“A rocket zooming away from a big blue bird, 3d render./ DALL-E”
Not long after he bought Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted, I can only imagine despairingly, "The (currently) quiet majority should tweet more!"
At the time, the world's richest man was maintaining that the reason he acquired the platform was "because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square." The exodus of right-wing users to Twitter clones like Truth Social and other echo chambers was putting the status of the bird site as the world's digital town square at risk, Musk claimed. The remaining “quiet majority” had been cowed into silence by the woke mob. Only he could fix it.
Only he hasn't. Instead, we've seen a steady acceleration towards what Cory Doctorow has labelled the "enshittification" of the platform. As Doctorow argues, leaving Twitter for rival upstarts involves high switching costs. The more expensive it is to migrate elsewhere, like Mastodon, “the larger the ration of shit they can serve to their users—more ads, more boosted posts, less moderation, less reliability—without losing those users’ business.”
Clearly addicted to Twitter himself, Musk seems to be banking on the hope that the perverse pull it has on him is a more universal experience that applies to the rest of us. "On Twitter, likes are rare & criticism is brutal, Musk tweeted in 2018. "So hardcore. It's great." It may be a source of constant distraction, anxiety and enragement but you just can't quit it, he seems to be saying. In fact, you probably enjoy it.
Well, despite the benefits I’ve reaped from it over the years, I wouldn’t say I actually enjoy it. In fact, over the years and especially since Musk bought it, I've jerry-rigged an elaborate system for extracting what value I can get out of the site without being sucked into its vortex. I've spent freely on other apps that surface content from it or allow me to post to it, just as long as I don't have to log into it.
I've even bought a lifelong subscription to an app that forces me to either take a deep breath, follow a bouncing ball with my finger on the screen, or take a long hard look at myself for 30 seconds whenever I try to open Twitter. If I spend more than 5 minutes on it, I get a notification to admonish me: "It's been 5 min on Twitter already. Maybe it's time to return to reality?"
The idea that I would pay for the privilege of being visible on a platform that I actively try to avoid is obviously absurd to me. And I suspect that ponying up to pay for Twitter Blue is not high on the agenda for the many Twitter users who prefer to hang back and gawk at the spectacle. Despite Musk's grim view of human nature, the site’s "quiet majority" likely don't tweet because they recognise that Twitter isn't actually the world's town square, it's the world's colosseum, and they're not that interested in being thrown to the lions.
At any rate, Twitter's toxicity has worsened since Musk's acquisition to the point where it's not just the "quiet majority" he has to worry about but members of the chattering class who are desperately trying to abandon ship. That's why I, like many others, joined Mastodon a few months ago—despite the switching costs—and it's why I posted my first Substack Note just the other day:
It turns out the answer to that question is yes, by the way, but not that many. Certainly not as many as the writers who have been steadily building up followings on Substack in recent years.
Which is why you're reading this. It seems that, unlike Twitter where you have to pay to be seen, users are more visible on Substack Notes if they write articles and then attract subscribers who are interested in what they have to say. Some of those subscribers even pay!
So instead of paying Elon Musk $8 a month for the privilege of providing him with free content, I’m going to write here. I might even eventually have some people here who want to pay me. For now, if you’re interested in hearing what I have to say, which is usually about China, censorship, surveillance and propaganda, please subscribe.