Is Elon Musk Destroying Twitter to Make the World...Better?

Watching the drama unfold regarding Elon Musk’s newest toy, I began to think about Twitter in general.  In a moment of clarity, I reached an alarming conclusion: Twitter is incredibly dangerous, and probably needs to be stopped. 

The Growing Power of Twitter

It isn’t the idea of Twitter that’s dangerous.  Like most of the earlier generation of Social Media platforms, it was conceived as a tool to foster honesty, connection, and communication between individuals, or perhaps small groups.  The real danger of Twitter lies instead in how it was adopted and co-opted, and how it is run and controlled.

As early as the first Obama campaign, Twitter began to show its power: it was used to organize flash mob style rallies - news of which spread virally on the platform.  People sat up and began to look at this tool and how it could be leveraged.  Already at that point, celebrities were tweeting, bypassing agents, marketing teams, and reporters to communicate directly with their fans.  It didn’t take long for corporations and politicians to follow suit.  After a while, most didn’t bother with “official statements'' any more - they just tweeted.  As confirmed accounts, their identity could be safely assumed, and it is very hard to mis-quote a tweet. By the Trump era, foreign policy decisions, intelligence on foreign governments, and executive decisions were being tweeted as standard procedure (and not only by the President).  When COVID began, public health announcements and orders were added to that list. 

The system allowed the public to consume statements from public figures without a filter.  But, those public figures could not control either the interpretation of or the reaction to those statements.  And because so many people were reacting at once, the reactions began to have powerful and unpredictable effects.  Additionally, and harder to see, the algorithms that Twitter uses to prioritize tweets amplified those effects.  Not out of some evil plot, but because they are designed to maximize attention, reaction, and drama.  Those algorithms are the ultimate sensationalists, and they constantly tweaked the priority, visibility, and order of the tweets and responses to have the greatest impact- no matter what impact that was.

Mouthpiece to the World - Optimized for Drama

So here is Twitter: the world’s most trusted communication tool because it’s straight from the horse’s mouth.  Twitter rapidly outpaced journalism itself - many news stories in the Twitter era are simply informing the reader that someone tweeted something.  There just isn’t time for more before someone else tweets something even more newsworthy. But the feedback loop for reaction is global, amplified, and fast, making responses to mis-steps big and small instant, massive, and visceral. Both the call of the bandwagon and the wrath of the mob became voracious beasts, casually making fortunes and ruining lives in its path with a hundred million casual likes, or swipes, or comments.

I first noticed this (and I suspect he did as well) when Elon Musk’s tweets started to have major effects on the Stock Market.  One of his tweets caused a cryptocurrency named after a dog meme on the internet to skyrocket in value. I suspect that the events of the Trump and COVID eras made him more concerned.  It became obvious that everything from Presidential elections to the Declaration of World War 3 could and probably would be initiated on and greatly affected by Tweets and reactions to them.  The monstrous feedback loop had moved on to larger prey - no longer did it make or break the fortunes of just individuals; now it attacked the pillars of whole nations.  Now the algorithms promoting drama over reason and outrage and fanaticism over reasoned response were affecting stability at a global level.

The leadership of Twitter prior to Elon's purchase was not blind to this.  Their solution was to move to silence users who were actively taking advantage of Twitter's power to promote hate and to foment violence.  While this approach had merit, it didn't take into account that the leadership of Twitter was no more immune to the monstrous feedback loop than anyone else.  Twitter would reflexively defend itself when attacked, it seemed.  The outrage - focused and amplified by Twitter itself - against these changes made it more and more difficult to continue making them.

The insidious thing about this is that it was -is- largely invisible.  The mob was ever fickle, after all.  It was only when I stopped to really think about what Twitter had become that I realized - with horror - what role Twitter (and to a lesser extent all social media) was playing in the growing instability and extremism that was sweeping the connected world.  And the only reason I stopped to think about it at all was to try to make sense of the actions of its new owner Elon Musk.

Enter Elon

When Elon Musk first tweeted about acquiring ownership of Twitter, I didn't pay it much heed.  Elon had a habit of tweeting ridiculous things on weekends.  Personally, I suspected it was a form of entertainment for him - a modern day "Boy who cried Wolf," watching the world work itself into a tizzy over patently absurd things.  But, as it became more and more likely that he was going to actually become the sole owner of the platform, I realized that this purchase seemed different from the other companies he had helmed.

Without exception, all the other companies that Elon Musk has founded or purchased have an altruistic and globally positive mission. Paypal wanted to fuel the e-commerce revolution; Tesla aims to accelerated the end on fossil fuel reliance; SpaceX works towards reducing the cost of space access by a factor of 100 and to put a million colonists on Mars.  Neurolink aims to give us a fighting chance to compete with AI (I said altruistic, not realistic); and The Boring Company wants to move traffic jams below ground.  But with Twitter, there was no such announcement.  Just vague comments about "freedom of speech" and "fairness."  It was uncharacteristic enough that I began to wonder if owning Twitter was just the world's most expensive mid-life crisis.

After all, his fortunes were primarily the result of Tesla's viral success on the Stock Market: the people who believed in the dream and goals of the electric car company could and did purchase stock in it.  That dream, not the profitability of the company, drove the stock price to unimaginable heights.  It probably is what allowed the company to ultimately transition to modest profitability.  It also made its largest shareholder almost unimaginably wealthy.  While I can't say for certain that Elon didn't seek out this wealth, it did seem that he wasn't particularly interested in the competitive scorekeeping that Billionaires play against each other.  Perhaps the money didn't mean enough to him that dumping most of it into buying the world's most expensive toy wasn't a completely far fetched idea.  

So, it was with an expectation of more entertaining chaos that I made some popcorn and sat down to watch. 

Methods to the Madness?

The first months of Elon's command of Twitter were chaotic to say the least.  In between seemingly random cuts, layoffs, and changes, stories began to emerge that painted Twitter not as a stalwart bastion of direct individual expression, but as a company that had lost control of its own direction and that was desperately trying to remain profitable and to keep its IT infrastructure from collapsing like a house of cards.  The truth of these stories remains unclear, but it is increasingly clear that the leadership of Twitter was not comfortable with its role as the world's first and final arbiter of public statements. 

As Elon continued to make ludicrous and ill-conceived changes, I began to think he’d gone over the edge, Howard Hughes- style. The changes he would announce and the effects he would predict seemed ludicrously - even childishly - mismatched.  It was obvious that his changes would not do what he said he wanted them to.  People began to lose faith in his business acumen, and I continued to wonder what he was up to.  Because while his business decisions rarely have to do with profit (at least directly), they had always been in service to the company's vision.  Without an announced vision for Twitter, it wasn't obvious that Elon may not have actually lost his mind. 

Over time, though, I started to notice a pattern in his changes and decisions.  If Elon had reached a similar conclusion to my own about the danger that Twitter posed to the stability of the world, then it stood to reason that he would try to reduce that danger.  That would be consistent with his actions across his career to this point.  He could just shut the service down, but that would likely have an equally devastating effect on global stability.  But as more and more people complained about the effects the changes he had initiated were having, I began to ask myself "what if Twitter wasn't the world's most trusted communication tool any more?"

It dawned on me that the only way to effectively and permanently mitigate the havoc that Twitter's Feedback Monster was wreaking on the world stage would be to undermine one of the pillars that support it: the trust in the identity of the user. At the same time, changing the reputation of the platform away from a home for reasonable discourse and leaning into that of a home for "entertaining" chaotic mudslinging drama fed by anonymous trolls helps to reduce expectations by Twitter's audience that anything posted has anything but the most tenuous connection with fact or truth.

How to Destroy Legitimacy while Maximizing Drama

There are three strings to this plan, as far as I can see:

• Firstly - anyone can be anyone. By removing the verification service and replacing it with a subscription, users will be unable to trust the identity of Twitter Users.  Pay $8 a month and you can pretend to be whoever you like.  There will be a million copycat accounts for anyone controversial: 500 Donald Trump accounts; 1000 President Xi JinPing; and 5000 Elon Musks - each spewing contradictory nonsense.  No more “most trusted communication tool.”  If the President of the United States tweets a declaration of war, no one will know if it is official.  Without that trust, it stops being a place to find official communications.
• Secondly - anyone can play.   By publicly refusing to place a moral governance on the userbase, Elon further delegitimizes the tool as being for the “Public Good.”  While it is unfortunate that communities that had previously found Twitter to be a relatively safe space will now be forced to move to avoid being attacked by the more loathsome and predatory denizens of the internet, the very presence of those denizens turns people away from the platform, making it less and less a place for legitimate communication, and more and more a place for "exciting drama," and chaos.
• Finally - reliability.  Several of the introduced changes eliminate redundancy and erode the reliability of the platform.  More downtime, system services being turned off, and critical staff being laid off all contribute to a sense of unreliability.  Twitter has already become a place you shouldn’t be comfortable relying on for time-sensitive announcements, and while I do expect it to stabilize to an acceptable standard, I doubt that Twitter will commit itself to a level of reliability acceptable for important and immediate public statements.

What does all this Mean?

The overall effect of these changes are broadly twofold. Firstly it erodes trust in the efficacy of any particular tweet. There is now no real assertion that the person is who they claim to be, that the statement has any relation to a truth or opinion related to that person, or even that Twitter is reliably available to check what was said in any case. Secondly, it moves discourse on the platform towards extremes of drama and excitement. Anyone can say anything in anonymity or while playing whatever role or guise they choose with the algorithms promoting and cherry picking the juiciest tweets’ visibility for maximum viral effect. This will keep the advertisers very happy, as it means traffic to the platform will remain high. Together, these two effects allow Elon to simultaneously neuter Twitter while also turning a profit. Even if this wasn't actually his plan, it looks like he will have achieved this within a fairly short period of time.

A Futurist's Guide to the 2023 IPCC Climate Change Report

Introduction

Two weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report which sums up the previous six years' worth of research, climate change data, and carbon emissions.  It also contains the most recent predictions and recommendations.  I wanted to write my take on it, but my usual format of a couple of paragraphs on Facebook wasn't up to the challenge.  So, after reading, absorbing, and ruminating the report and its implication, I dusted off ye old blog to record my thoughts.

What is the IPCC?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a United Nations body created to act as a central clearing house for all global research on climate change.  It essentially allows the entire scientific community working in the area of climate change to see all of the data, research, simulations, and so on, and gives that group a single voice to share its results to the world.  To learn more, check out https://www.ipcc.ch/about/.

What does the latest report say?

This report is dire.  It's hard to find positives within the report, to be honest, and processing this after reading the report has been one of the reasons I've taken two weeks to write this.  We are now well past the point of warning about climate change.  It's happening, and it's getting worse.  In fact, it's getting worse faster than was predicted.

In the spirit of not giving up hope, the scientists of the IPCC use terms like "It's not too late." but the rest of that sentence really tells the tale: "It's not too late to avoid the worst case scenario."  According to the report, it is extremely likely that we'll barrel right past the point of "Things get really bad" - 1.5 degrees of warming and it's looking more and more likely that we'll hit "You do not want to be here" temperatures of 2.0 degrees of warming.

To give this some context, the report calls for a 43% reduction in carbon emissions globally by 2030 - that's seven years - to avoid 1.5 degrees.  In BC, if we outlawed all internal combustion engines in the entire province we would still miss that goal.

Here's the report itself if you want to read it and/or check my interpretation: 

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

What does this mean for the future - our future?

Ok, time to put the depressing UN Report down, put on my Futurist hat, and get to work.  Let's break this down, and figure out what it means and what we can do.  Because there are things we can be and need to be doing - things that will make a difference in not only our own lives, but in those lives around us as well.

We Aren't Going to Stop this from Happening

Maybe we could have, and maybe we still can, but it's become pretty obvious that, despite everything, we are not going to prevent Climate Change from rapidly worsening past points that the UN considers "existential."  

Let's all take a deep breath and accept that.  

Now this doesn't mean "Eat Drink and Be Merry" - we still need to work towards carbon neutrality, because we will want to reverse the Climate Disaster at some point, but things are going to get dicey for a couple of generations at least.  With that accepted, need to shift our thinking away from "preventing" climate change, and to "surviving" - and some day "reversing" - climate change.

What is going to happen?

It is hard - to the point of impossible - to predict exactly what's going to happen as the global temperature rises.  We've seen many effects of increasing just 0.9 degrees - droughts, floods, fires, superstorms, shifts of growing seasons, mass extinctions, etc.  We will definitely get more of all of that.  However there are also more subtle changes - for example the jet stream has stabilized over North America, meaning weather systems last for weeks instead of days.  As the global weather system gets more and more energy, things get more chaotic.  Like shaking a snow globe harder - you can't predict the behavior of the snow.

I think of it as "driving into a hurricane:"  -the deeper we go, the worse things will get, but exactly what we'll see and feel - there is no way to know.  So all I can say for sure is that things will get harder as we continue to warm.  And we need to be prepared for that - prepared and adaptable.

We Need to Survive as a Civilization, not just as People

As "romantic" as it is to imagine post-apocalyptic living in a mountain cabin away from everything, most people need the supports of civilization in order to survive.  Clean water, electricity, medicines, and other civil supports need to continue in order for the majority of citizens to stay acceptably healthy.  So when we are talking about surviving climate change, what we mean is keeping the lights on, the hospitals open, and the prescriptions delivered. If we fail in this, we will need to start over as a species. We are far too stubborn to be anything other than the last surviving animal on this planet, but as a goal, I think being reduced to the stone age isn't ambitious enough.

How to help Civilization Survive

Congratulations if you've made it this far - it's heavy stuff and hard to read.  Now we come to the "what can you do" part of the article.  And as it turns out, there is a lot we can do to help us get through this.  

It all boils down to this:  Get Small. Reduce your load on the systems.

The civil supports that make up civilization are already under stress - firefighters, health systems, power grids, water systems, and more are all carrying an increasing load.  Our duty to those systems is to reduce the amount that we are contributing to that stress.  And, largely, we have already begun doing it.

How? By increasing our resilience and independence.  If the systems need to handle a bigger load, we can help be reducing our demands on those systems.  Different people in different situations will be able to do this in different ways and in different amounts, but we can all do something.  Here are some ideas:

Health:

• Take first aid training:  can you treat a sprained ankle?  check a wound for infection?  Tell the difference between a fever from a flu and something more serious?  If not, a course in first aid will help you to better deal with minor issues at home and to know when something is serious enough to go to the clinic.  By reducing the number of clinic visits made "just in case", we can reduce the load on the system as a whole, and increase the chance of those resources being there when someone really needs them.
• Stock a good first aid kit:  If you have gauze and burn cream at home - and you know how to use them - you won't need to see a doctor for a minor burn. Minor injuries can be effectively and safely treated without needing to go to a clinic if you have the materials to do so.
• Dress appropriately:  Weather extremes are becoming more common.  Dressing to protect yourself from extreme heat, cold, and wet go a long way to keeping you healthy.
• If you need it, use it:  Just because you aren't going to a clinic to treat an uninfected cut doesn't mean you aren't drawing anything from the health system.  Get your meds.  Get treated when it's necessary.  Go for surgeries necessary for quality of life.  Mindfulness of waste does not mean foregoing important medical treatments.

Water:

• Get a rain barrel:  If you use water outside for any reason (plants, car washing, lawn, window cleaning, etc.) having a source of water that isn't drinking water allows the water systems to continue to function longer when under stress.
• Conserve wasted water:  We've all heard that you shouldn't waste water by letting it run, but sometimes you have to (in the sink or shower while getting the water hot, for example).  If you keep a bucket nearby, you can save that water, and dump it into the rain barrel.  That way, even if there is no rain, you can keep putting water into the barrel.
• Grey water:  If you're ambitious, conserving grey water expands the above options.  This is perhaps too much for most people and for most living spaces, but it's an option

Power:

• Efficiency:  Power efficiency has come a long way in the past few decades.  As much as possible, use efficient systems to reduce your load on the power grid.
• Independence:  I don't think it is necessary to go "off grid," but more and more things can function without needing to be plugged in to power at all. Solar lights, solar chargers, etc. not only save you money, but they also mean that the grid isn't quite so stressed at peak times.

Food:

• Growing: Growing all of your own food isn't usually practical, but you can often make a difference if you look carefully at what you like to eat and make the most of what you can grow - spices go a long way, for example.
• Buy local:  If you are in a position to buy local, do so.  It reduces strain on all sorts of supply systems, not to mention keeping money in the community.

Community:

• Build community networks: Take some time to introduce yourself to those living close to you:  Even if it's just smiling and nodding, it makes a difference.  There may be times when mutual support will be important, and that is much easier if you've already established relationships.
• Be generous:  Do you have extra?  Offer it around.  Again, even if no one takes you up on it, it establishes a precedent that will make things easier if/when it is needed.  It also changes things if you need something later:  barter is easier than asking for charity.

Summary

We are in for some tough times.  Where I live will probably have a milder set of problems vs other places, at least at first, but everywhere will feel it.  Take reasonable precautions and do what you can, and we'll get through it.  Things will be lost - places, practices, luxuries - but we will get through.  It isn't the end of the world.  Just the end of an era.  This new era will force us to live smaller, smarter, and closer to each other.  There will be benefits as well as losses.  Let's just take a deep breath - and get to work.