The digital Titanic, the TwitTanic, just crashed into the iceberg with its new Captain, Elon Musk, at the wheel. And if you don’t think the parallels abound, read on. You well recall the dilemma of Titanic, that there weren’t enough lifeboats on board so when the unthinkable did happen, and people needed to abandon ship, it simply wasn’t going to be possible for everybody to get off.

In this case, we’re all on board the TwitTanic and we don’t have a life boat, either. Or, maybe we’ve got the lifeboats, our computers, but there is no other ship to go to. In all events, we’re stuck. We’re sitting here wondering how much time we have and what we’re going to do. A blogger named Dave Karft said last week, “I thought the platform would be pretty much unchanged in 1-3 months and then effectively dead within a year. Now it’s looking like it’ll be pretty different in 1-3 weeks and effectively dead within six months.”

Ouch. Those would be grim tidings under any circumstances, but with the election on the horizon?

“If it falls apart by Tuesday, we’re in trouble.” Sweet Jesus. “Using Twitter as a trustworthy source of information on Tuesday is going to be a nightmare.” OMG

You heard it with your own ears. The issue is that Musk needs people to give him eight dollars for a verified checkmark. And that’s down from $20. He got into a pissing contest with Stephen King and now it’s down to eight. He’s got a $13 billion debt load, so he needs cash. Yesterday. Ergo, he did two pretty incredible things the past three days. 1) He decided on this new product, the verified checkmark, which he wants done by Monday. 2) He fired half the workforce.

What’s that you say? How can you ship a new product, on a mature platform, on the fly, with half the workforce — and their institutional knowledge — gone? And do it over the weekend? ?!?

You know where we’re going now, into the It Gets Worse part of the article. It not only gets worse, this is what “worse” looks like in this case. This is an untrammeled, unmitigated, unparalleled nightmare. This is what the TwitTanic looks like.

A tweeter with a blue check mark, former NFL player Chris Kluwe, decided to show the vulnerability of the blue check system. He changed his screen name and profile pic to impersonate Elon Musk. Look what happened. It’s a parody account with all the right markings. In other words, it’s a perfect forgery. And Musk has owned the platform since Thursday and this is what is going on.

The Triad:

At some point in the next few weeks the blue-check on Twitter is going to morph from being an identification marker to a marker of who’s a sucker and who isn’t.

The problem for Twitter is that Musk and his tech bro friends think that Twitter verification delivered value primarily to the people who are verified. (Projection. It’s always projection with guys like this.)

In reality, the blue check drives value primarily to the user base who is consuming the product.

By incentivizing the Famous People not to get blue checks (suckers!) who will be incentivized to get verified? The kind of people who could never have gotten a blue-check in earlier times: spammers and trolls.

Musk’s subscription gambit will decrease his platform’s utility for the rest of the user base. […]

Advertisers are already fleeing Twitter. The company’s primary revenue stream is declining. Elon, predictably, has decided to blame “activist groups,” as though he is some sort of cancel culture victim. . . .

This is all a predictable outcome of Elon’s first week of chaos. What advertisers are asking for is assurance that the company will remain basically unchanged. What advertisers are seeing is a 500% increase in use of the n-word, and Musk himself tweeting a fever-swamp conspiracy theory, and Musk announcing that the old verification system is going to be scrapped, details on how they’ll manage misinformation and impersonation TBD, and Musk firing half of the company, decimating the content moderation team.

That is the admittedly lengthy wind up. Here is the pitch. (I told you this was going to get worse.)

Nobody knows. This is a case of first impression — much as the reportedly unsinkable Titanic hitting the iceberg on its maiden voyage was.

Oh, did I mention that Election Night we have a full moon? A blood moon, in fact? Moving out of Aires? Thank God it’s moving into Taurus, that might be the best. Want to know why? The moon was in Aires the night the Titanic went down, April 14, 1912.

Is this getting too weird for you? Here’s some Aires (Greek god of war, spirit of battle) music to listen to while you contemplate shipwrecks and the TwitTanic. Dear God help us, we will get election information out there somehow if we have to use smoke signals and tie tin cans together. It’s going to be our night. This is one battle we’re going to win.

 

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22 COMMENTS

    • I knew there was a major Twitter hub in Dublin. I was planning to get around to asking you about it. Thank you for sharing the link.

      3

    • Well, there’s already talk of a class-action suit against Musk for violating California’s labor laws regarding firing employees. I don’t remember the specifics but it has something to do with a sixty-day or a 3-month warning before the kind of action that Musk has taken.

      2

      • Are they employees proper? I know a lot of tech firms call their employees “contractors” just so they can weasel out of employment law problems.

        2

        • That’s not just tech firms, it’s all kinds of businesses. I have a lot of experience seeing that stuff; of course, I live in a “right to work” state. For the uninitiated, that means you have the “right to get your ass right to work”, and that covers it.

          3

  4. We will see. I primarily used Twitter as a place to look for links to credible sources and I hope that doesn’t change. Our friend Ron Filipowski tweeted today that he has subscribed to Twitter Blue for some time now because it’s features make his work easier.
    Of course imposters will make trouble but the accounts will cost the mischief makers money.
    Perhaps a work around can be found. Lots of clever folks there.

    6

    • Mainly I’m worried about spammers and trolls. With half the content moderation people gone, it could be a zoo. All the smart people are saying stay on Twitter and work things through. Filipkowski is one and Don Winslow is another.

      Maybe if we all hang together we’ll get through. There are a lot of clever people there.

      3

      • Are you on the waiting list for Jack’s new site Blue Sky? I suspect that at some point there will be a mass migration to it. Here’s hoping that Elon gets stuck holding a $44B bag of shit.

        8

  5. NASED.org is saying twitter is “one source”. That is probably a mistake since it is no longer a reliable source of anything other than trolling, misinformation, and racist garbage. It’s not like it was incredibly reliable in the first place but now it is completely UNreliable. Why in the fuck would any election organization wanting to keep voters informed even consider twitter to be “one source”? That is asking for trouble since twitter is going to be a shit-show for the foreseeable future.

    4

  6. We have a few days. Relying on Twitter has in my opinion always been stupid despite what advocates say. I’ve always relied on my local Democratic Party officials in the internet age. THEIR websites contain information I can trust. And don’t have bullshit competing with them by putting up misinformation. Frankly, the DNC needs to be offering support to EVERY county and recruiting people around the country who have web experience to assist county Party folks with their websites. Add workers/volunteers to staff phone lines and add as many as they can get the phone company to add. Including heading to cell phone providers they use and adding lines to their plans. Recruiting volunteers to go through neighborhoods to tell them where to call or log on to get ACCRUATE information on where they can vote, their rights if poll workers through up roadblocks, etc.

    I’ve long said Twitter is Twattle. That it was dangerous. And now it could unleash the election equivalent of a hurricane or earthquake. We appear to have invested heavily in a ground game this year, and with early voting coming to an end they need to be printing out fact sheets for workers to take around.

    Musk doesn’t want to pay taxes or be regulated whether it’s Space X, Tesla or now Twitter. His best chance to avoid that is the GOP getting back in charge. At least of one chamber of Congress will do just fine for him. I for one think that’s EXACTLY what he’s been up to with his actions in the past week. Create a cluster-fuck under the assumption even if things go FUBAR he can put humpty-dumpty back together again.

    If Dorsey is far enough along with his new venture he will have the pick of the litter of former and even current Twitter employees and that site will become no better than Truth Social. It might hang on for a while, a giant version of Parler but Musk will be looking to sell and at a loss to get out of the mess he’s created for himself. Oh, and don’t forget not just the impact the mess will have on Tesla, but on Space X too. Russia’s space program has been fucked ever since Musk was able to start ferrying astronauts and cargo to the Space Station. Boeing is getting there but they are way behind Space X. So it’s in Russia’s interests to fuck with Twitter! Both to help them in Ukraine but also to fuck up America’s space program!

    THIS is why major social media sites that promote their “news’ function should be and should long ago have been regulated. Putting something so large as Twitter into private hands wouldn’t have happened had that been the case. But we are where we are. I take no pleasure in saying I told you so to Twitter’s advocates. FB fucked everyone in 2016, and Twitter is likely to do much worse.

    3

    • Twitter is a place where you go to hear what Charles Pierce thinks about the last inning or to read Adam Jentleson cracking wise on Mitch McConnell. Anyone who sees it as an oracle is an idiot.

      3

      • For a while, once I (after years of pressure) got sucked into FB I went there daily. Most posts were of little consequence although sometimes people Including me) had some signficant news to share. A new job, a move, a birth or death in the family and in my small hometown that meant chances were even those of us who hadn’t lived there in a long time knew them. So, it wasn’t entirely worthless but I came to realize how big a time suck it was. And after putting up some insignificant stuff of my own (who gives a shit about the new homemade soup I made that turned out good?) I realized I was becoming what I had ridiculed – thinking ordinary shit I did was oh so important and just HAD to be shared! But in my view Twitter had the same flaws except worse. One could actually write something descriptive on FB but on twitter there was that 140 character limit. So it was mostly inane “LOOK AT ME” bullshit. Expanding eventually to longer tweets didn’t do much. Too many people posting meaningless to anyone but themselves bullshit. And politicians and news outlets increasingly relying on it was I thought stupid as hell and could well prove dangerous. As more disinformation flooded our national discourse I became ever more convinced Twitter would become a liability to democracy and therefore freedom.

        There HAS to be a better way. If politicians and journalists had a lick of fucking sense they’d have long ago created their own platform. Sure, the crazies and assholes (most, but not all in the GOP would still have their bullshit flowing through it but it would be a damned sight better than what we’ve had with FB and Twitter! And I think journalists would have a tougher time rationalizing the regular overlooking of excesses by some, and the both-siderism wouldn’t be as bad.

        4

  7. “The issue is that Musk needs people to give him eight dollars for a verified checkmark. And that’s down from $20. He got into a pissing contest with Stephen King and now it’s down to eight. He’s got a $13 billion debt load, so he needs cash.”

    A little math shows that he’s not going to put much of a dent in that $13 billion debt at $8 a pop. If he expected the Twitter users (or “subscribers”) to cough up $8 to help with that debt, he’s going to need 1,625,000,000 “subscribers.” That number, just for context, is roughly 1 of every 5 human beings living on Planet Earth. Even spreading it out over a year, that still means he’d need more than 135 million “subscribers” paying for a full year (from what I can tell, that’s about half the number of “daily monetizable active users”–whatever that means–and about a third of the site’s overall monthly users).

    Of course, I wonder how many current Twitter users are going to want to pony up $8 a month to be “verified” considering Musk just laid out some $77 million for a new private jet? You’d think he’d hold off making such a significant (and hardly necessary) purchase if he’s having “money” trouble due to his Twitter acquisition. Isn’t that what right-wingers say about the “poor people” who would *dare* have a color TV set, a microwave oven and a cell phone but they claim they need welfare?

    4

  8. Good piece.. but then it’s all relative. Meanwhile in #Kyiv 4.5 million people have no power, Heat, or water. SOON no food.
    I LIKED THIS MEME .. someone called it metaphor. Others parody.

  9. Please delete above . Wrong pics selected
    Good piece.. but then it’s all relative. Meanwhile in #Kyiv 4.5 million people have no power, Heat, or water. SOON no food.
    I LIKED THIS MEME .. someone called it metaphor. Others parody.

    1

  10. Ha. Looks like Elon’s little stunt when he walked into Twitter HQ with a sink was a metaphor for “I’m gonna sink this sucker”.

    2

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