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When I started out as an assistant at Vice, one of my duties was to check the slush pile of our main email address’s inbox, where spam accumulated along with hate mail and the occasional legitimate query. One day I got an email from some guy who had made a mashup of Faces of Death and America’s Funniest Home Videos. For the uninitiated, Faces of Death was an infamous film series that showed footage of real people actually dying in car accidents, in shootings, and executions and so on; this enterprising young man had paired those horrors with Bob Saget’s dad jokes and the boing-oing sound effects from America’s Funniest Home Videos. I said sure, I’d like to see that, and the guy mailed in a DVD and I watched it. It wasn’t tasteful or nuanced, it no doubt lacked the requisite permissions from ABC Entertainment Inc, but by gum it delivered on its premise in a way that say, The Eternals did not.
This would have been in 2010 or so, several vibe shifts and a whole technological epoch ago. The internet was ubiquitous but not all-encompassing; social media was an oddity and streaming services barely existed (Netflix began offering streaming video in the US that year). This meant you discovered movies and magazines and music in old-fashioned ways, through word of mouth and burned CDs and torrent links, without the assistance of algorithms. Pandora, with its promise to allow you to listen to music based on a song you selected, was a novelty. We were still in the era when stuff was hard to find. If you had heard of the Velvet Underground in the 80s, you literally couldn’t buy many of their records, since they were out of print. If you wanted to watch Eraserhead or Pink Flamingos, you had to trek out to your local independent video rental place, and if you didn’t have one of those in your town, good luck kid, you can always move to New York when you turn 18. The counterculture—and there was a counterculture, for years and years—had to be sought out.
If you were an artist (an old term for “content creator”) who was part of this counterculture, you were probably making art for a niche audience, which might have been the Lower East Side scene or just you and a few of your friends. The guy who made the Faces of Death mashup had no dreams of going viral, because “going viral” didn’t really exist. You just hoped that what you made would be appreciated by the people it was made for, and maybe it was only made for a few people.
But say you weren’t an artist, but the editor of a small to mid-sized magazine or website. You had an idea of who bought your magazine or read your online articles, either through market research or the comment section or letters to the editor (oh, wow). This is to say that your content was for a specific group of people, a group maybe defined not so much by demographics as worldview. There’s a certain kind of person who was subscribing to The New Republic in 2001, and a certain kind of person refreshing the Gawker homepage in 2005, and god help these people if they should ever meet. Oh, and your most reliable online readers would come to you by typing out your homepage at the top of their browsers. If someone didn’t know to do that, they might never read your stuff, and that was fine, because it probably wasn’t for them. The internet was a bunch of little boxes with very little connective tissue.
The internet has not been like that for many years. There is a connective tissue between all the little communities and subcultures, because we all have Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Social media allows us to all be in the same huge room together, all shouting at the same time. Twitter in particular is a muddle of ideas and conversations, most of them moronic. You have economists and hardcore leftists and “sigma males” and meme accounts and sports bloggers and K-pop fans and a million others, all able to listen in on each other’s conversations, like the world’s biggest cafeteria but without food. Conversations aren’t contained inside little boxes, but can spill out into the wider internet. This, it turns out, is very bad for everyone.
Take “Bean Dad,” a.k.a. John Roderick. Many years ago Roderick was barely famous, a local celeb in the Seattle indie scene. (His band, the Long Winters, put out a good album back in 2003, and he ran a quirky campaign for City Council in 2015.) When he tweeted what he thought was an amusing story about refusing to tell his daughter how to use a can opener so she could figure out how to use it herself, it went viral in the worst way. People accused him of child abuse, then dug up old tweets of him making extremely offensive jokes. The only defense of this is that until probably like 2013, a lot of people used Twitter to say offensive things or deploy stereotypes in sarcastic ways, assuming wrongly that tweets were ephemeral and that no one would take them seriously. Roderick may have been under the impression that only his followers were going to see his jokes and stories, and they would know him well enough to understand that he wasn’t a racist or an anti-Semite or a monster.
But the people who encountered him for the first time as Bean Dad had no context. As his tweets spread to a wider and wider audience, many users came across them through quote-tweets that accused him of starving his daughter and making her cry. Maybe understandably, they believed him to be a terrible person. Some even called Child Protective Services on him.
This is a cautionary tale, not just for Twitter users, but for anyone who makes content. You may think that the best thing is for as many people as possible to see your writing or your photos or your videos or your jokes, and that the worst-case scenario is that your work languishes in obscurity. But you’re wrong. The worst-case scenario isn’t obscurity, but the entire world paying attention to you, including many people who will misinterpret what you say, not get your references or your jokes, and denounce you as a bigot or an idiot. Social media algorithms being what they are, the more people call you out, the more attention your original content gets, which brings out even more haters, a cycle that only ends when you delete your account and apologize for the posts, or the dogpile moves on to their next arbitrarily chosen target.
Your goal, whether you’re a media company or just a person making stuff for fun, isn’t to reach everyone, or at least it shouldn’t be. You want to find the people who will love your work so much that they’ll pay to consume it and share it themselves. You want subscribers, fans, devotees–not a huge number of passersby who will click on your headlines, maybe skim the first paragraph of your story, but then click away. Inspiring passion in 100 people is better (and more profitable) than provoking a “meh” from 10,000.
I was thinking about this stuff as Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter caused a collective freakout among many of the left-leaning tweeters I follow. Some say they’re prepared to leave the social network, making plans to go to Mastodon or CounterSocial instead, smaller platforms with far less reach. Some conservatives have already migrated to right-wing sites that take a more lenient stance toward conspiracy theories and hate speech than Twitter does. And Substack just launched a chat feature in an attempt to make its platform more social network-y.
This hasn’t quite happened yet, but you can see a path toward a restoration of the old balkanized internet, where people and content were largely confined to little boxes. Left-wing politics Twitter could move over to Mastodon and a collection of Substack chats, right-wing politics Twitter could go to Truth Social and Parler, meme and comedy creators could focus on Instagram and TikTok, more opinion-havers could write newsletters instead of tweeting and recreate something like the mid-2000s blogosphere. This process could get hastened if Twitter becomes clunkier and less user-friendly (which it might under Musk’s seat-of-his-pants management style), or it might slow down if people end up not liking Mastodon or Substack chat. God knows there have been plenty of “alternative” social networks that never really got off the ground. Remember Ello? No? Exactly.
If Twitter dies, I’ll genuinely miss its wide-open spaces. Because so many people are on it, it’s a great place to share your work and hope that it can find an audience. I’ve become fans of writers and comedians and podcasts because I saw them first on Twitter, and I’m sure that there are people out there who subscribe to this Substack because they saw me on Twitter. If you follow the right mix of people, Twitter can be a fun mix of commentary, links to important work, and jokes–though there are fewer jokes now than a few years ago because all the comedians got into politics.
But if Twitter dies, I hope that nothing replaces it. Social media has incentivized all kinds of terrible behavior; it’s also given birth to a new kind of monoculture. Instead of helping users discover new music it just spurs discussion of Taylor Swift, BTS, and other mega-stars. Social media is a bad place to learn about movies, but it’s a great place to share your takes about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And so on. It took a while for people to figure it out, but if Twitter is like a public square, it’s probably a bad idea to share your controversial or antisocial opinions there, or to display art that might potentially piss off the normies.
Instead of a public square, we need safe spaces where people can experiment, be weird, make jokes, and form actual connections. Some of these spaces will probably be filled with horrible things. Most won’t appeal to you. But maybe you can find one that seems like it was made just for you, and feel like you’ve discovered something that was inside you all along. You might not be able to share your joy at this discovery with the entire world, but that’s OK. You won’t need to.