Historian of the US Right
He who controls the medium (to some extent) controls the message; or, Why Elon Musks's juvenile right wing politics rendered Twitter unbearable for me.
As I detox and detach from Twitter, I've been thinking about the relationship between, as McLuhan would put it, the medium and the message. This piece by Ezra Klein today (free/gifted link below) made me even more convinced that, at least for now, leaving was the right decision.
With Elon hiring and firing the people who make and enforce the policies, with Elon's fingers on the algorithmic knobs, with Elon re-activating the accounts of numerous unapologetic Nazis and other varieties of hateful fascist propagandists, with Elon sending tweets that unleash torrents of angry, harassing, and often homophobic abuse on former employees and other private citizens, it became increasingly difficult for me to justify contributing content to a medium controlled by such a thuggish, illiberal troll.
Jack Dorsey was far from an ideal philosopher king, and his iteration of Twitter was hardly an idyllic, democracy-enriching medium before Musk came along. But at least it seemed like there were some people in the organization who were taking seriously the challenge of designing and moderating a social media platform that was aspirationally democratic.
Back in 1995 I began working on a dissertation (that became my book, Tom Paine's America) that interrogated the relationship between democracy and the relatively new media technology of the 1790s (i.e., the newspaper). It's not a coincidence that I became interested in those questions at precisely the moment when the internet was starting to come on everyone's radar screen as a potentially revolutionary technology. I remember reading pieces of techno-utopianism like this edition of Wired and thinking "wow that would be so cool" and also "hmmm, something tells me it might not work out this way."
If you're interested, here's a talk I gave on this topic back in 2018 where I fretted about the potentially democracy-destroying and nation-destroying potential of social media technology. Musk strikes me as precisely the sort of person who, in the name of what looks like freedom to an entitled man-child billionaire like him, will only amplify and never moderate the socially destructive aspects of his new toy.
I'm not quite sure how to end this. One thing I kind of liked about Twitter is that I never felt obligated to write a concluding paragraph on a thread, whereas this medium seems to demand it. So in lieu of a conclusion, I'll leave you with Jelani Cobb's smart meditation on why Elon is making Twitter terrible.
