There’s an excellent new documentary on BBC iPlayer about the life and death of Twitter. What’s fascinating is just how early the genetic faults of the system were obvious, and just how strongly the founders refused to do anything to try to ameliorate their effects.
As I’ve outlined in two recent books, Getting High, and God-like, we have to understand Kranzberg’s first law here:
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral
It is not that Twitter was/is bad per se. But the way it catalysed our deep-rooted human failings meant that its impact has been enormously damaging to our public life and institutions.
What is so shocking in this piece is just how much the founders knew this, but refused to do anything about it. They had had an idea, they had created a monster and they weren’t going to take any responsibility for the havoc it wreaked.
The eventual takeover by Musk is dealt with brilliantly, especially in the context of the wild problems that Trump caused the platform around the Covid pandemic and the 6th January attacks on the Capitol.
But the character who comes out of this worst is surely Jack Dorsey. I hadn’t realised just how odd a character he was, and how much this oddness directly steered Twitter.
Watching the piece reminded me of a lecture that the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek gave a while ago on “The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.”
In it, he builds a very convincing argument that a strand of Buddhist thought can be twisted to present ‘nirvana’ as a state of enlightenment which is uncoupled from karma, meaning that it would be possible for someone who had reached this state to do complete unspeakable acts, but for these to have no karmic impacts on them. In short: they were so enlightened that any darkness they produced could pass no shadow over them.
Seen in this way, it’s no surprise that this ethic has become hugely popular amongst the billionaire tech bros of Silicon Valley whose innovations have savaged so much of our existence.
Well worth a watch:
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