is irrelevant to most people, who never used Twitter at all, or if they did knew it as a tool for following celebrities and news accounts, rather than as a whole context for their lives and work. But the disappearance of Twitter as a “single context” for not just the media business but adjacent reality-representation and meaning-making industries like entertainment, politics, and (some fractions of) tech means also the erosion of a relatively coherent, relatively shared elite understanding of the world.

What is happening feels like a kind of re-balkanization of the web, as our more-or-less single, more-or-less shared context--that is, “Twitter” the social ecosystem, not “Twitter” the specific website--seems to be distributing itself into other social networks, chat rooms, forums, newsletters. People like me are less clear about “what’s happening online” than we have been in more than a decade, and are also consequently willing to believe basically anything we’re told. On a small scale this means that you can’t tell whether or not a given magazine piece is part of “the conversation” beyond your immediate circle; on a larger scale, it means you feel even more in the dark about (say) American political opinion.

This is the internet economy in which Yashar Ali’s tweet claiming that “thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous ‘Letter to America’” can gain real traction.⁴ Between its novelty, its design, and the general youth of its user base, TikTok appears as in an impenetrably different context to Twitter,and no one can quite gauge what’s happening on it.

But this dynamic is more familiar than it is alien, isn’t it? In the early years of social-media context collapse, when people in media and politics were still coming to understand the new “single contexts” in which they operated, it was relatively common to write trend stories or sponsor whole moral panics around a handful of tweets or Facebook posts. As we grew more familiar with (and comfortable in) our new shared context, that kind of “nut-picking” or “egg-manning” became harder to pull off. As John Herrman wrote yesterday, the numbers don’t quite add up:

Koebler and Maiberg note that on Wednesday, the most popular hashtag about the letter had around 1.3 million views, according to TikTok. In the world of hyperinflated TikTok metrics, where “truly viral videos and concepts are regularly viewed tens or hundreds of millions of times,” this does not amount to a trend in any meaningful sense of the word. Likewise, the claim that there were “thousands” of videos seems to be inflated; on Wednesday, well before TikTok stated that it would be removing such videos for promoting terrorism, they numbered at most in the hundreds, many expressing bewilderment or anger at other TikTokers, making jokes, or talking about the letter in general terms — that is, putting it into some sort of context. (Most of these hundreds of videos received very low levels of engagement.) As of Thursday morning, relatively few — many of which were clipped for the video shared widely on X above — endorsed any aspect of bin Laden’s letter, and some of the ones that triggered this whole controversy, which had by then generated numerous tweets and news articles, had been deleted by their creators, in part because they had been overwhelmed by other TikTokers making fun of them.

I’m too old and stupid (and too bad at predicting) to make any strong bets about where this goes from here. TikTok won’t, and can’t, replace Twitter in its capacity as “shared single context,” (and I don’t have much hope for Threads or Bluesky, either). The best I can say, I guess, is that there will continue to be a lot of confusion.

1. My basic framework for understanding Musk’s actions since he bought the company in 2022 is that he really does believe all the stuff he says about “the woke mind virus” and wants to use Twitter for his own bizarre ideological purposes but he’s also trying to rescue a really terrible investment decision backed by a ton of debt. The fusion of his own personal and contemptibly stupid ideological imperative and the looming institutional revenue imperative--in addition to his own instincts as a showman-speculator--explains why his decisions have overall been so overall baffling and moronic.

2. For the record, I don’t think this is Twitter’s long-term future--the site itself is in technical decline, the business is hemorrhaging value, and Musk’s dedication to 💯-ing anti-Semites in full public view is cutting off its chances at rebuilding advertising revenue. Eventually, something on the money will have to give.

3. This is an interesting parallel story about cultural production, social context, and distribution that mirrors what I am talking about in certain ways.

4. Obviously the 24-hour moral panic over Zoomer Bin Laden fans isn’t just a consequence of a new kind of internet culture ecosystem but also of a particular geopolitical environment, but it’s not like these aren’t feeding off each other.