Let's try this again, shall we?

In this newsletter: the surprising fact that this newsletter exists; I wrote a book!; the high cost of dumb conspiracy theories; fun things to read and do

It's me, hi

OK so here is what happened, in rough chronological order:

1. Last year I thought I would start a newsletter. This would be fun!

2. I chose a nice service called Revue to send these newsletters

3. Then I basically forgot to send any newsletters?

4. Revue got bought by Twitter

5. Then Twitter got bought by Elon Musk

6. That's going well

7. Revue is being shut down in a few weeks

This is a bit inconvenient, given that (like everyone else) I’m now thinking about how to stay in touch with all my computer friends if Twitter suddenly goes away. I have no idea if the Good Ship Hellsite is actually going to sink* – but if it is, it’s probably not ideal that my current lifeboat is welded to the deck.

So: I'm sending this to my Revue list, then moving everything over to Buttondown, which is a delightful little newsletter service. Future emails will come from tomphillips@buttondown.email.

I don't want make any promises I will hilariously fail to keep, but I am going to try to newsletter at least every couple of weeks. Might be a bit more, might be a bit less? If you are not getting them then please check either a) your spam folder, or b) that I am still alive. They will also live on the internet here. And let's hope we don't have to do this again in six months when the boss of Buttondown sacks all his staff in a fit of pique as well. (That probably won’t happen, because it is literally just one guy.)

What has happened since the last time I sent a newsletter?

I mean it has been quite a while, it was, what... five Education Secretaries ago? I think we can all agree that a number of events have occurred since then.

But undoubtedly the most important event was that Conspiracy – the book I wrote with Jonn Elledge about the long, weird history of conspiracy theories – was published. People seem to really like it! It was the book of the week in The Times, who called it "uproarious". It is selling well. We keep getting nice tweets from people who've read it. All in all, a lovely time has been had. (Also, I wrote a bunch of articles about things from the book for the i, the Irish Independent and the New Statesman.)

Here is a picture of us posing like idiots at the launch party, which helpfully happened on the day Boris Johnson resigned.

Elon's $44billion tinfoil hat

One of the dangers of writing about conspiracist thinking is that you begin to resemble the people you’re writing about: you start seeing it absolutely everywhere. I think that this is because it is, in fact, everywhere? Pretty much everybody is a conspiracy theorist about something. But the problem remains: you still end up pointing wildly at random stuff and shouting “Look! Look! It’s all connected!” at unnerved passers-by. Doesn’t matter how many citations to reputable journals you punctuate your ranting with, if you’re shouting any variant of “they walk among us!” then people are still going to slowly back away, smiling politely.

So, with some trepidation, let’s do exactly that! There has been a lot of debate about exactly why Elon Musk initially tried to buy Twitter, even if he later tried very hard to get out of buying it. Plausible answers include: “it was a joke that he didn’t realise he wouldn’t be able to get out of”; “mistakenly believing that Twitter was the biggest website on the internet”; “genuine ideological commitment to using it as a political cudgel”; and “was bored, wanted attention”. These are all good answers and most of them probably have a bit of truth. But I think an underrated explanation is: he honestly bought the conspiracy theory.

I mean, I can’t be sure. But I suspect Elon Musk genuinely believed that Twitter was knowingly engaged in a deliberate, secretive effort to suppress conservative voices on its platform. Not just “he vaguely disagreed with their moderation policies”; he really thought that there was a covert plot that he could expose. I think he expected that on the day the deal closed he would be able to walk into Twitter HQ, demand to see the site’s code, and find in it something that said, like,

IF varIdeology=‘Conservative’ THEN downrank=10

and at that point… stuff would happen?

Presumably that ‘stuff’ would have included Elon presenting his damning evidence to the world, at which point everybody would say “You truly are the greatest detective! Thankyou, Free Speech Batman!”, and he would get another 200k cybertruck preorders as the shadowbanned masses flocked back. Also maybe he would sue the old execs for fraud and wokecrimes? Anyway, in my mind, the scenes at Twitter in recent days have mostly involved Musk screaming “But it must be in here somewhere!” at a quailing Tesla software engineer as he searches frantically for the smoking gun. The engineer doesn’t think it is in there, but he cannot be sure, because this is not his area of expertise (he was originally hired by Elon to make the screens in Teslas loop a GIF saying “sick burn” every time the car caught fire).

My evidence for this theory is vibes. I mean for starters, he keeps on tweeting kind of adjacent conspiracy theories (about Paul Pelosi, about FTX, etc). He tweets vague threats about how evidence of Twitter leadership covering things up is going to come out. His information diet seems to consist heavily of sources from the paranoid right-wing grievancesphere. He generally seems pretty conspiracy-minded; he’s long viewed short sellers as a conspiracy against him. And you know, there’s stuff like this:

This is one of my favourite categories of modern conspiracy theory: namely, free market enthusiasts who turn into raving paranoiacs the moment the market doesn't give them the results they expected. (In this case, maintaining that Twitter's imploding ad business is all the fault of a small band of wokerati despite – say – the president of one of the country's biggest ad industry bodies patiently trying to explain that advertisers "are not being manipulated by activist groups", they're just making rational business choices.)

Basically, it turns out there are a lot of people whose support for market-driven economics seems to have been based on the unacknowledged belief that the market's preferences would always reflect their own personal taste. When that suddenly turns out not to be the case, rather than having the obvious response – shrug, say “oh well”, go about your day – they decide that this must be the result of some nefarious, if nebulous, plot. It can’t simply be that my preferences aren’t those of the market at large! There must be activists manipulating the system! The Left Blob has taken control of everything!

This is another one of those things that, once you spot it, you start noticing absolutely everywhere. At this point I feel like it’s the ur-explanation for something like half of all elite political discourse in recent times. (It probably needs a catchy name though to make people talk about it. Capitalist dissonance? Market denialism?) Anyway, as a result on both sides of the Atlantic you now have whole emergent ideologies forming on the right of politics around the basic proposition that, when businesses explain to you how they can make the most money, they're lying. “Actually we’ve found employees are more productive with flexible working.” No they aren’t! “Our ads sell less stuff if they’re displayed next to antisemitic screeds.” Why do you hate freedom? “I can make more per acre with a solar farm.” SHUT YOUR FILTHY FARMER MOUTH AND GROW SOME FUCKING APPLES LIKE GOD INTENDED!

In Conspiracy, we wrote about how conspiracist thinking often stems from ascribing motive and agency to systemic trends:

...our world is often shaped in profound ways by unseen forces that can seem like the product of conscious design – from social change to patterns of disease to the effects of the market. Many of these forces are, as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, ‘not originally the effect of any human wisdom’, but simply a ‘consequence of a certain propensity in human nature’. All our lives, we’re constantly pushed, pulled and prodded by invisible hands. Is it really surprising that, sometimes, we imagine those hands must be attached to somebody?

I find it quite funny that we’ve come all the way around, and that lots of people who would normally point to exactly these kind of forces as both an explanation of and a justification for our world are suddenly freaking out about them. I also think it’s quite funny (in a bleak sort of way) that there’s at least a chance that the world’s richest man blew $44billion to discover that actually, no, there was no hidden hand manipulating his favourite online hangout – there’s just a certain propensity in human nature.

Extra fun things to watch, read and do

• Have you been watching Andor? You should watch Andor! My hopes were not high for an unasked-for Disney+ prequel to a prequel to Star Wars, but... it turns out it's amazing? Not just "good by the erratic standards of Star Wars spin-off TV shows", but an honest-to-goodness cracker of a slow-burn political thriller. This newsletter was nearly entirely devoted to banging on about how good it is, and tbh there's a decent chance the next one will in fact be just that. For now, Adam Serwer wrote a great bit for The Atlantic about its depiction of politics.

• A book I loved: Natasha Pulley's The Half-Life of Valery K, based on a mysterious real-life Soviet nuclear incident, which mixes creeping radiation horror and surveillance axiety with spiky wit and beautifully observed relationships. Funnier and more romantic than Chernobyl.

• A short thread of comparisons between Elon Musk and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, by a railway historian who just wants to drag Brunel.

• Huge thanks to the social team at the Scottish Parliament, who made me giggle uncontrollably for an embrassingly long time the other week with this graphic calling Stephen Kerr MSP a nutritious potato

  

Footnote: Blue birds, black swans

*OK, I wasn’t going to actually write a take on “what might happen to Twitter”, but if you want my best guess: well, look, Musk’s leadership is sufficiently chaotic and incompetent that prediction is hard. It’s like he’s specifically trying to manufacture black swan events. If the multiple reports of whole critical infrastructure teams being reduced to zero are true (and they come from well-sourced reporters), then the chances of a catastrophic and potentially unrecoverable outage are now very real. This is a good thread that outlines a bunch of plausible scenarios. The main reason to think this won’t happen immediately, at least from a tech standpoint, is that the people who Musk fired were in fact pretty talented, and they built robust systems with lots of redundancy.

More likely, I suspect, is that the service gradually death spirals from a thousand cuts on three fronts. On the tech side, the infrastructure will slowly degrade as only the biggest fires get put out, making the user experience progressively worse. If failures come at peak traffic times around major events (hi, World Cup) then one of the main draws of Twitter is no longer there. On the business side, high debt and falling ad revenue force increasingly aggressive monetisation pushes, which also make the user experience suck more (“ruin the product into profitability” is an oddly familiar pathway for tech firms). Meanwhile the cuts to trust and safety also, you guessed it, make the user experience worse, while opening up significant legal and political liability. These effects will be unevenly distributed at first, with the experience maybe not noticeably different for, say, Western English speakers who use the site to find interesting links and chat about the news; meanwhile elsewhere, a crisis is brewing and there’s nobody to even spot that it’s happening.

All of these things increase the risk of a catastrophic incident, but they can kill the site even without one. One or even two of these problems might be survivable, but all at once is a tough ask. There’s no single mass exodus event; instead, people just begin to spend less and less time there, bit by bit communities start to make homes on other platforms, creators increasingly save their material for different venues, and all the network effects that drew people towards the site go into reverse. At its best, Twitter is a giant, joyous serendipity engine; if it has fewer people spending less time there, the chance of any one of those happy mediated coincidences falls. This is, in general, how social networks die: nodes start blinking out, the network thins, and at some point they lose critical mass. It’s like a neglected mall: sure, maybe it burns down overnight, but more likely it just gets less popular until the only people still there are three goths and a man shouting at pigeons. My best guess is that in a year’s time – absent some dramatic reversal of Musk’s approach – there will probably still be a thing called “Twitter”, and maybe we will still go there sometimes and reminisce, but it won’t really be Twitter any more. I hope I’m wrong, though.