What is the most important tweet of all time?
Plus: Come see Max Read read tomorrow night in NYC
Greetings from Read Max HQ! If you live in the New York City area, I will be appearing with Jada Yuan, Robert Coe, and Geoffrey O'Brien at KBG Bar tomorrow, Thursday 2/14, at 7 p.m. I’m going to be reading an updated version of the Read Max classic “The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas,” including some new material from a recent phone call I had with that story’s subject, John Fenley. Come by and have a drink! I’ll have a stack of Read Max stickers for anyone who wants one. And, for the sake of those of you not in the New York area, or who can’t make it, I’ll update the Pine Bluff story on the website later this week.
Last month I had the pleasure of participating in a New York Times project to pick, rank, and commentate upon the 25 “most important” Tweets. The list was published last week; you can read it here.
I think it’s a pretty good list, as these things go, given the restrictions (i.e., English-language tweets only). But it’s also a revealing exercise, insofar as the completed and published list is ultimately a bit underwhelming. These are the most important tweets? Really?
One of the long-running arguments of this newsletter is that Twitter’s importance in the U.S. (and, I’d wager, though I don’t know for sure, most other places) exists mostly insofar as, and to the extent that, it provides for the efficient mobilization of elite attention. In the same way that if you want to complain about, say, an airline cancellation, you’re more likely to get a quick response on Twitter than you are through a phone tree, if you want to complain about elite institutions or elite behavior (or misbehavior), Twitter is where you will get your satisfaction. This is true because Twitter is public, but also because workers and bosses in the politics, media, entertainment, and technology industries in a handful of large cities are wildly oversampled compared to people doing almost any other job in just about any other place. If you were good enough at it, Twitter was at one point like having a hotline to every assignment editor, congressperson, and development executive in the country.1
I think the list reflects this dynamic: The “importance” of most of these tweets lies less in some specific action the tweet touched off than in the way that they were able to direct elite attention2 to whatever news events, investments, arguments, malfeasance, people, bad tweets. But I think it also shows that thinking about Twitter in terms of individual influential tweets is probably misguided -- in most cases these tweets are exemplars of or stand-ins for particular dynamics3, Twitter-entangled social movements, or Twitter-covered off-screen news events. It’s hard to argue against Alyssa Milano’s #MeToo tweet in the number-one spot, but it’s also hard to argue that it was the tweet that matters, rather than the network of followers that Milano was embedded in. Justine Sacco’s tweet is not, in and of itself, very influential or important, but the eager audience for viral cancellations it revealed was. (At least, in a relative sense.)
This is maybe just my earlier argument seen from another angle: What matters most about Twitter has always been the unique networks it created -- the “social graphs” -- which knit together a number of fields and industries and gave anyone with the ability to sign on and learn Twitter’s folkways more-or-less direct access to those fields and industries. The actual individual tweets, no matter how memorable or funny or searing or racist or horny or accidentally revealing, are rarely “important” or powerful or influential in any absolute sense.4
One takeaway here is in how we understand Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter. In terms of the framework I’m thinking through here, the introduction of “long tweets,” for example, won’t change much, since all it does is expand the types of content you can produce on Twitter. Longer, shorter, images, videos: Traditionally none of these changes have really affected what Twitter does, on a basic level. But reworking the timeline to promote paying users, or shifting settings so that, say, one single user is boosted a thousandfold over every other user, is going to fundamentally change how Twitter works and what it’s for.
The “importance” of Gamergate, to me, emerges because it was a kind of proof of concept or dry run for this overall idea -- if you have a hotline to journalists and their bosses, you can use it equally to harass the former and pressure the latter.
I keep using the sort of awkward phrase “elite attention” where “media attention” would probably be sufficient because I want to emphasize that it’s not just “the media” whose attention is directed toward the obsessions or objects of Twitter discourse -- it’s also politicians and their staffers, entertainment creators and executives, tech investors and programmers, academics, and an annoyingly high number of lawyers. I recognize, fwiw, that “elite” is probably not the most accurate word for describing this entire group of people, but it’s the elite members among this group of college-educated professionals in the meaning-making industries whose Twitter-refracted attention is key for making the case for Twitter’s importance.
Interestingly, to a large extent the tweets on the list that aren’t important because they themselves mobilize attention, but because they pithily sum up a particular dynamic of this attention ecosystem, e.g.:
The epigrammatic one-liner that encapsulates a common Twitter behavior or interaction is a whole category of extremely popular/beloved tweet that could make up its own list:
Etc. These tweets are Twitter proverbs: true but clichéd, invoked by those with nothing original to say, and should be deployed sparingly.
One possible exception is Elon Musk’s tweet about taking Tesla private, which actually did, single-handedly and directly, move an enormous amount of money around. At the same time, I don’t think the movement of that money changed an enormous amount in terms of actual capital investment or output, so in some sense it was just another example of a network with Elon Musk at the center having its attention directed toward something for a brief moment.
sometimes i forget the origins and will just casually refer to a milkshake duck or someone corncob'ing or tell someone you in fact, don't got to hand it to them, so I think these are primo examples of tweets that have infiltrated the brains of the terminally online
I ran out of free NYT articles and Pocket is not displaying the piece, but I'm dying to know if "Ah! Well. Nevertheless," made it?? Seems like a footnote 3 tweet if ever there was one.