The "is Twitter real?" election

Tyler Cowen's theory of the conjuncture

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This week’s newsletter concerns the rise of the tech right in the Republican party and Tyler Cowen’s reading of what has happened. It also coins the phrase “anti-cope”!

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Is Twitter real life?

One of the funniest biannual traditions in tech journalism is “shocked coverage of tech-industry figures supporting Republicans season,” during which a spate of articles and tweets are published marveling at the fact that many prominent Silicon Valley executives and investors are Republicans, and often quite right-wing Republicans, at that! I’m not sure how many of these cycles we have to go through before it becomes clear that there is (and always has been) a large and influential faction of tech capital (i.e. founders, investors, executives) that is not merely “libertarian” but deeply right wing: militarist, eugenicist, hierarchy-obsessed. I understand that the old myths of left-wing hippie founders die hard, and that the tech workforce is largely though by no means exclusively liberal-to-left-wing, but at some point the fact that the most famous and prominent tech capitalist of the 21st century is constantly tweeting inane racist stuff has to make the significant presence of tech money at the Republican National Convention not a particular surprise, and certainly not deserving of the word “realignment.”

This particular round of apparent-surprise-at-Republican-tech-wealth has been occasioned by four events, as far as I can tell: (1) Donald Trump selecting former venture capitalist and habitué of online right-wing circles J.D. Vance as his running mate; (2) Elon Musk endorsing Trump following the failed assassination attempt, and fiddling about with Twitter to make it an explicitly pro-Trump platform on the design level; (3) prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorsing Trump; and (4) South African podcaster and weird little freak David Sacks appearing at the Republican National Convention.

Between these endorsements, the energy of the convention, the excitement around the assassination attempt, and the ongoing intra-Democratic Party battle over Biden’s candidacy, the mood on Twitter has been one of right-wing triumphalism, the most detailed sympathetic account of which has been produced by the George Mason University economist and prolific blogger Tyler Cowen, who published a blog post this week that articulates, as Henry Farrell puts it, “the conventional wisdom of the Silicon Valley Right about Why The Democrats Are Losers And Why We Are Correct to Support Trump.”

Cowen, a libertarian whose writing and podcast are widely consumed in the Valley, is something like the respectable house intellectual for right-wing capital in Silicon Valley (don’t ask about the non-respectable house intellectuals), and his stated goal for the post is to express his theories about why “the vibes have changed.” In practice what he’s done is produce something like (to put it in left-wing journal terms) an analysis of the present conjuncture, starting from the premise that a vibe shift has “clearly” happened: “Trump was a highly vulnerable, defeated President, facing numerous legal charges and indeed an actual felony conviction. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next election. In conceptual terms, how exactly did that happen?”

He elaborates his own analysis in a helpful and convenient 19-point list. Some of his points, e.g. “3. The deindustrialization of America has mattered more than people expected at first, and has had longer legs, in terms of its impact on public opinion,” are indisputable, if, I think, shallowly understood. Other points, e.g. "11. Trans support has not been a winning issue for Democrats, but it is hard for them to let it go,” seem straightforwardly wrong--as Ettingermentum has established in some detail, support for trans rights has not come at electoral cost for Democrats, while Republican campaigns that focus on anti-trans issues have been consistent losers. Still others, e.g. “8. Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously,” strike me as basically tautological: The vibes are bad for Democrats because Democrats have bad vibes.

He does not mention abortion rights at all? And “inflation” gets only a kind of brief side mention in the point about foreign policy, which seems weird for a brief from an economist?

But the claim I’m most interested in is the first one:

1. Trump and his team understand that we now live in a world of social media.  Only a modest part of the Democratic establishment has mastered the same.

I think the validity of the entire rest of the list more or less rests on the idea that “we now live in a world of social media.” Indeed the vast majority of it only really makes sense or has any kind of empirical grounding if you append “on Twitter” somewhere in the assertion, e.g.

13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one.  Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years.

14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.”  It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital.  Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.

are hard to square with most quantitative (or, indeed, qualitative) views of reality, but

13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one.  Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years on Twitter.

14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.”  It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital on Twitter.  Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base on Twitter.

are, if not indisputable, at least reasonable claims.

But do we all “live in a world of social media,” by which I assume Cowen means something like “social-media sentiment is both representative and determinative of ‘national sentiment’ as measured by elections”? One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans? If you were basing your expectations for the election on the balance of opinion and enthusiasm on Twitter, were you surprised by the results? In general, with the possible exception of the 2018 midterms, I think the answer has been “no, Twitter is not real,” or, put less bluntly, Twitter sentiment is neither reflective nor determinative of voter sentiment, at least not yet.¹

This is not to say that a measure of Twitter sentiment is useless--as we’ve written many times on this very newsletter, Twitter is real to and for elites, in that it tends to broadly reflect elite belief and sentiment in politics, media, tech, entertainment, finance, and professional basketball--nor that it’s not possible that Twitter could become real in the way I mean. Or, at least, real enough be an accurate predictor of electoral outcomes (if not of “true” “public opinion”).

But it’s also a dangerous place to assess sentiment (or “vibes”) not just because it’s a very skewed sample of the population² but because Twitter is only vibe shifts. It is the most volatile social network more or less by design and function; on Twitter, it is always already so over, and we are always already so back. It was only six days ago that the former president of the U.S. was nearly assassinated and the conventional wisdom on the website was that he’d cruise to re-election; that entire episode is about 36 hours away from near-total deletion from the platform’s collective memory as a new set of vibes arrives. To borrow a cliché, vibes on Twitter are like weather in [wherever you grew up and heard this joke first]: If you don’t like them, just wait a few minutes.

In fact, I think a recognition of this fact haunts Cowen’s list, which to me reads as a kind of “anti-cope”--an attempt to rationalize and explain good news that might have been arbitrarily delivered and ultimately transient. Where “cope” is how you convince yourself it’s not actually so over, anti-cope is how you convince yourself that we’re so back for good this time, that we’re not just suffering another vibes volatility cycle, that there’s something more going on to success than “old guy + higher prices.” (Another word for cope and anti-cope is: Ideology.)

1. I recognize that the phrasing here is going to set some academics’ teeth on edge, because Twitter is obviously “real” (in that it both reflects and influences the world in which it exists), and because elections are not necessarily “real” in the way the question implies (i.e. they do not reflect some absolute and unchanging “public opinion” or “political will”). Twitter and elections are different modes of representation that embody different ‘publics’ and manufacture different ‘public opinions’ under different frameworks and with different consequences; neither is more “real” than the other. But I don’t think it’s, like, entirely unfair to say, as a kind of shorthand, in order to emphasize both the scale of each mediation and the consequences, “Twitter is not real, and elections are.”

Maybe by “we live in a world of social media” Cowen merely means that campaigning is heavily mediated by short video and soundbites and it’s important to have a candidate who can appear active and vigorous in those limiting contexts. That seems true, and fair enough! But my sense is that he means something more like what one might mean by “Twitter is real.”

2. Oone thing that Cowen’s list made me think is that Musk’s ownership of Twitter has its downsides and dangers for the online reactionaries it otherwise helps. Overall, of course, Musk-era Twitter is a huge boon to the right wing, who can use the site basically unfettered to organize, mobilize, prostelytize and publicize for their cause for the first time in a decade. But if you “own” Twitter in both the literal sense and in the ideological sense, it can become easy to get out over your skis, and imagine too freely that the site wholly reflects and directly controls sentiment off of Twitter. Certainly, this was one problem for Democrats in 2016. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Cowen and company are in for a rude surprise come November; as I said, I don’t have high hopes for the Biden candidacy, and my hopes for the hypothetical Harris candidacy are only slightly higher. But I would be wary of assuming that the triumphal turn of the Silicon Valley right is warranted, or that they’re basing their victorious smugness on anything besides their Twitter feeds.