James McLeod's Twitter reality check: What the hell are we doing, anyway?
Those of us who post online will keep on posting because that’s what we’ve been doing for most of two decades, because it kinda felt good at first.
By: James McLeod
If you’ve spent any time on Twitter in the past week, the energy is downright mutinous.
Twitchy, hardcore social media addicts are outraged that they might be strong-armed into paying for the privilege of feeding their addiction (or at least keeping their status-signalling blue check mark while doing so). They loudly and angrily declare that they won’t do it. They will pack up their witty quips and leave.
If this is you, please know that I sympathize with you. (I am one of you.) But it’s a bit much to ask me to take your protestations seriously.
I see you. You spend more time on this website than you spend on Netflix. I know because I’m here too. The notion that you could quit any time you want and simply walk away from it … well … I guess I’ll believe it when I see it.
It’s especially galling when the guy who’s demanding revenue from you is the richest man in the world, and Twitter’s biggest addict. Now he is getting high on his own supply. That always goes well.
Journalists in particular point out the absurdity of being asked to pay money for Twitter, when their relentless, minute-by-minute posts are an enormous part of the value. They are creating the content — for free! — that helps keep other addicts glued to their smartphones. My dad goes to Twitter because Andrew Coyne says smart things there. Dad has never posted a tweet in his life. Coyne posts a lot.
Perhaps it’s absurd that journalists like Coyne will be asked to pay $8 per month to keep their “verified” status and additional privileges for super-users. But that absurdity isn’t anything new.
More than a decade ago, when Twitter was fairly new, I remember somebody talking about the proceedings of the Leveson Inquiry — a British investigation into the shocking culture of tabloid newspapers hacking celebrities’ phones. As the inquiry testimony unfolded, the best way to follow all the details was on Twitter. At the time, this was new.
I forget who said it, but somebody marveled about Twitter, saying it was a pretty neat trick for the website to somehow convince most of the United Kingdom’s top journalists to post their work onto the website that had never paid them a penny.
A lot has happened on Twitter since 2012 — GamerGate, Donald Trump, Nicki Minaj posting about her cousin’s swollen testicles, cancel culture, the world’s richest man committing securities fraud for a weed joke, the world’s richest man telling financial regulators to … well …
But through it all, Twitter’s neat trick of getting journalists to work for free has endured.
If you want to know the latest tidbits about the Freedom Convoy Inquiry in Ottawa, the best way to follow along is by reading the tweets of top-tier journalists like Tonda MacCharles, Rachel Gilmore, Judy Trinh, Chris Nardi and others.
But Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and his immediate move to charge verified accounts $8/month poses a rather fundamental question.
Why the hell are any of us doing this?
Why is Andrew Coyne debasing himself jousting with randos? Why are otherwise astute and thoughtful journalists relentlessly providing free content to a site that rewards them with death threats? Never mind the eight bucks a month — it’ll be $10/month in Canada, right? — why are any of us working for the richest man in the world for free?
Take a step back. Why are we posting on Instagram and Facebook, providing the core value to a company that wrecks democracy, screws with our kids, and raked in US$4.3 billion in pure profit in the past three months?
Lately I’ve been making a point of trying to spend more time on TikTok, because that seems to be where the action is, and I don’t want to be left behind. The app is the unseemly endpoint of the whole awful adventure with social media posting over the past 15 or 20 years. Many of the videos are blatantly manipulative engagement bait, designed to hack the algorithm in one way or another.
Nearly everything is fake in one way or another, and the closest thing to substantive intellectually stimulating content is a random stranger ranting confidently while staring directly into the camera.
You can try to seek out good and reputable content, but you’re mostly grappling in the dark, because nearly everything on TikTok is delivered through a profoundly opaque algorithm that could be influencing your perspective and warping the information you’re receiving.
On TikTok it is even more difficult than Twitter to verify the accuracy of the information you’re receiving. Anything goes as long as you’re not talking about Taiwanese independence or the Tiananmen Square massacre.
TikTok isn’t even profitable, by the way. It lost US$7 billion last year to buy its rapid growth. It really makes you wonder what exactly they think they’re buying.
The most successful TikTok creators get paid insultingly small amounts of money.
The app is compelling in the same way that Twitter is good for following news, but it begs the same question that Elon Musk is implicitly forcing us to grapple with.
Why the hell are any of us doing this?
For nearly two decades many of us have all been hustling and posting, chasing the quantifiable validation of social media interactions, and this vague idea that being successful on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram or wherever will be good for us somehow.
Has all this posting actually been good for us? Journalists, do you feel like all this unpaid work has benefited you? TikTok posters, is it making you happy? Did all the time you spent on Facebook make your life better?
Do you actually want to be an influencer? Does that seem like a happy life? Making aspirational images and videos doesn’t actually make for an aspirational life.
For me, the answer is some combination of network effects, and good old fashioned force of habit. I'm on Twitter because it's still the best way to feel like I’ve got my finger on the pulse, and I post tweets because I'm already there scrolling, because it's easy, and because I want to be in the mix.
Inertia is a powerful thing. Those of us who post online will keep on posting because that’s what we’ve been doing for most of two decades, because it kinda felt good at first, and then later just because everyone else is doing it.
But the richest man in the world just bought Twitter and he’s not only asking you to work for free, he’s saying that the only way he can make the finances work is if you give him your credit card number and pay him about a hundred bucks a year.
It’s up to you. But I think now’s a good moment to ask yourself:
Why the hell are any of us doing this?
James McLeod is a Toronto-based writer and communications professional. From 2018 to 2020 he covered Canadian tech for the Financial Post.
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