Yglesias has one of his better pieces about Elon Musk, online anger and the conservative mind. He cited this golden line:
“Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it.”
This is about as accurate a description of Twitter and general online behavior as I can think of. It wasn't ALL about getting outraged over imaginary crap, but a lot of it really is. As Twitter dies, I certainly notice I've been spending less and less time there. I have a few curated feeds about Ukraine and Iran that I check in on periodically, but I don't just scroll through it. It's just boring now. Maybe Musk should rebrand Twitter as the Boring Company.
It's telling that as Twitter gets boring, it loses engagement and that's because anger drives engagement. The negative engagement model is making us all pretty miserable. This isn't to say that I didn't really enjoy the witty and insightful takes on that hellscape. I did. But there was also the pervasive "someone on the Internet is wrong" dynamic. I don't miss that.
That the World's Formerly Richest Man is making himself angry and miserable about made-up bullshit does complete his journey to the conservative side of the cultural divide. Yglesias does some Bothsides crap about angry leftists, but it is clear that anger drives extremism, and social media makes us angrier.
Being outraged by imaginary stuff is now the primary focus and even the goal of conservative politics. There is no policy, no governing philosophy. It is simply endless iterations of people getting outraged by pronouns and someone who chooses to wear a mask to the grocery store. It is - in that sense - fundamentally indecent, fundamentally bullying and cruel.
The GOP is basically the personification of the worst parts of social media.
No comments:
Post a Comment