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60    <h1 class="post-title p-name" itemprop="name headline">Tinker twitter saturn spez</h1>
61    <p class="post-meta">
62      <time class="dt-published" datetime="2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00" itemprop="datePublished">Nov 8, 2022
63      </time></p>
64  </header>
65
66  <div class="post-content e-content" itemprop="articleBody">
67    <p>Important vocab first:</p>
68
69<blockquote>
70  <p><strong>tumblr</strong>, verb: to misunderstand a network so badly that you fire your core customers on day 1. Not your <em>best</em> customers, but the ones who are connected in such a way that your ecosystem evaporates when they are removed. Also when wordpress buys your unicorn for one penny on the dollar</p>
71</blockquote>
72
73<p>I am a lapsed social media luddite.
74After abstaining through the 10s, I joined twitter for real in march 2020, neck deep in nyc covid, because I sensed it had information not available in the news.</p>
75
76<p>This is technically true if you define ‘information’ as muttered 10-word prophecies exhumed from 2014, or meme formats with 36 hour half lives.
77It is less true if you’re talking about things that will still be right in 8 hours.</p>
78
79<p>Rocky beginning.
80But it’s a language that I learned to read, albeit in middle age, and while I was never fluent, I’m conversational.
81I know and like some of its classics.</p>
82
83<p>This is an epitaph for the civilization that produced those classics.
84I’m not the person to write this; I have only been a leaf on a large tree.
85But twitter is a part of my external brain and it will feel like a phantom limb when it is gone.</p>
86
87<p>This is about what I will lose as an organ to which I have outsourced some of my neurology goes dark.</p>
88
89<ul id="markdown-toc">
90  <li><a href="#gold-teeth-and" id="markdown-toc-gold-teeth-and">Gold teeth and</a></li>
91  <li><a href="#what-happens-when-an-elephant-dies" id="markdown-toc-what-happens-when-an-elephant-dies">What happens when an elephant dies</a></li>
92  <li><a href="#tinker-as-in-des-moines" id="markdown-toc-tinker-as-in-des-moines">Tinker as in des moines</a></li>
93  <li><a href="#too-many-notes" id="markdown-toc-too-many-notes">Too many notes</a></li>
94  <li><a href="#millicronkite-exposure" id="markdown-toc-millicronkite-exposure">Millicronkite exposure</a></li>
95  <li><a href="#appendix-other-takes" id="markdown-toc-appendix-other-takes">Appendix: other takes</a></li>
96</ul>
97
98<h2 id="gold-teeth-and">Gold teeth and</h2>
99
100<p><img src="https://abe-winter.github.io/assets/bonk.png" alt="screenshot of tweet about saying 'bonk' in a work mtg" /></p>
101
102<p>Twitter was not the biggest social network but it was the biggest social network of text<sup id="fnref:for-text" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:for-text" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup>.
103Maybe that makes it the <em>smartest</em> network.
104As with all parasitic interactions, a lot depends on whether you have latched on to the neck or the armpit.</p>
105
106<p>It is also inscrutable unless you dip constantly into the stream.
107A river of anti-lethe, a drug that stops being addictive if you forget to use it for a day.
108A tower of babel built 40 words at a time.
109A ladder to heaven made of haiku-length snark shot out of a cannon.
110If the cannon stops (or if you are busy and can’t keep up), the tower falls.</p>
111
112<p>It provides dense shared context; it’s the densest of the surviving large platforms in terms of how many different authors you can read at once.
113It’s the most curation-friendly.</p>
114
115<p>Comedy, if you’re lacking context, is very hard to translate, in a way that literal text is not.
116Mastodon (at least the version I’ve had access to) feels sedate and careful compared to twitter.
117Jokes on mastodon have to be <em>decoded</em> by scholars like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninurta-P%C4%81qid%C4%81t%27s_Dog_Bite">the doctor in nippur</a>.
118There are too few eyes.</p>
119
120<p>The most online of us are filter feeders, like oysters.
121They clean the water, convert garbage to a luxury food, and possibly mitigate storm surges I think.<sup id="fnref:surge" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:surge" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup>
122Once in a while we crack one open and find its injury has been converted to a pearl.</p>
123
124<p>
124Learning to read twitter made me think of New Slang, the Shins song.</p>
125
126<p>I always thought the song was about being kicked out of vegas, but the guy says it’s about trying to return home and discovering that you can’t – about ‘saturn return’<sup id="fnref:saturn" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:saturn" class="footnote" rel="footnote">3</a></sup>, an astrology concept where in your late 20s you go back so that you can move on.
127I’m not sure how old twitter is in actual years but in zodiacal platform dog years, what, about 29?</p>
128
129<p>Dense shared context supports rapidly evolving language and allusions, but the other side of that coin is ‘context collapse’, the friction when a rock is overturned and private languages are misinterpreted in harsh sunlight.
130You could read a danah boyd article about this OR you could just watch comic patti harrison’s <a href="https://youtu.be/HZIvpTrNNmo?t=288">30 second apology</a> for being kicked for abusing her blue check by impersonating nilla wafers.</p>
131
132<p>(More later on fun with blue checks).</p>
133
134<p>It is also a prayer wheel for making brands, and other incumbent powers, look unhip<sup id="fnref:what" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:what" class="footnote" rel="footnote">4</a></sup>.</p>
135
136<p>What I’m saying is it’s a giant circulatory system for memes (memes as in motile ideas, not as in photos with text caption).
137What happens when a giant circulatory system stops?</p>
138
139<h2 id="what-happens-when-an-elephant-dies">What happens when an elephant dies</h2>
140
141<p>If you’ve watched the nature channel after curfew, or fullmetal alchemist, or the 2nd season of the WB teen drama Lavoisier, you know that when a large animal dies, its matter and energy are conserved.</p>
142
143<p>This is of little help to the elephant, who is not the beneficiary of a conservation law. Elephants <em>can</em> be created and destroyed, or at least converted into several billion ants plus 0.58 hyenas.</p>
144
145<p>Something I learned on twitter which I think is approximately true is that all c
145oal comes from trees who died before fungus figured out how to break down lignin.
146If twitter gets shut down and reduced to the training set for GPT-5, this may be some kind of metaphor.</p>
147
148<p>Networks of course have no moral valence, but many of the things I like are delivered via a network.
149I’m not just talking about podcasts and git repos, but also:
150safe water, various kinds of climate control, foods fresh + stale, cardboard boxes and what’s inside may surprise you.</p>
151
152<p>Networks also deliver bad things, like 9/11, and so we sometimes try to disrupt them.
153They can re-form, for the same reasons and under similar conditions as they formed in the first place, but are legit weakened for a while like when one cuts an undersea fiber and one’s internet slows down.</p>
154
155<p>Degrading communication links is in fact a great lightweight way to disrupt networks.
156In other words, let’s chill some speech.</p>
157
158<h2 id="tinker-as-in-des-moines">Tinker as in des moines</h2>
159
160<p><img src="https://abe-winter.github.io/assets/fuck-cheer.png" alt="image of tweet talking about mahanoy v BL" /></p>
161
162<p>Tinker is a free speech case that prevented a school from punishing siblings who wore black armbands to protest vietnam.</p>
163
164<p>It applied originally to on-campus expression.
165More recently, school districts are trying to apply it to a wider range of places, such as the internet.
166The interesting recent case is Mahanoy v BL, where a high schooler sent a snap captioned ‘fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything’ and got suspended.
167How did she get suspended, you ask, if snaps auto delete?
168Some rat brought in a screenshot.</p>
169
170<p>The rule she was suspended for:</p>
171
172<blockquote>
173  <p>There will be no toleration of any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches placed on the internet<sup id="fnref:toleration" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:toleration" class="footnote" rel="footnote">5</a></sup></p>
174</blockquote>
175
176<p>Not incorporated by reference into twitter’s rules <em>yet</em>, but the tone is spot on.</p>
177
178<p>Speaking of scotus, some frisky ex-clerk triggered new management into promising a <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241">nuclear name and shame</a> for advertisers who didn’t renew their ad buys this year.
179The incentives here are clear I guess, and the methods, while gross, are not exactly novel, and the strategy is probably dumb but also not surprising.</p>
180
181<p>Still, ‘punishing a boycott’ is a fascinatingly bad way to frame your reaction.
182It is taking the Henry Ford badness of opening fire on strikers, and projecting it on your <em>customers</em>.</p>
183
184<p>The last few years have been such a combination of new weirdness + cyclic history that I often wonder what my grandparents would say.
185I suspect some combination of liking the authority, hating the tone, and reminding me that ‘in my day the customer was always right’.</p>
186
187<p>Have seen some takes like ‘he’s shutting off blue checks the day of a national election, this is a fascist plot’.
188(<a href="https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1588384805045301248">example</a> but there are many. Note also that the company moved this date forward because of criticism and also probably because the new system isn’t working yet).
189Or like ‘EM seems to want to be a right-wing darling, has murderbot autocrats on speed dial, and has substantial business interests in china, and this move is related to those things’.</p>
190
191<p>A premise of platform moderation is that catchy lies radicalize low-information voters towards reactionary violence, using poison for weight loss, and paying into pyramid schemes.
192By contrast EM’s take on moderation has been to devote eng resources to blocking his <a href="https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1589393052707479552">parodies</a> and to <a href="https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1589460948611661824">lash out at journalists</a>.</p>
193
194<p>‘He bought it to kill it and also expects to turn a profit’ sounds unbearably dumb, but you could view the private equity playbook that way:
195study how to farm the customers, buy the business, then sell before the customers learn to build their own.
196But the things PE firms buy are 1) not quite so network-based and 2) they don’t ruin them so thoroughly so fast.</p>
197
198<p>The FT got <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b7d51d60-00d8-11e3-a90a-00144feab7de">this quote</a> when bezos bought the post in 2013:</p>
199
200<blockquote>
201  <p>Asked why a crop of wealthy individuals would buy newspapers, Alan Mutter, an industry anal
201yst, says: “I assume they have large fortunes they are trying to make smaller.”</p>
202</blockquote>
203
204<p>Stupid explains a lot, but hanlon’s razor cuts both ways and it is sometimes hard to tell.
205It’s troubling that there are people who, either forgetting history or remembering it too well, want to erode this:</p>
206
207<p><img src="https://abe-winter.github.io/assets/tinker-armbands.jpg" alt="photo of mary beth + john tinker holding black armbands with peace signs" /></p>
208
209<h2 id="too-many-notes">Too many notes</h2>
210
211<p>I came for the information, but my friends who read a newspaper twice a week are better informed about many topics.
212I know things 6 to 12 hours early, but the version I know is in all caps and seldom right.
213Times readers get those checked details.</p>
214
215<p>I stayed because there are some very smart people there.
216I’m a B and when I talk about having an external brain, it means having access to the thought patterns of As, even if I can’t adopt them or apply them to my life.
217I’m salieri, but less jealous.</p>
218
219<p>I have not eaten horse paste (yet), committed political violence, or paid into (too many) pyramid schemes.
220But in my way I’ve been radicalized from my time here.
221I control the inputs, but this is still a filter bubble.
222It simultaneously validates and programs my beliefs, an overton hypersphere.
223It limits what I can see, a self-selected hubble volume.
224I’m not too smart to be fooled.</p>
225
226<p>Deciding what an A looks like, or sounds like, is part of the process of learning to read a network.
227For me, they are people who amplify, and sometimes answer, the questions I ask when I read something dumb.</p>
228
229<p>They also look a lot like Lester Bangs from almost famous:
230they make their reputation on being honest and unmerciful – and call them anytime, they stay up late.
231They are not infallible, but they are more careful than they seem, while also completely willing to jump on a grenade if it lets them be first to a joke.
232They’re replies that outreach the original post.</p>
233
234<p><img src="https://abe-winter.github.io/assets/journalists-core.png" alt="tweet saying journalists make twitter the public square" /></p>
235
236<p>I don’t know if journalists are the core of the network, in the sense that if you remove them the economic value goes away.
237I don’t know if the A-brains I’ve curated for myself, who are mostly not journalists, are the core.
238But I suspect this ‘public square’ argument is approximately right – despite all the sarcasm and entertainment content on there, the fact that there is a core of news keeps the network alive.</p>
239
240<p>Companies like huffpo and buzzfeed which emerged in the 00s talked about the ‘mullet model’, where in dollar terms, entertainment content funds news.
241The part that is harder to explain: in trust and reputation terms, reporting funds entertainment.
242To operate an information service, you need both.</p>
243
244<p>And the blue checks would like to stay but can afford to leave.
245They mostly make their money off-site, either from day jobs or various substacks and podcasts.
246Their access to information, which happens more in private rooms than mine, won’t be totally cut off by disrupting the network.</p>
247
248<p>When I think about what will replace twitter, I worry that it was run basically as a public service, and grew organically, and, like a forest, cannot just be replaced.
249I worry it will be replaced by private rooms which I can’t access.
250I’ve been trying to port my networks, but what about <em>their</em> networks.
251The ‘central extended network’ has been sliced up.</p>
252
253<p>Yes, substack + patreon win, yes science has moved to mastodon, yes tumblr gets a boost and post is trying to launch, yes news still works, and ‘IRL is back’.
254But twitter was the raw version of those –
255unfiltered, hard to drink, unedited, but a fountain of youth and wisdom if it doesn’t make you crazy.</p>
256
257<h2 id="millicronkite-exposure">Millicronkite exposure</h2>
258
259<p>LBJ probably didn’t say<sup id="fnref:didnt" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:didnt" class="footnote" rel="footnote">6</a></sup> ‘if we’ve lost cronkite, we’ve lost the nation’.
260And twitter isn’t the myth version of cronkite, a single trusted voice – it is closer to the opposite.
261But using it has helped me to understand what cronkite might have been for 60s american news watchers.</p>
262
263<p>The idea of cronkite is commitment to public trust.
264Twitter is island gigantism for people who can’t not commit to a gag, but somehow it has turned out that reliable dunking is almost the same as public trust.</p>
265
266<p>What I have seen this week is blue checks, with very little hesitation, impersonating EM by the dozen and getting kicked.
267The feeling is the same feeling I had in real life in march 2020 – party at the end of the world.
268Celebration not because there is something to celebrate but because you have no illusions about the platform still being open tomorrow.</p>
269
270<p>Imagine you’ve bought a theater and you walk in shouting ‘fire’ in an attempt to scare the audience into compliance.
271(Sorry to the 1st amendment scholars who are triggered by this language; I’m not making a free speech argument).</p>
272
273<p>But the theater is a place people go to <em>watch</em> people set themselves on fire, and the audience also lives here and have taken turns on stage.
274So you walk in and the regulars stare, transfixed, as you fumble with a matchbook.
275You don’t look like you know fire safety and that excites them.
276Maybe you escalate by saying ‘You’ve never seen the <em>building</em> on fire have you’ and they’re thinking, you’re right, that’s the only thing we haven’t tried.</p>
277
278<p>But that theater is also my brain.
279Alas.</p>
280
281<h2 id="appendix-other-takes">Appendix: other takes</h2>
282
283<ul>
284  <li>this <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/whstancil/status/1593486363558612992">will stancil thread</a>. ‘eyes in a lot places, if it goes we’ll be blind’. ‘institutionally-approved viewpoints’. ‘all the counterarguments and alternative viewpoints are going to disappear’. ‘quality that made elites uncomfortable’</li>
285</ul>
286
287<h2 class="no_toc" id="notes">Notes</h2>
288
289<script async="" defer="" src="https://cdn.simpleanalytics.io/hello.js"></script>
289
290
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292
293<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
294  <ol>
295    <li id="fn:for-text" role="doc-endnote">
296      <p>why not facebook? never having had a facebook acct for more than 2 days without being banned (upcoming post), I can’t say for sure, but my sense is that fb is a social network either for family photos and / or rage. And swap meets. <a href="#fnref:for-text" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a></p>
297    </li>
298    <li id="fn:surge" role="doc-endnote">
299      <p>my source for the storm surge claim is probably the 99 percent invisible podcast? or an old blog <a href="#fnref:surge" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a></p>
300    </li>
301    <li id="fn:saturn" role="doc-endnote">
302      <p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091001133553/http://www.tntdownunder.com/article/2446199116.html">TNT interview</a> on archive.org <a href="#fnref:saturn" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a></p>
303    </li>
304    <li id="fn:what" role="doc-endnote">
305      <p>minnie is WHAT<br /><img src="https://abe-winter.github.io/assets/minnie-is-what.png" alt="exegesis of 'minnie is what'" /> <a href="#fnref:what" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a></p>
306    </li>
307    <li id="fn:toleration" role="doc-endnote">
308      <p>technically this language bans ‘toleration’, not ‘negative information’, and does not empower the school to punish speech online <a href="#fnref:toleration" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a></p>
309    </li>
310    <li id="fn:didnt" role="doc-endnote">
311      <p>‘getting it wrong’ author on <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/4249/w-joseph-campbell-recalling-the-mythical-cronkite-moment/">the cronkite moment</a> <a href="#fnref:didnt" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">&#8617;</a></p>
312    </li>
313  </ol>
314</div>
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