November 14, 2024
By David Polansky
Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, particularly in light of Elon Musk’s highly visible support for his campaign, has again raised the question of the political significance of X (formerly Twitter). Since Musk acquired the platform in 2022, few institutions have displayed the same “Rorschach” quality. For example, the political activist Michael Shellenberger believes that X, along with its present owner, is now the standard-bearer of free speech in a world of tyrannical governments.
By contrast, the cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams claims it has degenerated into a hotbed of bigotry and extremism. It is the latter, negative view that predominates in mainstream venues like the New York Times.
Neither of these polarized takes, however, quite captures the present reality of X. Musk and his political enthusiasms remain consequential. But his most important contributions are his bottomless neediness—which is still the reigning ethos of X—and his novel introduction of monetization into the site’s economy.
The combination of the two has shaped X in important ways. Much of what people find lamentable is downstream from incentives to post questionable content in the interest of gaining not just social but financial reward. Thus—to take just one out of a million possible instances—an obviously fake post asking “Did Israel just NUKE Lebanon?” received over 18 million views and over 100,000 “likes.” And it’s not even a dumb joke or trolling in the conventional sense of the term—just engagement-bait that did its job effectively (and remuneratively).
Not infrequently, this dynamic produces surprising bedfellows. A highly popular account known as “Europe Invasion” is devoted to lurid stories of crime and political radicalism among the burgeoning immigrant populations of EU countries. This is not an unimportant topic in itself. But in this case a) many of the stories appear to be wholly invented, and b) the account itself is apparently operated by two Turkish businessmen based in Dubai. Pynchon must wish he came up with that one.
Even the most obnoxious far-right accounts are not so much Hitler as huckster. Here is just one recent example from a young “influencer” that begins: “When people meet me, they’re often flabbergasted to discover I’m a right-wing renegade on X” (it goes on from there at some length). Naturally, it concludes with a photo of the author. Chesterton this ain’t. But the point isn’t that this is bad writing. It’s that people don’t really write or talk this way at all unless they’re selling something.
Less politicized perhaps, but nonetheless fraudulent in their own way are the array of faux-educational accounts with names like “Cultural Tutor” and “Culture Explorer.” Some tend toward slideshow-style tours of global (though mostly Western) art and architecture that, while visually pleasing enough, leave their audiences scarcely more educated than before. Others take a more literary tack, strip-mining world classics for easily digestible insights repackaged for readers with minimal attention spans, resulting in what reads like a McKinsey consultant’s version of the liberal arts. As with overtly political accounts, what all of these offer is a simulacrum of thought. At the end of the day they just want your money—or at least your attention, which is to be converted into money at some later date.
Very little of this behavior is in fact unique to X. X is merely the most high-profile (and perhaps high-IQ) platform within a social media ecosystem increasingly characterized by shameless hucksterism. From podcasts to twitch streaming to TikTok—even Substack—the “don’t forget to like and subscribe!” crew predominates. That this environment has fostered the chimerical hybrid of the Horatio Alger striver with Hofstadter’s paranoid style is undeniably curious, but it is not unique to X, and it is inseparable at this point from economic motivations. X is just the place where it finds its most articulate expression and its broadest audience.
I don’t mean to suggest that the financial incentive is the sole driver of performative provocation. Much of the social media ecosystem functions as the id of democracy, and X is no exception. Take away monetization, and plenty of people will still be out there hurling slurs for love of the game, so to speak. Similarly, while there is no shortage of thirst trap accounts (many of which function primarily as advertisements for OnlyFans subscriptions), these are hardly a precondition for attracting grosser or misogynistic forms of online male attention, as plenty of women can attest.
And the absence of economic incentives isn’t necessarily an improvement. Freedom from baser motivations has not turned Bluesky Social, X’s competitor, into a genteel and exclusive digital salon. It instead resembles a haven for collective psychosis fostered by hermetic isolation—think Black Narcissus, only instead of nuns it’s 50-something public semi-intellectual males.
In any case, one should not overrate the virtues of pre-Elon Twitter (i.e., back when it was “Twitter”). I’m not just referring to the prior regime of greater censorship, but the basic social dynamic uninformed by direct pecuniary motives. It would be a mistake to think of this era as somehow pure. Money is not the only form of currency in the world, and both then and now the reigning ethos is not just greed but amour-propre.
After all, X, and more broadly social media, remains the greatest, largest-scale arena for indulging in amour-propre that the world has ever known. Modern celebrity existed long before, but this was a rarefied status. Only with social media could ordinary individuals directly access the potential audience at a scale once reserved for such celebrities. Anyone whose posts have ever gone viral has felt that sense of ego gratification. It isn’t difficult to find accounts—even anonymous ones(!)—for which chasing that experience appears to be their sole raison d’être.
Interacting with such accounts is a queerly hollow experience, not unlike communicating with an LLM or a particularly transparent scammer. They may respond with understandable human language, but their words have a fundamentally different purpose than we’re used to. What most comes to mind in such cases is the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit”—a kind of statement that is produced when the speaker is simply indifferent to its truth content. Returning to Williams’ objections, a figure like David Duke presumably believes his racialist theories or alternative history of WWII. But there is very little reason to think a Jackson Hinkle or Nick Fuentes is similarly committed to his narrative.
The proliferation of bullshit is also why the Musk-endorsed “Community Notes” feature is of limited efficacy. Many such notes perform a genuine service (not to mention provide moments of high comedy). Yet the format presupposes a community with shared truth-seeking norms. That is to say: it assumes that some people may get it right, and others may get it wrong, but while we prefer that our account prevail, we are in some sense commonly interested in discussions that generate truthful outcomes. This assumption does not characterize large swathes of X these days.
Even if corrupting influences predated Musk, though, it was monetization that locked the present social dynamics of X into place and supercharged their worst tendencies. Imagine, in other words, a drug that you didn’t have to pay for, but rather paid you. Each dopamine rush comes with a potential deposit into your bank account. That’s roughly the situation on X. I am confident in saying that most of the appalling accounts out there could not care less about being “right” or getting “called out”—especially if the latter only increases visibility (and thus clicks, and thus monetary gain). As the line (frequently attributed to Andy Warhol) goes, you don’t read your press, you weigh it, and the fact that such press is now measured in weightless bytes has not changed the underlying point—especially when those bytes can be assigned a financial value.
There’s a wonderful sequence in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, in which the mystical bathhouse where most of the film is set is visited by a strange creature. It initially appears nonthreatening, as it has no face or feature of its own; its distinguishing trait is the ability to produce gold coins at will.
It is only once the employees of the bathhouse accept the coins that the creature begins to transform into something grotesque and ravenous — demanding to be fed even as it continues to grow to monstrous proportions, finally gorging itself on the employees and other patrons of the bathhouse, all the while dispensing coins to its victims. Ultimately, it is the timely intervention of the protagonist, Sen, that saves the day, reducing the creature back to its benign former self.
For she was the only one who rejected the gold.
David Polansky is a political theorist and a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy.