Disassembly
Or why there is no next Twitter.
When fissile material is assembled in sufficient quantity under the right circumstances, a chain reaction can take place. We know this as the basis of nuclear reactors. If the conditions of the assembly are really pushed hard the assembly can go prompt critical and thus boom, the basis of nuclear weapons.
Science metaphors are generally unhelpful for understanding the human world. This is not because scientists don’t have things to say, they obviously do, but that scientific metaphors can’t get at the weirdness and non-linearity of humans. Humans are not easily placed in discrete state categories, most real problems require at least dual process models to make a meaningful intervention, universalizing assumptions fill-in gaps in knowledge, and the list goes on. Physics is especially problematic. Mirkowsi noted the challenges of physics in his work on the co-evolution of physics and economics which explains a fair bit of both. Scientific aesthetics are seductive, they are so hard to leave that economists have a reputation for being unwilling to abandon their theoretical models when they physical universe says otherwise. Try asking an economist about the relationship between minimum wage and unemployment, or perhaps hit them with the reality that there is minimal correlation between rent controls and the building of new housing. Enjoy this meta-analysis: for most of the benefits or drawbacks of rent control, there is no relationship.
Science metaphors are bad because they lead us to incorrect, potentially damaging results, which are juiced with extra-aesthetic energy. Consider the evolution of Sociology, the entire neo-vitalist idea of the social force is all but extinct. There are alternatives, you can study the actual associations of people in context without an extra-discursive physical referent. Beware, people are really persuaded by complete ontologies.
A decade ago it was common for early social media consultants to market themselves as masters of “controlled chain reactions” which then interfaced with biology metaphors: ecosystem, viral, organic. Many of our classroom activities from this time period are completely obsolete because the unified ontology was inaccurate. There is no organic reach today. TikTok is designed to encourage lots of video creators, Pinterest actively discouraged the formation of Pinfluencers, and now courts them as they are design professionals (not one-off Pinners). We are back to teaching fairly banal marketing mix theories and if you follow the fraud, as I do, the real action is in linear IP-centric television advertising. As I argued in my book in 2018, advertising targeting has always been overrated.
So why does this mean there will be no more Twitter? Let’s assume for a minute that the physics metaphors were right, that Twitter was a controlled chain-reaction created by context collapse combined with a Metcalfe network concentration effect and social proof via intermedia agenda setting (things happening on Twitter had effects elsewhere). Twitter nearly collapsed in 2015 before the return of Jack Dorsey, the issue wasn’t a lack of social energy, but that organization was not optimized to manage it. Dorsey was particularly effective for all the reasons why the business press hated him, he allowed the company to form an effective bureaucracy which lead to effective moderation. Thus, the second golden age of Twitter.
What did Musk do then? He removed the moderator from the social reactor and put ultra-hot rods into the core, the sustained criticality absent a moderator caused the device to disassemble. He is left with a broken reactor, no moderator, and a mess of radioactive waste. Since the reactor has been destroyed, the other utilities hooked up to it have moved onto other sources of energy, even getting back to making it themselves. What does this mean practically?
- Traffic will continue to fall. The career pathway of “big on twitter” is closed. Other platforms no longer follow leads from the platform, even TMZ. Professionalization of journalists for social would mean that folks won’t be breathlessly covering the next platform as they did Twitter.
- Fragmentation has taken the material and placed it in smaller reactors with different designs (mastodon instances, blueksy, threads). None of these has the same total social load as Twitter, but as they develop, their use for users will be more appealing than a poorly aligned macro-network. These are also better run platforms which will never have uncontrolled eras, except Bluesky which is too chaotic to grow.
- Much of the social energy in these systems fizzled during the disassembly. There is just less energy for reactors in general.
Twitter was a social nuclear reactor which underwent explosive disassembly due to operator error. The social material needed to build a full scale network like this will never be piled again.
