Elon Musk and Twitter

What I think Elon Musk wants out of Twitter is the user graph. It's not some ideological play about re-weighting the reach of particular ideas or speakers.

Twitter constitutes a social graph of everyone-who's-anyone in the English-speaking world. It increases the speed with which the elite generally adopt the same position on each issue, the way a flock of birds or school of fish appear to turn as one, despite there being no leader or co-ercion. But as well as this social graph, Twitter also mints a particular form of status by conferring blue checkmarks on favoured individuals.

Musk's few gnomic announcements about his plans for Twitter include a reference to authenticating the humans. Now this is taken by many, on different sides of the debate, as being anti-bot: reducing the role of covert automated participation in Twitter is seen as a good thing, and not just by establishment Left and establishment Right figures, but even by the radical fringes, since pretty much *everyone* loses from the astroturfing and feels victimised by it.

But I think the significance is not that the role of bots will be reduced, but that there will be a tougher link between your Twitter account and your offline identity, and that those who won't provide evidence of their offline identity will be algorithmically discriminated against *alongside* the bots. If I'm right about Musk's intentions, Twitter will still permit pseudonymity, but discriminate against it. Actual humans can opt in or opt out of associating their offline identity with their Twitter account, but the incentives will be to opt in. And then Musk will control the best opt-in authenticated social graph in the world (Palantir doesn't count), and try to build other things connected with it.

The other change I imagine happening is that he's going to discount

the "blue check" privilege, and make it available to almost anyone who

is authenticated. That will devalue the currency that a lot of the laptop class is invested in, and lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In anticipation and ignorance of Musk's plans, many have announced or supported one or other of two possible countermeasures: better anti-trust enforcement and getting off Twitter in favour of an alternative, typically Mastodon. These are both good things too - it's possible and self-consistent to support both Musk's moves *and* these countermeasures.

Commenting on the matter, Marc Andreesen, creator of the first mainstream graphical web browser, said that efforts to restrict freedom of speech would now move elsewhere in the stack, implicitly including the desktop. The implications for Gemini are clear: alternatives are needed. But I think the alternative really will be in the form of more "group chat" arrangements on Telegram and similar, for the time being.