THE ELON IS AT IT AGAIN CHRONICLES: A SOCIAL MEDIA RANT

Twitter? So What!

A deep misunderstanding of social.

Twitter is not some global town square. I’ve been to the town square and all there is is some guy shuffling around picking up the trash.

Twitter is a bar, a party, a club. That’s where the journalists have always hung out.

The internet has turned us all into general managers, marketers, journalists. Hell, I’m now my own personal janitor.

We’re all journalists and being an establishment journalist doesn’t bring the kudos it once did. You work for Rupert? Bully for you.

You see, journalists have become more literally journalists than ever before. They barely report anything. They journal opinions, which puts them on the same level as any dumb arsehole on Twitter. Some manage to rise above it. Many sink below it.

Elon Musk likes to think he is “the mayor” of Twitter. He’s not.

He’s the arsehole at a party buying the drinks. We don’t like him because he’s buying the drinks. Nonetheless, we do like the drinks.

I’ve organised, DJ’d, VJ’d, bussed, bartended, MC’d, maitre de’d and tidied up more parties and events than I care to mention.

These events and parties are the IRL things that look most like social media.

Being in the company of attractive people under the influence of a few too many beverages, whilst the heady disco music plays is a recipe for some to become discombobulated.

It’s for this reason you can’t facilitate your own party without it descending into a complete mess. Elon is trying to facilitate his own party.

When I was a young designer a manufacturer invited me to come and see their factory in Germany. It demystified certain stereotypes about the German people.

When we were in Cologne to have lunch, I was reminded that people are simply people. We eat. We sleep. We do stuff. Then we repeat.

Lunch was in a huge eating hall. It was decked out with tressel tables and bench seating, each table seating around two dozen people.

The hall was a gothic structure that seemed like it had been feeding the masses for centuries. There was easily 50 tables, the place was packed, so over a thousand people.

The menu was limited. On the food front, there was simply lunch. Schnitzel with vegetables and bread and roast pork. The drinks? Water, coffee, beer, wine.

As we know, the mind plays tricks, yet there was something about the experience that stuck in my head.

Is this how you feed hundreds of people once you’ve got cities?

Growing up in “new world” Australia I couldn’t think of an equivalent experience.

The key lesson for me was that if you want to feed the masses, you’ve got to keep it simple. Elon is starting to get tricky.

A solution or the solution?

When something solves a problem and becomes widely adopted it is assumed that this is the best solution.

Also, when a new problem arrives humanity is prone to seek out a universal solution, a one size fits all approach.

Like the food hall in Cologne, it’s effective on one level, yet in terms of its cultural value, it’s restrictive. The approach demands a limiting of options to make it work. It’s why when you cram 200 people into a venue for a wedding, you get the set menu, not a la carte. It’s the only way that the caterer can deliver. Yet once the practicalities of feeding a room of 200 people have been met, there are a range of social and cultural expectations that need to be met, too.

While humans have been eating for a rather long time, thus requiring an evolution of solutions, the internet is a rather new thing by comparison.

It’s hard to imagine, but a mere 30 years ago, the internet did not work.

It was very hard to find anything and getting someone to find your stuff was impossible.

It was a city in need of some giant food halls.

That Geocities was one of the first attempts to address this problem was not a coincidence. The problem? No site was big enough to be reliable enough. While there were lots of tasty flavours on offer, there was a glaring lack of substance.

When you’re starving you’ll eat anything, but mostly, you’re going to seek out something for which there is a reliable supply.

Reliability is the hallmark of all the big players on the internet, despite their claims to the contrary.

There is no more glaring an example than Google, simulataneously the most boring and the most reliable company on the internet. The internet is a maze and we need a good map to find things.

Google understood this enough to be able to provide the best map for the virtual (Google Search) and real life (Google Maps) spaces we inhabit. That it is the foundation of their brand.

Throw in email, and you’ve got a solid product range.

My advise fellas? Stick to that and you’ll last millenia.

Twitter is not the town square, its a bar. Before the internet came along, journalists didn’t hang out in the town square, they hung out in bars and clubs.

One of the more interesting things my wife and I have done was trying to sell our restaurant.

Paul, the agent we ended up with was a lovely chap. We used to call him Mr 100%.

Have you every heard the proverb:

“If you’re going to buy a Mercedes, borrow someone elses Mercedes to turn up to the showroom. That way, the salesperson will take you seriously.”

If you’re going to sell your restaurant make sure you get an agent who understands restaurants.

Paul owned his own restaurant. He knew what it was all about.

Needless to say, we spent a lot of time sitting around drinking coffee, talking about selling, and buying, restaurants.

Rule One Of Buying A Restaurant?

Don’t change anything. Well, don’t change anything until you at least understand how what you’ve bought works.

It’s crazy how many people buy their favourite restaurant with the “If I just fix one thing, this place will be perfect”. That that one thing just happens to be a lack of avant-garde jazz playing on the sound system, or that they’re not serving the correct brand of apricot jam is usually indicative that they’ve got no idea how it works.

After three months of avant-garde jazz, the crowd has entirely gone and you’re wondering what happened.

So tip one for Mr Musk. No avant-garde jazz. I like avant-garde jazz. Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, check it out, but I do not want avant-garde jazz or its Twitterverse equivalent either.

Elon has been playing a lot of avant-garde jazz lately.

Experienced operators know that just a single person can empty a packed bar in the space of an hour. Once you spot them, you want them out of the room. Fast.

Big advertisers are reliable, but they’re nervous.

Don’t play them avant-garde jazz. Don’t start fights. Elon is playing avant-garde jazz, badly and starting fights.

When it comes to a party, you know the one arsehole that never gets thrown out? The one buying the drinks.

It’s always fascinating to see how rich people behave when it’s party time. Money is no object, but power is in the eye of the beholder, and typically the power is more important than the money.

Some nice people become rich and remain nice people. Some turn into arseholes, money can do that. But no arsehole ever, I mean ever, became rich and turned into a nice person. More often than not, they seek out wealth to facilitate becoming an even bigger arsehole.

Don’t get me started on philanthropists.

Rich people like to think they’re the life of the party, just like Elon.

The biggest mistake the guy buying the drinks usually makes is when he decides he’s going to go and “socialise”, which usually consists of asking people if they are having a good time and then reminding them that he’s buying all the drinks.

This is usually the point when someone yells, “There’s an exhibition opening on Flinders Lane. Free cask wine! Who’s coming?”

What do you expect? As Prince said, parties aren’t meant to last.

I don’t get all this carry on about Twitter. A rich person bought something. He paid a lot. Big deal. Who cares?

Brand managers are fleeing Twitter because they understand one simple fact.

Twitter is simply a brand. In this day and age, the technical challenge that they solve is mostly trivial. OK, it’s a technical challenge the boy genius appears to be struggling with.

FYI, Twitter didn’t “stop working within a week”.

Twitter is not the town square. Twitter is a bar. Despite the Zuck and the Muskrat and Google just trying to buy anything that vaguely smells like competition.

And how was Twitter “competition” to Musk? The narrative.

So Musk bought the narrative. Like the bohos at the rick man’s party, the narrative is not so easy to control.

Instagram and Facebook are going the same way as MySpace. Metaverse was a disaster. These “geniuses” are wasting cash because they actually don’t know what to do. They’re the arsehole at the party buying the drinks, thinking that they’re the reason everyone is having a good time.

So Musk bought the narrative. Makes sense. And Twitter is the narrative. Unlike The Zuck, Musk actually has a personality. No, not a pleasant one, but a personality at least.

Musk should do the opposite of what he’s planning. He can go on with his phony free speech crusade (and it’s looking particularly phony as we speak). Fine. Gives him something to tweet about. But he should cut the grand vision and just make sure he keeps the servers working.

People want to just go on doing what they’ve been doing. Don’t navigate your way through the packed dance floor to demand the DJ starts playing avant-garde jazz because that’s “real” music.

What’s the only meaningful change I’ve seen since Musk took over?

He now appears in my timeline a lot more. He’s boring, it’s pathetic.

But he’s the guy buying the drinks at the party so let him just get on with it. And keep the servers working. It’s the equivalent to the hospitality “Keep the drinks flowing”. That all the crowd cares about. Once the drinks stop flowing, the party’s over.

Now if Musk’s plan is to serve me nothing but lousy drinks, I’m moving to another bar. And no, I really don’t care what everyone else in the bar is drinking.

The people who fight in bars always get thrown out eventually. Well, actually, sooner rather than later.

I know one of the most successful retailers in Australia. His key piece of advice is this. Serving the masses and being exclusive don’t mix.

Even worse, phoney exclusive is a disaster. Elon has turned checkmarks into phoney exclusive.

You can’t buy up everything for ever and before too long the competition gets serious. We’re not there yet, but people are actively starting to mention their Mastadon account in their Twitter feed.

So far, the vibe from Mastadon has been dull. Worse, boring. Ernest virtue signallers making it clear what people they hated and how Mastadon was definitely not about those sort of people. Maybe that’s what some people are looking for. It’s like a bar with no alcohol. Sure some people drink too much and need to get thrown out, but most people handle it just fine.

Even weirder, there is a lot of talk about what’s happening back at Twitter!

I wonder how the party’s going? My lord.

Still, Mastadon is a start. 8 million users as we speak. It’s an encouraging number.

But Taylor Swift has 234M followers on Instagram alone. If Swift could pull all of those users off Twitter and Instagram, well that is not a trivial number. It’s almost 20% of Instagrams users.

8 million is a fraction of a percent.

Taylor Swift is 33 year old. I can guarantee you she will still be going strong when she is 60. Madonna is 64.

That’s 27 years.

Many have tried to get a music social media off the ground. Taylor Swift would take a huge bite out of Twitter and even Tik Tok.

This doesn’t necessarily put anyone out of business but it does diversify the market and different platforms start to develop different personalities.

But these are hypothetical ideas.

So for now, the circus has a new ringmaster.

But no one goes to the circus to watch the ringmaster.

A new party is getting started and now would not be the time to leave. Things are going to get interesting. Or they won’t and we’ll just get bored and stagger off.

Loosely, I inhabit the Medium writer corner of Twitter which is about as useful as saying a group of people sitting in that booth over there.

It’s a Yoda situation. Either do or not do. While the party is going you need to get on with partying, whatever that means to you.

Don’t like the party? Sure. Leave then. I’ve always observed the most boring people leave the party first.

Oh. And the most desperate leave last. But we’re not there yet.

There used to be a band in Melbourne called the Slaughtmen. Story has it that they got their name from a group of men who used to drink at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda. The local butchers. They’d come in, in their aprons, cover in blood. A gruesome sight. A reminder as to who does the dirt work to bring you your evening meal.

We must remind ourselves of what we do together and who might be doing the dirty work.

If the eating hall is the only place in town where you can get a meal, then you’re going to see the slaughterman.

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The world is constantly changing and it is worthwhile to be reminded where everyone stands in those changes. Even if where they stand is an aweful place.

If you don’t like what people are saying you can block them.

And now we’re faced with Elon’s latest braingasm. Rate limiting. This is the equivalent of the rich arsehole stumbling over to the bar to get the bar staff serving the free drinks more slowly in the hope that the punters start buying their own drinks. They won’t. They’ll be off to Flinders Lane to drink cask wine, and if you alienate too many of them, they’ll take the crowd with them.

I am not a social creature. It is a truism that humans are social creatures and in the context of the corporatised technocracy this truism is a potentially dangerous narrative.

It centralised the state of humanity around a series of interpersonal exchanges. This is only partially true with regards to our lived reality. While interpersonal relationships are important, it is fundamentally important that we acknowledge humanity as a collective enterprise. When technocrats endevour to focus our attention at the personal level they are trying to distract us from the structural realities that are just as much, if not more, important elements within our experience of day-to-day life. Having the left individual yelling at the right individual is a complete waste of time for the individual if both the corporate left and the corporate right are using this to distract us from the fact that our commonwealth is being strip mined.

Maybe I wasn’t entirely truthful when I said I wasn’t a social person. If I’m enjoying the party, I’m often one of the last to leave. I like Twitter and I’m in no hurry to leave the party. Let’s touch on the thoughts of that great party philosopher, Prince, just one more time. Parties weren’t meant to last.

Don’t think I know what I’m talking about? Fine. It’s just an opinion. It is, however, an opinion that I didn’t need to spend billions of dollars to express.

You can follow me on Twitter here! https://twitter.com/RobertGowty