For better or worse, Elon Musk has to drastically change Twitter
My attempt to say something useful about this
Photo by JD Lasica
I just wrote an opinion piece about the Elon Musk-Twitter singularity for FWB (Here’s a New York Times article about what FWB is).
What I tried to do is describe what it looks like Elon Musk wants to do, and also what he has to do, and synthesize all that into a guess as to what Twitter will be like in a couple years. There are plenty of takes available about how he’s thought to be empowering right-wing people on Twitter, so I mostly steered clear of that, and instead focused on the other parts: the open-source algorithm, monetization, and most importantly the likely infusion of blockchain functionality.
Here are two paragraphs, but I urge you to read the whole thing.
The world’s most powerful people used to have to go to the Bilderberg Hotel in the Netherlands once a year to put their heads together as a unified cabal. Now, the world’s richest person and all his fans are an even bigger, better cabal, and that cabal has a live chat that everyone can see. Sure a lot of people get mad at the cabal, but it doesn’t matter because it’s mostly just a low-level hum
So that’s how and why Musk uses it, but what will the mysterious new experience for normies be like? Expect it to just generally feel like Twitter is not designed for coastal Democrats anymore. You’ll still be able to post a link to a Paul Krugman op-ed and say, “This makes some good points about tariffs,” but don’t expect the usual three likes. Likes, which are boring because there’s no money changing hands, will, I would guess, be de-emphasized in favor of more lucrative types of engagement. I wouldn’t rule out your Krugman tweet suddenly getting hoovered up into a user-created NFT collection called “Bug Person Brains,” which will automatically drop 1/1,000,000th of an Elon Coin into a crypto wallet you don’t even know how to use. I’m not saying that’s going to be the reality, but I’m positive that’s going to be the vibe.