The Sociopathic Network

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Twitter is dying. Again.

Over the weekend, the company reportedly laid off another 200 employees, bringing the total headcount down below 2,000 at a site which is supposed to handle millions of users generating billions of posts.

And of course, people went immediately to Twitter to talk about it.

People have been ready for Twitter to collapse since Elon Musk bought the company for an eye-rolling $44 billion after trying to back out of the deal.

Still, no matter how much people complain about it, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how often it’s described as a hellscape, we keep tapping away at the app every day like monkeys looking for a hit of cocaine.

There’s been a medium-grade panic about chatbots going rogue lately, but we already have a malevolent piece of software wreaking havoc in our daily lives. If Twitter were a person, it would probably check all the boxes on Robert Hare’s psychopath checklist.

1. Glibness and superficial charm? Check. There’s nothing Twitter values more than glibness. People have gotten TV deals out of it. People have made entire lives out of it.

2. Proneness to boredom / low tolerance for frustration? Twitter runs on a low tolerance for boredom; try to remember what you tweeted about yesterday. In fact, try to remember what you tweeted about an hour ago. I know, it seemed so important at the time.

3. Parasitic lifestyle? Well, Twitter isn’t paying its rent, and it survives off the free labor of its users. So, check.

4. Lack of remorse or guilt? Callousness or a lack of empathy? You could ask Twitter’s first big sacrificial victim, Justine Sacco, who saw a bad tweet become an international hatewatch, or its former Head of Safety, Yael Roth, who had to flee his home after online threats. Or you could ask any of the thousands of people in-between who have been harassed, mobbed, and threatened over the platform.

5. Finally, egocentricity and a grandiose sense of self-worth? Twitter is “extremely important to the future of mankind… I think the civilizational risk is decreased … the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”

That quote is from Musk, who spent part of his weekend defending a bigoted rant from a cartoonist, who loves Twitter so much he’s burned a small nation’s GDP for it.1

Since Musk bought the site, revenue is down. Employees, users, and advertisers have fled. Racism and antisemitism are both up, and there are still plenty of bots and child abuse on the platform.

If Musk were in a relationship with a human being like this, he’d wake up in a bathtub of ice with both his kidneys missing. And he’d probably still think he was in love.

But the machine will never love you back.

Not even if you sleep in the office.

I don’t have any room to talk, of course. I wrote an entire novel about the weaponization of social media, researched its damaging effects and its worst abuses, and I still cannot quit it.

There was a time when I’d wake up and check Twitter, until I remembered how my dad would light a cigarette before breakfast. The glow on his face from the flame of the lighter was a lot like the glow on my face from the screen.

I’m not a first-thing-in-the-morning user anymore. But every time I open Twitter, I’m still disappointed in myself.

I’ve searched for Twitter methadone to kick my habit. Nothing has worked so far. Because the alternatives are dull.

Post is the guy who corners you at a party and will not shut up about keto. Mastodon is the co-op alternative to the big chain groceries that smells weird and sells carob instead of chocolate. It’s too early to say much about Spoutible, except it’s pretty quiet.2

It’s disturbing to admit, but I find I miss the conflict. When I get on Twitter, like a gawker slowing down for a car crash, I want to see the carnage.

The great joy of Twitter is watching other people be gloriously, stupidly wrong in real time. It gets even better when they won’t admit they are wrong, and are determined to pilot their horrifically bad take straight into the ground, wings burning, escorted by Valkyries singing them to their doom.

In a recent eulogy for Twitter in the New York Times, Twitter’s greatest hits are ranked and reviewed. They do not drape humanity in glory.

You see a galactically stupid tweet like one of those, and you don't even have to reply (although so many people do). There is a hit of pure, sweet, vindication. You are right because there is someone else being utterly wrong. There’s no other supplier for that high other than Twitter.

Maybe this is inherent in the system, or maybe it’s us.

There’s a term I recently learned by reading David Graeber and David Wengrow called “schismogenesis.” Coined by Gregory Bateson, they use it to describe how argument actually pushes people further apart, rather than bringing them together. Two people can start out politely disagreeing about something innocuous; by the end of the exchange, they’re calling each other Nazis and pedophiles.

It’s possible this is the way human beings are built. Some researchers believe our brains evolved to argue for the biggest piece of pie, for victory over facts. We’d rather fight than agree.

I’m not saying Twitter turns us into sociopaths like some kind of zombie virus spread over the Internet. But like many other systems, it rewards sociopathic behavior3, incentivizing selfish or cruel or outrageous actions until the mob turns on those people, too.

For those who believe rational argument will eventually save us from ourselves, Twitter is the place that hope dies. It is cancerous with bad faith, lies, ad hominem, conspiracy theories, and just plain shitty behavior on a daily basis.

Of course Twitter is not all bad. Because people are not all bad.

Twitter has democratized the gathering and dissemination of news. When I was a reporter, we were the only ones who had access to instant information over the newswires. Now reporters watch Twitter to find out what’s happening. People in war-torn and disaster-ravaged countries use Twitter to help each other and alert the world to their pain.

There is no other platform that has the same reach and power. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are broadcasters, sending out messages to a wide audience but lagging in real-time feedback. Facebook and Snap are narrowcasters, faux-private forums for smaller groups of friends and family to communicate with each other4. Only Twitter is truly immediate; only Twitter currently moves the discourse and the markets on a daily basis.

Personally, I’ve given money to people and causes who need it through Twitter; mourned the death of favorite authors with other fans; made friends and found new books and ideas.

And though I cannot explain why, I can’t read “Bames Nond’s having a stronk” without laughing.

At its best, Twitter is a global nervous system, bringing us closer, putting new worlds and ideas and bad jokes within reach.

At its worst, Twitter is a video game where players fire bad opinions and abuse at one another until someone gives up or breaks down.

We have met the hellscape, and it is us.

A couple weeks ago, Twitter broke down. The platform limited tweets, vanished direct messages, and stopped working altogether for many users. The glitches are still piling up.

Sometimes I can’t log into Twitter. I go back a couple hours later, and it works.

Eventually, it won’t.

Oh sure, people have been saying that since Musk bought the site. And the site keeps chugging along.

But it’s going to go away sometime.

One gift of being a reporter during the first dot-com boom is a little perspective. There were flame wars on Usenet, trolls on Compuserve and AOL forums, pump-and-dump schemes on Yahoo! message boards, toxic comment sections on blogs, and scammers and predators on Facebook.

People always move on to the New New Thing. Even if Twitter doesn’t break, someday it will join MySpace or Internet Explorer in history. Someday we might even be nostalgic for Twitter.

Twitter’s going to die.

We’ll find another hellscape.

It’s going to be fine.