What's happening with Twitter? and other reader questions

Mailbag 03/31/2023

Outlander Magazine @StreetFashion01

Keyboard Puffer by Liminal! (2023)

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and welcome to the latest edition of our mailbag! Every month or so I solicit questions from subscribers and rifle through my molding brain for a vaguely entertaining answer. This edition features questions about the trajectory of Twitter, cyberpunk, fatherhood, and the Tottenham Hotspur Football club.

I got a ton of excellent questions this time--too many to answer in one go. Some of them (like the questions about A.I. and fakeness, or the one about e/acc) I’m not answering now because I want to write something longer on the topic when I have a chance; others (like the question about my favorite Elmore Leonard books) I’m going to fold into the weekly recommendations-roundup email; still more I’m saving for a future mailbag.

Just a reminder: I don’t have advertisers; I don’t have sponsors; I don’t use A.I. to do anything but waste my own time. Read Max is written entirely by humans and supported entirely by reader subscriptions. If you find my writing useful as you navigate our new weird future, and if you think others would find it useful as well, please consider paying to subscribe.

We’re about six months into Elon-Twitter, and for the most part attention seems to have moved on now that it’s clear the platform isn’t literally going to undergo rapid technical collapse. What trajectory do you think new Twitter is on? Will it be able to take the stress of a US presidential election next year?

— Zylogram

Last November, in the early weeks of Elon Twitter, I laid out four possible “Twitter futures,” depending on whether the actual business collapsed, or the culture of the platform died, or both, or neither. Based on that schematic, I think we are, for now, solidly within the trajectory of “Future Two,” where both the culture and business of the site survive Elon’s management, albeit at a somewhat diminished level. My usage of Twitter is somewhat different these days than at my peak in 2018 or so, since I never post and make heavy use of Twitter lists to follow topics and people I’m interested in, but on a basic level Twitter doesn’t “feel” any different to me than it did, say, this time last year. Some people I liked following are gone, but that’s always been a condition of Twitter, and there are still new weirdos to follow.¹ The site definitely works worse than it did last year, but the quality of what I read seems about the same.

I’ll even make a confession: I don’t really mind the “For You” feed! Again, maybe this is just because of my particular usage pattern (lots of lists, no follows), but it mostly serves up good, or, at least, funny tweets about subject matter I’m interested in.

However. I think the Musk plan to introduce what’s more or less a payola scheme with Twitter Blue--i.e., you need to pay up if you want anyone to see your tweets--seems pretty likely to put the site on a trajectory toward “Future Two,” where Twitter the business is fine, but the site’s culture and networks die off:

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.²

An important component of the culture of Twitter is one outlined in this excellent apologia by Matt Pearce: most of the people who make Twitter worth checking are not famous, or particularly credentialed, or trying to sell you something. They’re just smart and interesting people who have a lot of time on their hands, and probably some kind of minor psychological deficiency that compels them to post. If you make it that much harder for those people to be noticed or elevated, you drag down the entire ecosystem of the site; Twitter in turn becomes more focused on influencers and content creators, which might be fine for its bottom line, but will end whatever unique cultural features made it worth defending. The problem, I think, is that if Elon takes us into “Future Two,” the possibility of the culture of Twitter being rebuilt under some new management is pretty slim.

As for whether or not it can survive a presidential election: I think the servers will be able to handle the load, and I think the business will probably be stable. But an election on Twitter without Trump just seems pointless.

I saw that there was a new Alien movie coming and subsequently spent 45 minutes reading about the Weyland-Yutani corporation. I don’t even like to Alien movies that much, but I’m continually interested in the backstory and canon. Do you have a version of that? A fictional world where the primary texts are less interesting to you than the secondary lore?

Also, relatedly, do you have a recommendation for a sci-fi novel that has a nefarious corporation at its core?

— David

I have two answers to the first question: Warhammer 40,000 and Vanderpump Rules. Warhammer 40k is a tabletop roleplaying game, created by Rick Priestley, set (to quote the promotional materials) “in the grim darkness of the far future”; I’ve never played the game, nor have I ever read any of the many attendant novels, but I can spend a long time reading wiki pages about its baroque space-opera universe, in which far-future humans, now soldiers in a violent and authoritarian imperial cult, fight for power against various factions of alien freaks. It’s incredibly depressing and almost certainly reactionary, but it features lovingly detailed and evocative world-building of the kind only tabletop RPG games really achieve.

Vanderpump Rules, meanwhile, is a reality TV show set in the grim darkness of the Los Angeles present; I’ve never watched more than an episode or two of the actual show, nor any of its predecessors or spin-offs, but I can spend a long time reading wiki pages about its baroque reality-television universe, in which attention-seeking freaks, working servers at a sexy and unique restaurant, fight for power and attention against other attention-seeking freaks. It’s incredibly depressing and almost certainly reactionary, but it features lovingly detailed and evocative character-building of the kind only reality TV really achieves.

As for the second question: The obvious recommendation here is, like, “literally any cyberpunk novel.” But for the sake of not suggesting something obvious (and because there’s another question down below with some cyberpunk recommendations!), maybe Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch? The corporation at the core of Three Stigmata is a business called P.P. Layouts, Inc., whose main business is creating “layouts” that help drug users enter shared hallucinations involving a character named Perky Pat; the plot of the book involves the mutant C.E.O. of P.P. Layouts (possibly) attempting to murder a space colonist who has returned with a rival hallucinogenic from the far reaches of the galaxy, and who himself may be an alien, or possibly a god. P.P. Layouts probably doesn’t give you the same type of chill as Weyland-Yutani, but it’s one of Dick’s best, weirdest books.

(I’m also in the early chapters of a so-far extremely enjoyable new sci-fi novel by Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea, which has a possibly sinister corporation called DIANIMA at its core.)

Why are you a Spurs fan? Most sports fandom comes from, I don’t know, your dad or where you grew up or what your favorite Starter jacket was. But you *chose* to do this to yourself. Please explain.

— Ryan

The short answer to this question is that I got into EPL soccer casually starting around 2015 or 2016, when Spurs were fun, young, and exciting, but were still to some extent underdogs, and then more intensely after the 2018 World Cup, for the Champions League run, and by the time it became clear exactly how dire the situation was, I was too deep in to quit.

A slightly longer answer is that during the 2018 World Cup a Tottenham-supporter friend living in England shared a soccer Twitter list with me that was extremely heavy on Spurs fans, and that list began to mediate my whole experience of soccer. I didn’t have a ton of soccer-watching friends at the time; it was something I got into because I’m an early riser and soccer is nice to put on in the mornings; so my social experience of soccer (which is the most important experience of sports, I think?) was essentially following this particular Twitter list. The closest analogy I can come up with is that it was like having the local sports bar be a Tottenham bar? At some point you just slip into Spurs fandom because that’s everyone you’re seeing and hearing about. (I do have some IRL Spurs friends now. For the record.)

So there was some conscious decision-making--a young, fun, big-but-not-too-big, good-but-non-dominating team--but also, like any fandom, social circumstance and contingency. Imagine if I had started watching soccer seriously last year--I might have become an Arsenal fan!

I recognize that the enlightened view of sports fandom suggests that you should follow and root for the teams who play the most beautiful game, or at least who give you the most pleasure when you watch them--which was true across the board for Spurs in 2017, but is now only true the two times a year they play Man City--and perhaps I will be able to actualize this strategy when David Moyes is coaching Spurs to a Europa Conference League spot in 2027 while Harry Kane breaks Alan Shearer’s record with Man United. But if I can make a particularly American (and therefore baffling to any British people reading this) analogy: I have a sort of health-insurance plan view of fandom, by which I mean I don’t think you should be allowed to switch allegiances barring a “qualifying life event” like moving to a different city or marrying into a different fandom or suffering a grievous brain injury. Unfortunately I am locked into the “Tottenham Hotspur” healthcare plan, with its high deductible and nonexistent mental-health coverage, and there is no open enrollment to save me.

It seems like you are a big fan of cyberpunk.  I love noir and science fiction but I’ve never read or watched much cyberpunk. The aesthetics appeal to me but I am always sceptical of books or movies that fuse genres. I loved Blade Runner (obviously) but didn’t like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. What do you recommend as an entry point? Do I just need to give in and read Neuromancer?

— Martin

I love Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but I think it’s probably a poor introduction to “cyberpunk” as a genre for a bunch of reasons, maybe the important one in your case being that, even if it is cyberpunk, or proto-cyberpunk, its pleasures (semi-psychedelic religious head trip) are somewhat different from the traditional pleasures of “cyberpunk” as a genre (what if Raymond Chandler, but computers).

Disappointingly for my desire to be counterintuitive here, I think the obvious answer is the right one. Neuromancer is much closer in vibe to the Blade Runner movie, if that’s what you’re looking for; more to the point, Neuromancer and its two sequels defined the genre so thoroughly that anything else you might recommend either feels like an imitation, or is arguably not really “cyberpunk.”

But just for the sake of throwing some other suggestions out there: Mirrorshades, Bruce Sterling’s “cyberpunk anthology” (available in full for free on Rudy Rucker’s website), collects an excellent range of stories from Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear, among others. Sterling’s Islands in the Stream is probably his most purely “cyberpunk” book, though for my money Schismatrix, which is sort of “space opera with cyberpunk characteristics” is much better. I love Michael Swanwick’s underrated Vacuum Flowers, which I think the genre cops like to call “biopunk” because of its focus on transhuman body-mod type concerns. I’ve recommended Pat Cadigan’s Tea from an Empty Cup before. Finally, I personally don’t really vibe with Neal Stephenson, but many people love Snow Crash.

Anyway, if you’re catching up here after the question above about evil corporations in science fiction novels, all of those I just listed feature at least one evil corporation.

How do you feel about the decision to allow Collegiate atheletes to accept brand sponsorships?

— Simon

As it happens, I was just at a taping of Bomani Jones’s Game Theory where this exact question was the subject of his main segment. I agree with his take! You can see the full video here if you have an HBO Max subscription.

Game Theory with Bomani Jones @GameTheoryHBO

The fact is, most college athletes aren't actually making money off of NIL deals. Also, just a reminder, the NCAA still doesn't pay its players.

People crave boring normie Q&A: what's all your favorite 'being a dad' content? What do you read and listen to, what's worked and what doesn't? How do you balance writing and parenting? And why isn't there more of a niche dad online content community?

— Mike

I feel like I’m still trying to figure all this out, and probably will never actually figure it out to any kind of satisfaction. I used to be a late-night on-deadline struggle writer, but it’s a lot harder to do that well when you know you’re going to be up at 6:30 the following morning (if you’re lucky). A lot of the time these days I find myself putting my kid to bed and--instead of relaxing as I wold like to--working from 7 or 8 to 10 or 11 at night, because those are the hours my writing brain works best.

When Gus was a newborn I feel like I read parenting content constantly. A friend gave us a log-in to her “Taking Cara Babies” classes, which were moderately enlightening but also just video summaries of Happiest Baby on the Block and Bringing Up Bébé (it’s remarkable how many subscription-video parenting classes there are, and even more remarkable the extent to which they are just people summarizing books you can get out of the library); I read the Tribeca Pediatrics guy’s reference book The New Basics more or less cover-to-cover (I actually still recommend and check this one even past the newborn stage). I read so many splogs and message board threads about sleep, feeding, fussiness, etc.

In retrospect I think most of that stuff, the various strategies and techniques for keeping newborns calm and fed and well-rested, was probably best thought of as techniques to help us pass the time until he was out of the “fourth trimester” (another good book) and three or four months old. Every baby is different; every parent’s neurosis is unique; no book is going to have “the answer” but reading one and trying to put its advice into effect will make a rough week pass a bit more quickly, I think.

In terms of what worked and what didn’t: For that period the only thing that did unquestionably and entirely work for us, in a holistic, everyone-felt-happier, life-improved-immensely way--the only thing I really feel impassioned about--was sleep-training, which we did at about 3.5 months. (Using TCB’s PDF guide, which was basically just a modified version of Ferber’s.) All the rest of it--the swaddling, the white noise, the fourth-hand Snoo--was worth trying, but I can’t say conclusively that any of it “worked,” and I certainly wouldn’t waste a ton of money or time on any of it if it’s really clearly not working.

Since then, Gus has not been easy, precisely--but it hasn’t felt like we really needed, like, techniques or strategies until recently, now that his is fully in his “toddler” era. But I still don’t read a ton of being-a-dad content. I am curious if any Read Max readers (many of whom I suspect to be dads, or at least married or otherwise domestically entangled with them) have any recommendations or suggestions. (Especially around potty training, lol.) For that matter, if anyone knows any good niche online dad communities, let’s hear them…

1. Almost no one, and especially not the people who put their Mastodon instances in their handles, seems to have managed to move their online posting identity wholesale to another site, with a single exception: Donald Trump, who is the only person with integrity and commitment on this issue.

2. One category of Twitter Blue enthusiast I did not predict but now seems endemic to the site is “A.I. influencers,” who spew long, LinkedIn-format 🧵s about the 🤯 implications of GPT-4 or the best prompts you can use to make excruciatingly bad A.I. art, and who are rapidly making A.I. Twitter as unbearable as Crypto Twitter was around this time in 2021.