Inside Twitter's Soul

Robert and the gang discuss the comments to a single Elon Musk tweet, which is more revealing and culturally important than you might guess.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
I'm beautiful. That's how we start this episode of our
professional podcast that makes it pays all of our rent.
This is it could Happen here, a podcast about things
falling apart, and today we're talking about Twitter because nothing
embodies falling apart quite like Twitter. Um we have on

(00:29):
the show today, Garrison Davis, Chris Sharene, James, everybody, the
whole crew, except for the people who aren't here. They're
not here, but I hate them, Yeah, I don't hate them.
How's everybody, don't we all great? I just woke up,
had my coffee scrolled on Twitter for an hour, so

(00:50):
I'm ready to go this. This, this has been, This
has been legitimately the best three weeks that we have
had on Twitter since like like two. I feel bad
for all the people who have like left because they're
missing Twitter. So first off, I want to say, we're
not gonna try We're gonna try not to get too
into the weeds here if you're not a Twitter person,

(01:13):
and most people are not Twitter people. The reason that
number one, I want to start by explaining why we
think this is worth getting into, which is that like
Twitter as an undeniable command of like global news discourse
it's where all of the journalists hang out, it's where
a significant number of the politicians and wealthy business people
hang out, and all of us are being broken by it,

(01:34):
like it's one big opium den that we are all
like engaging in an addiction that is destroying our brains inside. Um.
It's not good for anyone, but it's undeniably important. And
since Elon Musk took over, things have been things have
been quite wild. So we're going to give an update
on kind of some of the stuff that's been happening

(01:55):
in Twitter at the end here, but I want to
read a little lessay I wrote, just kind of looking
at mostly a single post Musk made and some of
the responses to it that I think says a lot
about where we are as a species right now. On October,
shortly after taking control of Twitter from its former shareholders,
Elon Musk went on a frenzy of what you might

(02:17):
call ill considered emphetamine derived tweets about his ideas for
how the site should function. At one point, he noted
that twenty dollars a month seemed like a fair price
for people to pay to get or keep blue check marks.
There was even talk of twenty dollars a month being
the price to use Twitter at all and pay walling
the entire site. Now, a lot of people thought this
was bug funk, especially since like Hbo doesn't cost that

(02:39):
much and it's and it's got and door on it.
You can watch just Disney, both of both of the
streaming services that I watch I stole from you Garrison,
So really it's an incredible deal. So everyone made fun

(03:02):
of the fact that Elon was suggesting this, and no
one had a bigger laugh than Stephen King. Now, Stephen King,
if you're not aware, is worth pretty close to a
billion dollars. He is an unbelievably wealthy man, and like
he has like actual money, not like stock made up money,
that is cash. He has hundreds of millions of dollars
in cash because people like his He has more like

(03:25):
actual money than he probably liquid assets. He's a very
liquid man because he wrote The Shining and the Stand
and cou Joe and that's a clown book. So many
he writes a new book every week. He's the only
man who has successfully turned a painkiller addiction into putting

(03:47):
out a best selling novel every single month. What a
hero anyway, he tweeted, quote, twenty dollars a month to
keep my blue check. Fuck that they should pay me.
If that gets instituted, I'm gone, like in ron now.
In addition to being the kind to wordplay for which
Stephen King has become rightly famous, the reason that he
got kind of piste off is actually sensible. Obviously, twenty

(04:08):
dollars means nothing to someone with his kind of money,
but he's not wrong about his central argument, which is
that like Twitter ought to be paying people like him.
He has nearly seven million followers, and he tweets very regularly.
Massive accounts like Stephen King's are not Twitter's customers. They
are the business itself. It is the product. I want

(04:28):
to quote now from a report in Reuters. Quote, these
heavy tweeters account for less than ten percent of monthly
overall users, but generate of all tweets and half of
global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been an absolute decline since
the pandemic began. A Twitter researcher wrote in an internal
document titled where did the Tweeters go? Now? Sonny, It's

(04:52):
like Instagram or whatever. Once you're like, have a lot
of followers, you can make money. So I think Twitter
is different that way. It is. I I am the
only person in the history of Twitter who was actually
turned being a ship poster insway lucrative professional career. I
am the only one. Everyone else that is drill drill

(05:16):
was already like in in this like drivels already. I think,
like in the scene doing stuff like well they done
something has something to do with home stuck. But the
point is that the people like Stephen King are what
makes Twitter profitable. The idea that like they owe the
company money to be able to tweet is kind of
absolutely absurd, and in addition to that, like it it

(05:37):
feeds into a serious problem the site is having before
Elon bought it. They're they're they're they're attempting to answer
the question of like, why are these people who are
responsible for most of our money tweeting less? Because it's
it's costing us like it is. There's a reason why
Twitter has been on a profit down slope lately. Um
the only profitable years the company has had I should know,
we're two thousand eighteen and two thousand nineteen, in which

(05:59):
they were doing reasonably well financially, and since the pandemics started,
Twitter has reliably lost hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
This research was which was attempting to answer the question
why beat at concluded quote cryptocurrency and not safe for
work content, which includes nudity and pornography, are the highest
growing topics of interest among English speaking heavy users. The

(06:21):
report found at the same time, interest in news, sports,
and entertainment is waning among those users. Tweets on those topics,
which have helped Twitter burnishing images the world's digital town square,
as Musk once called it, are also the most desirable
for advertisers. So basically, the things that advertisers like to
see ads next to are becoming less popular on Twitter,
and ship that is poisoned for advertisers has become more popular. Now.

(06:46):
This is a problem for Musk because he loves crypto shilling,
which is a huge issue for everyone who isn't a
crypto weirdo. Um, there are some opportunities. One of the
things that I thought wasn't a bad idea was Musk
suggested ways in which to like monetize the site so
sex workers could more effectively monetize their followings, which is
a way Twitter might be able to make more money
now is that likely to make the company money in

(07:09):
excess of what they would lose in advertising for becoming
known as the Fox site. Probably not, Probably broadly speaking
of bad idea. Um So, in addition to Musk's outright
hatred of journalists in reporting, it seems like just his
general vibes might not be great for bringing back the
advertisers he seems to be personally having fine. He seems

(07:32):
to be personally inclined to like go after the things
and support the things that are directly poisoned for Twitter's
bottom line, which is fascinating for a guy who's spending
forty four billion dollars on the side. Can can we
can we mention for a second, by the way, the
reason he spent forty billion dollars on the site was
because he bought the stocks, the sites shares for a
meme price that someone sugested on Twitter. Yes, it was
like fifty four dollars and fifty four dollars and twenty cents,

(07:56):
so there's a four twenty. Yeah, this is this is
why you sent forty four billion dollars on this And
he previously it's worth noting he previously did that with
Twitter stock or with um Tesla stuff. He attempted to
take Tesla private for four dollars to share heavily for
that one. Because that's because it's very yes, exactly, because

(08:20):
that was that was very illegal, we think, very not
that funny. Yeah, it's also worth noting that like the
one thing that he actually has he has created, right,
he didn't invent Tesla, like he didn't even his is
his reply guys. No, his his reply guys are like
his unique asset, and and he's trying to price him

(08:41):
out of being his reply guys. The cult of personality stuff, yeah, yeah,
but like that's largely built on Twitter, right, like his
the whole cult around him, well and read it. But yeah,
and just like the fact that like people think the
genius x y Z whatever. Yeah, that is that's too
big a tapping for today's episode and recently we'll see.

(09:04):
But you know, we're not talking today about like Musk's
broadly speaking, why Musk is a con man. Well, we'll
talk about that. We've talked about that on plenty of
other occasions. Nor is this supposed to be an exhaustive
explanation for why Musk's Twitter is likely to fall apart.
We don't have the end of that story yet. So instead,
what I want to do is review a single tweet
and particularly the responses to that tweet, because I think
it is hugely interesting and kind of an important cultural artifact.

(09:27):
So the tweet was a response by Musk to the
Stephen King tweet that I I read earlier. Right King
being like, I'm not gonna pay this, Musk responded simply,
we need to pay the bills. Somehow Twitter cannot rely
entirely on advertisers. How about eight dollars? Now, this is
also very funny because you and you're like, whoa, there's

(09:50):
nothing in there. There's nothing, but it's it's just bouncing
around like a fucking bb and a goddamn dryer. Um.
So the first comments to this response, or what you'd expect,
there's a mix of anti Musk lib types laughing at
his bad business sense, mocking the idea of making Twitter's
most valuable users pay for the site. Um, you've got

(10:10):
your Musk defenders insisting that Blue checks some sort of
out of touch elite, which is one of my favorite
bits of deranged right wing culture that like there's some
sort of like yeah verse s I this there's like
a there's an old left Twitter joke like like like
literally it was like there was there was a running
series of jokes about like the blue check bourgeoisie and like,

(10:33):
and then somehow all of these people became convinced it
was real and through a process that like I cannot
even begin to understand the the process, and this is critical,
is that you cannot tell jokes on Twitter dot com.
That's true. Um, that that is that is the actual process,
and that is the Yeah, that's that's that's what's happening here.
So a representative Musk defender responses this comment by Douche

(10:55):
Canoe Magoo and everyone ha ha ha ha ha. Dude
worth five million who wants to tax the ricks rich
can't play twenty dollars ha ha. Hey elon Musk, I'll
play this pay this loser's twenty dollars a month. Now.
I looked into it, and this guy is an anti
vaxer with thirty four followers. If you're if you're curious

(11:18):
on the lip side, you've got guys like Keith Olberman's
subtweeting Musks to try and use like numbers in math
to show that this business plan which was never a
business real business plan isn't going to make money. The
first interesting response there was a few comments down from
Keith by a journalist named Hopewell Chinono. Good morning, Elon Musk.
For a lot of journalists in Africa, verification has helped

(11:40):
us to not fall victim to state tactics to use
our names to spread propaganda. I have been to jail
three times inside six months for exposing corruption. Few African
journalists will afford the U S twenty dollars and attached
to this tweet where images from Too Guardian articles about
Hope Well. I'm going to quote from one now. Nno
posted on his Twitter account that police had taken him
from his house and said that they were charging him

(12:01):
with communicating falsehoods. The arrest comes after Chennono tweeted that
police had beaten an infant to death while enforcing COVID
nineteen lockdown rules this week. Police later said the information
was false. Before the latest arrest, Hinono was out on
bail and separate charges of inciting violence as after he
voiced support for an anti government protest in July, and
also on contemptive court charges for allegedly claiming corruption within

(12:22):
the country's National Prosecution Agency. Chanono is one of Zimbabwe's
most prominent critics of President Emerson. I'm not gonna be
able to pronounce that last name administration, accusing it of
corruption and human rights abuses. The government denies the charges. Now,
Hope Well is a Harvard Fellow. He is an award
winning journalist and I had no idea this guy existed
prior to this tweet. Uh. He is an extremely courageous

(12:44):
person who, from everything I can read, is reporting on
corruption within the Zimbabwean government has been very influential, recently
led to the sacking of the very corrupt Health Minister.
I would not have heard of this man without Twitter.
He would not have had a voice capable of reaching
a large number of people without Twitter. It's possible those
Guardian articles about him and his struggle would not exist
if it weren't for the prominence of his Twitter account. Um,

(13:06):
and you know, it's also worth noting that if Twitter
weren't the site that it is, he never would have
had a chance to make his concerns public anywhere close
to the CEO of that company. Many things about this
interaction cry out for the very best about Twitter. The
smallest and probably most valuable of the major social media websites,
and at least a social level, we all call it
the hell site, and a huge part of Twitter culture

(13:27):
is despising it. But moments like this really do make
a lot of the bullshit worthwhile. In the articles hope
Will attached to his post, he's wearing a red and
white striped shirt. The top response to Hopewell's replied a
musk is by Jason Roeberg. A musk reply by Guy one,
American News and Fox News commenter. He writes, why did
they dress you like American Waldo, I'll pay for your subscription.

(13:50):
Hopo replies, that is very kind of you. That is
prison uniform. My imprisonment was triggered by tweets exposing state corruption.
The ruling political elites use captured state institutions to punish
analyst who exposed the looting of public funds um which
I don't know. Another perfectly characteristic Twitter response and being
like look at the way he's dressed and being like, yeah,
that's a prison uniform. I was I just got out

(14:11):
of prison for when I was doing amazing criminalism. Yeah,
it's just very It says a lot there's a lot
going on here. Yeah. Have you come across his I guess,
I hope, Well, you know, no dot com which is
not his website. No, Jesus Mark God, is it something?
Is that like a government thing? Yes, it's a government
I hope. But you don't know. He's very deceptives. He's

(14:32):
the liar and dishonest person. Yeah. Yeah, so just wow,
this is an incredible story website. Look at this. They've
done some work. I love. The background is like a
boat sailing in the star sol to see what the
fuck they They're not doing their finest work over there.

(14:55):
The first section is the title in all caps is
and I quote Daddy Hope story that his Twitter handled that. Okay, okay,
his residence looks like a sex he then apparently okay, yeah,
I don't know what they look like, but you could
like it's it's obvious, like he's obviously like disinformation about

(15:16):
him personally. It's a big fucking issue for this guy. Yeah.
Dot com is just a great example of live verification
on Twitter is an important it's a wonderful example of that. Garrison. Now,

(15:37):
the responses to this guy continued to be pretty amazing.
Another fun reply was simply I thought that in Zimbabwe
they arrest only white folks. Oh, has that person got
a picture of like a some kind of white guy
very short shorts? And yeah, yeah he's some some some
serious Rhodesian ship on that dude's timeline. Now, I want

(16:01):
to note most of the responses to Hopeful are very
positive um and all of the negative replies have multiple
people attacking the people who are going after hope Well
and defending him. Because Twitter works the way that it does,
though this increases engagement provides an algorithmic boost to everybody involved.
The whole situation in his replies is kind of as
bleak and hopeless as Hopell's initial reply is itself hopeful.

(16:23):
Scrolling down further, the applies to Musk's tweet. We get
this gym from the skin doctor, and this is somebody
just like tweeting his his advice to Ellen. How about
privileged classes like white straight men and women upper cast
Hindus pay a hundred dollars for their blue ticks. You
keep eight dollars each from it and pay the rest
ninety two dollars to oppressed classes blue tickers like rich communists,

(16:44):
LGBT doll its feminists, left journals, vegans, peta fair. No,
this one is quite the response that it has. It
has seventy dred likes, which makes sense because the skin
Doctor has more than half million followers. He is a
Hindu dermatologist from Flower Mount, Texas who posts like pro

(17:06):
Hindu fascist content Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. He also posts
right wing sketch comedy videos about how a modern Titanic
sinking wouldn't put women and children first because of wokeness. Um.
He's an incredible account. I recommend following the skin Doctor. Yeah,

(17:27):
this is the world that are our wants. Yeah, and
this is like yeah. The responses of his to his
tweet are another perfect microcosm of Twitter, because a big
part of it is he has this like long fight
with another right winger who doesn't get the joke and
attacks him for being woke, and also gets thousands of yes,

(17:49):
it's so good. Um, and it's probably you know, fair
for me to talk just a little bit about the
liberal lefty you know must reply guys, the ones who
reply it to one of his posts, but attacking him.
So let's talk about Eric Davis, a verified candidate for
the North Carolina Statehouse with fifty four followers. Um, not

(18:12):
a lot of followers. He is a Democrat. Uh, and
he seems to be trying to draft off of Musk's
replies to increase his own popularity. And that this was
you know, prior to the election. Uh, we should check
in on how Eric Davis did in North Carolina for him.
And then I just love that, like all his replying
just landed with people like it's very funny. Yeah, his

(18:36):
reply shows a total lack of understanding about what's happening
with Twitter. Quote. Wait, so Twitter was perfectly fine before
the supposedly richest man took control, but now that it
has even more money and got rid of many of
the workers, so it's even cheaper to sustain now it
can't survive without paying That is part logic for the
Musk fan base. I guess, which is completely wrong. Twitter
hasn't was not making money. Twitter was losing hundreds of

(18:58):
millions of dollars a year and now makes even less money.
But anyway, Um, it's got three hundred and seventy four likes,
which is one of the biggest tweets this particular candidate
has had, by the way, that that is h he know, Wait,
what are we think the same guy? Did he win
North Caroline his school board? Oh no, no, no for school.
But in the general election he got eight thousand votes

(19:18):
and lost by how much? He lost by by fifty
two percent of the vote and got seventy six in
his Yeah, if only, if only fully he tweeted more,
if only he'd owned Elon Musko a little bit harder

(19:40):
via tweet, that would have flung things. God, that's funny,
so further down as a political cartoon, and I do
not understand it, but I am. I'm going to force
you all to to observe it. I could look at
it like I can try to explain it. Drop it
in the chat. So that's the that's the political cartoon. Okay.

(20:01):
So it's the meme of the guy who's who's walking
with his girlfriend and it's looking at the other woman,
except all of their faces are cartoon faces of Elon Mutton,
Elon Musk's girlfriend. It's wearing a Twitter shirt and he's
looking over at a girl with a red TikTok. What

(20:23):
does this mean? That's a hard question, Robert. You we
could do a whole semester about what this means. Yeah,
distracted by Aiden looking at Ellen. It's like ignoring Twitter
because you're looking over at the red pill. I guess
I don't know you're looking at Also, you like you.

(20:44):
I don't think it's supposed to meet anything. They all
have his face, which makes it so much more complicated.
It's a lot going on there. I'm so happy that
none of us have been on the internet enough to
understand what this means. I'm so proud of us. And lastly,
there's my very favorite reply from someone called doctor Disrespect

(21:04):
with a staggering two point four million followers. Do you
not know who this is? He's some video game player
he wears like a plate carrier while he's playing video games,
and also public sometimes Oh my god. Anyway, yeah, he
tweets this to musk. Let the two X give you

(21:25):
a thought. Allow face scan slash retinal scan into a
blue check mode, similar to iPhone unlock through face scan,
but in this case only while scan is active. A
tweet is created alongside unique code coinciding with that instance.
Let's wake up Ellen. This has eight thousand three two lines.

(21:46):
Who the fund is this guy? Okay, so he's like
he's like, he's an FPS streamer, right, like he was
like a big condrom. He he does just like whole
thing because he stopped. He's the first, he's the first
person shooter streamer. He plays Call of Duty, among other things. Yeah,
he got banned from Twitch for doing something that like, well,

(22:10):
I think she was she the guy who got bank
he took a video and why are you asking us?
I think he might be the guy who got banned
for taking a video in a in a in a bathroom.
I can't remember exactly. He's also okay. So one of
the things he's most famous for is he's one of
the people who are there's this entire cadre of like
professional like Call of Duty streamers whose entire thing is
that they don't want there to be ranked batchmaking and

(22:32):
video games because they don't like playing against good players
and they want to be able to stream pub stomps
all the time. And they're really really mad about this
and have been screaming at every game deav who has
like ever existed for like multiple years now about how
they suck. Like, so he's the guy video games, Yeah,
he wasn't. He's also mad about people who are good
at it. He's really annoying he's okay, okay, that's all.

(22:55):
That's all. That's all we need to know about this fellow. Yeah,
that's the little thing that I wrote about that I
couldn't get out of my head. I don't know why.
I just found that specific post in the comments to it.
It is fascinating because it both shows that Musk did
not have a clear game plan on what's he wants
going forward into this, like the twenty how fast the

(23:17):
twenty twenty dollar a month thing got disregarded for eight
dollars just because of one tweet because Stephen King didn't
like it. Yeah, it's like, it's very clear he's just
bouncing from one thing to another with no clear idea
on what he's doing whatsoever. And then with the with
the thing about the journalist, it really shows how Ellen

(23:37):
does not understand what verification is or why it exists,
and slowly, over the course these past few weeks, has
understood why it exists and just replaced it with another,
with a second checkmark beneath the first check mark, so
you have your blue checkmark, that you have your official checkmark.
It's it's just wild that he's he's slowly, he slowly
over the course of mostly thousands of will impersonating him

(24:00):
to make to make fun of him, he realized why
why verification exists. And I mean, but it's telling that
like he he did not know why it exists until
until it was a personal until it was a personal
problem that impacted him specifically. He doesn't care about the
journalists from Zimbabwe. He doesn't care that that's going to happen.
It only becomes a thing when it's going to start

(24:22):
impacting him. Take a moment of silence for for our
brave posters who went out in a blaze of glory
impersonating bust and get getting getting their account band who
who it was? That was funny, But that's less of that.
So I want to I want to talk about sat
what's actually like because people have funked around and had fun.
A bunch of famous people got banned making fun of
Elon Musk and it was you know, the funny part

(24:44):
of this was that damage was done. Legitimate damage was
done to a couple of companies Locheed Martin and Eli
Lily and had damage to their stock price done, which
is at least, you know, probably temporary, although they haven't
yet recovered to the heights they were before the joke.
What's less temporary is that as a result of those jokes,
at least one company, Eli Lily, pulled millions of dollars

(25:06):
in adververtising off of Twitter. So the eight dollar check
mark did cause real financial harm to Twitter the company,
and at least kind of a temporary financial slap on
the wrist to some other people. Um it's kind of
unclear what the long term impacts of that will be,
but Musk has delayed the rollout of the blue checkmark
plan on a more on a wider basis for like

(25:28):
a month until they figure shit out, which they may
not do at the present time. What you're seeing is
he's fired and is continuing to fire everybody within the
company who says anything negative against him. A couple of
engineers were bold enough to like critique him or argue
with him on Twitter, and there have also been people
within the company who have kind of pushed out corrections

(25:49):
to some of his posts through Twitter's bird watch, uh
thing of the jig that have been critical of like
things he said that we're not actually true and at
the moment, kind of the holy pattern what we're kind
of doing is sort of watching him purge most of
the old staff of Twitter, as he seems to be
in the process of trying to hire new people on
um And one of the most recent thing that's happened

(26:12):
is he's sent out a letter saying basically like we
all have to everybody has to go into hardcore crazy
mode to make the company profitable. Uh, if you don't
want to do this, you know, here's the door. You
can get your three months severance. And it kind of
looks like the vast majority of the remaining engineers may
take the severance. There's a good reason for this. So
basically the kind of position they're in the way and

(26:34):
this is this is heavily involved in how Silicon Valley works.
The way to make a lot of money in Silicon
Valley is to get equity in a company before it
gets huge. Right. You can also get a big salary
at a company, but salaries, a big salary for a
dev might be for to eight hundred thousand dollars a
year if you're really really good, Whereas if you get
in on the ground floor of a startup that that

(26:55):
goes public, you could make hundreds of millions of dollars. Right,
big difference in those things. Musk is asking people to
work like nightmares start up amounts, but they will not
have any equity or any but like if they figure
out Twitter two point oh and suddenly make it a
website that a billion people use, which is what he wants, um,
they will not have any share in that. So a

(27:16):
lot of devs are making the decision to like, well,
I'm just going to take the severance and try to
build something else. So try to get a job in
another startup or like try it, because why why why
wouldn't you if you were capable of making the next
big social media app, why wouldn't you take the money,
leave Twitter and just try to do it rather than
try to do it through fucking Twitter, which is a
goddamn disaster right now. Anyway, that's more or less where

(27:39):
things are. Yeah, and I think that the everything is
refreshing yourself, the people who are left at Twitter, like
I don't know how the site works, Like Musk has

(28:01):
no idea how the site works, Like you know, this
is like on the sort of back end infratructure end
and so like we are like we we've we've already
had there. There there was there was a thing people
found out where like Twitter ads and storing people's like
most of the digitous people's credit cards in plain text. Um,
like the site is physically falling apart. It's already started.
It's probably just going to continue, and like we are

(28:25):
probably not that far away from just watching the actual
site just physically fall apart. And so you know, maybe
is taking a step back from CEL. Yeah, he's looking
to probably hire some competent people instead because he's realized
how hard it is and it's not fun anymore. Like
it's that's true, but there there's kind of a problem here,

(28:48):
which is that like there's a lot of like a okay,
like i I I really doubt Twitter as like very
very good. I mean, it's documentation is probably okay, but
there's a lot of people who understand how critical stuff
like how critical stuff works towards has gone right, And
it's not as easy as just like you can like

(29:08):
you know, just socket in another person who's like, oh,
who like knows how programming works right like you You
you need the expertise from those people who had deep
understandings of how it works, and like you know, maybe
maybe there maybe there's enough time to sort of like
fill in the gaps and like take it out of
his tails. But but I don't know, especially like with

(29:30):
you know, the number of people who are just increasingly leaving.
Nobody really does know, and you know, it's one of
those things we'll all we'll all watch, is this is
this shakes out. I don't know if I think the
whole site is going to actually fall apart um. I
think the bigger I think the thing that is I
think when I when we talk about it falling apart,
the thing that's actually likely is that there will be

(29:52):
increasing security breaches due to the fact that there are
less people minding the store. Folks, data will be exposed.
I cannot size enough. Do not attach your fucking credit
card to Twitter? Yeah? Absolutely? Do you not like message?
Like a lot of us use Twitter for reporting. I
get d ms all the time for people who want
to leak stuff, people who want to talk to me
about stuff, some of which might not be legal where

(30:14):
they are. Like, don't fucking do that on Twitter dot
com anymore? Asked message someone asked for signal lost approach
on mail? Do something like that? Like it? That could
be very dangerous for some people. Yeah, there's a lot
of ship that could go wrong as a result of
this for people. Um, but I think it will probably
be a series of scandals and funk ups like that,

(30:35):
as opposed to just the site goes offline one day. Now,
that said, it's not impossible that like his Elen is
a guy who is shall we say, somewhat mere curial.
It's possible to site will lose enough money that one
day he's just like fuck it and turns it off.
He does technically have that ability. That would be kind
of a fascinating thing to see happen. I don't I

(30:56):
think that's a much lower likely scenario. Well, yeah, I
think it's putting it like when when when I say
the site breaks, like, it's probably not going to be
there's one day where it doesn't load, Like but what
we when we've already been seeing like they they, I think,
by accident, basically broke a bunch of how two factor
authentification worked because they shut down the micro Yeah, and
like they're gonna keep doing stuff like that and there's

(31:17):
just gonna be like random stuff that just stopped working
absolutely like like that that's already happening. Twitter has already
been kind of a piece of shp, like even when
it had an actual staff, and now it's like, yeah,
it is important to note the people who were running
Twitter prior to Musk taking over, we're not great at
their jobs because as evidence by the fact that Twitter
lost two hundred and twelve million dollars last year. Yeah. Yeah.

(31:40):
And in the meantime, there's there's an account that documents
all the dogs of the UC strike, which it's sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that does. As this is happening to Twitter, Meta is
also going through a series of devastating layoffs and as
sim really impacting their functionality and pivoting very hard away

(32:04):
from the news driven approach that they've been doing the
past few years. So the two, both the two main
like old guards social media sites between Facebook and Twitter,
are going under significant changes. Um TikTok is of course
owned by companies that are not great on your own
data of privacy. Instagram is owned by Facebook, and maston

(32:30):
is miserable. So Mastedon is We're gonna get yelled at
so much by the masted On people. But I'm just look,
I couldn't I couldn't figure out how masted On worked
inside of thirty seconds and that is all the time
I will ever devote to learning how a social media
site works. I'm sorry, guys, I'm sorry. The best critique
I've seen of Mastodon is that, in a part, the

(32:53):
kind of the twenty twenty uprising happened because the video
of George Floyd getting murdered got circulated so much on Twitter,
like people saw they weren't able to look away from
the atrocity that could never happen on Mastodon. And that's
that's the biggest kind of thing for why Mastodon is
not a not a a replacement for Twitter, because it

(33:16):
will never At this point, it doesn't look like it
will have the same cultural impact um that Twitter can have.
Now of course that could change, who knows, And it's
it's at this point, it's just it doesn't It doesn't
seem to get the same thing that Twitter can do.
That doesn't mean it's a failure. Like a lot of
people use it. If you like it, if you find
a community there, great, it's just not the same thing.

(33:37):
It's not the same thing. Like that's all we're saying.
That's why I was saying, like replacement Twitter, different things.
Do you mean it's not valuable? Just like if Twitter
were to turn into just a site for sex workers
to make money on, there's nothing wrong with that, but
it would not be fulfilling the same role that it
currently does. Yeah, I mean, like I tried to overthrow
my first government on Twitter. I tried to overthrow my

(33:57):
most recent government on Twitter. Like has to be a
social media service and facilitates tempting governments, Like Twitter is
like unique because it's where a lot of people get
their news. It's where a lot of people learn things
like if the celebrity is trending, are they dead? Like
you know what I mean. Like, it's just like it's
where a lot of collective information is. And I don't

(34:19):
think there's a site right now that can even even
come close to how many people rely on Twitter. Just
let's see. I mean, I think it's it's it's it's
not that that's where people get news. It's where a
certain type of influential person gets their news because a
lot of people get their news via TikTok. They're just

(34:40):
people my age of younger like like like like like
a lot of people do get news on whatever they
look at. The reason why twitters impactfuls because twitters where
a whole bunch of people who have influence in other
areas get their information from. And that's why it's that's
why something that has interest, you know, in twenty twenty
years is when everyone who's on TikTok is going to

(35:01):
be in there, Like early thirties, who knows what the
media landscape is gonna be, Right, it's now the most
influential media. Yeah, it's it's this. It's the same thing
as how like back during the French Revolution, the most
influential thing in media was this one chick's coffee house, right,
because it's just where all of the people that had
the most people listening to them independently happened to hang
out together. That's what Twitter has been for a while.

(35:24):
Um and and and that's not always a good thing,
because everyone who hangs out on Twitter gets their brain
broken in a very specific way. And we're watching it
continue to happen to the wealthiest man in the history
of the human race, which has been a hoot. Also,
I mean, and this is the thing people on Twitter
talk about all the time. Twitter is like the only
place in the modern world where you can actually interact

(35:47):
with the ruling class and like make their lives. Like
the only other thing you could possibly try to do
in order to do that is like get you and
seven your friends to try to storm their mansion and
they'll probably shoot you. When I have bad When I
have a bad day, I can find the air to
the Habsburg Fortune and I can tweet him a picture
of the dead body of his cousin who after he

(36:09):
was shot to death for carrying out a coup in Mexico.
I can do that on Twitter dot com and no
other website. I will warn you that you do get
banned for certain and dead dictator memes. I've had a
few Mussolini bands, but otherwise, Yeah, it's a glorious website.
It is. Yeah, I'm just enjoying pictures that people have
responded to Nancy Pelosi's retirement thing with right now and

(36:31):
it's just you guys click the bottom link as an
absolute banger. Yeah, unfortunately I saw that before. That's one
of the most that is that is like that looks
like a horror horror movie picture. No, God, So imagine

(36:59):
if like you were doing a horror movie where like
people are in a haunted house and there's like a
demon in the walls, and it at some point like
pulls out like a man size demon comes out of
the wall and pulls a person into the wall. It
looks like that, but the demon in the wall is
instead in a copy of the Constitution, and he's cradling
Nancy Pelosi. But she has the body of a twenty

(37:19):
year old female college student. Oh god, it is well,
I feel like that's that's maybe we should break this down.
We have, you know, I think I think we have
gazed into the Twitter abyss for long enough. It's been
about this is enough. We won't I promise we won't

(37:40):
talk about Twitter like this for another several weeks. Won't
be here next time. But yeah, we're We're all going
to log off this and then go on Twitter. I'm not.
I have to. I have to do my job. I'm
gonna write about Sam Bankman freed. Happy Christmas, eve Bucks.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

(38:04):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
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