The transformation of Twitter is a big deal, bigger than the day to day moving parts in the news. Lay-offs here, reinstatement there, Progressive angst everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, on a wholly personal level, I feel for ya, because I’ve been there myself and quite frankly, in even worse straights than many of you will ever know. On the other hand, I’ve never seen any of your crew reciprocate that sentiment in any public way. You see, you’re probably on the younger side if you’re in tech. Most of you are Millennials, or younger. Many of you were raised in well to do homes and you went to college, perhaps travelled a bit in the summers. Some but not all of you are smart, smarter than I’ll ever be, but not necessarily street smart. I’m sure many of you will find nice landing spots in the short term but maybe a few of you will have to learn the real street for the first time. Given the posh work environment you came from, that will be a true life-jolt for some of you.
There are two main reasons why you had to walk that walk out the exit door. The first is past and present: you grew into feeling that the repressive fascist dictatorship against free expression that you all helped create and function, you believed that it was the only right way and you believed that it would go on indefinitely. It was the universe that you built. With all the enabling government and media institutions around you, you believed you were in the majority and there was no reason why your oppressions shouldn’t be continued ad infinitum. You were masters of the universe. Unfortunately, for you, that attracted the attention of Elon Musk. You banned one too many people for your own good. To be blunt here, you were full of yourselves. You wanted to make your own little echo chamber more airtight than ever, more hermitically sealed than any information outlet had ever been before. Musk noticed; he noticed the universal values that you were seemingly in contempt of and decided to do something about it.
The second reasons had to do with the business end. Here again, hubris seems to have played into it, that and Covid. You helped invent a brave new world where nobody hardly ever had to report to the office again; a work world where you could rent a camper, drive the beautiful coast and ‘work’ surfside or somewhere out in the desert if you wanted. A lot of employees worked in their real or metaphorical pajamas, day after day, week after week and went from enjoying the break, to thinking it would be a long-term improvement to thinking that that it was an inhumane injustice against you personally if it ever did have to end. There were way too many of you, working in way too many functions – countless teams devoted to various aspects of censorship – things that had nothing to do with the original vision or technical needs of Twitter. Maybe these things are common in your little dot on the globe, but free lunches don’t happen very many places; and video games at work, safe spaces, play pens and the like.
Outside of the tiny pocket of Silicone Valley, very few work places in this country share or tolerate the pampered conditions you expected inside your bubble, and don’t get us started on the rest of the world. You see yourself as special, the exception, the smartest, doing ‘God’s’ work so to speak. Meanwhile, the welder in Corpus Christi is up at 4am. The rancher growing your food in Nebraska works 16 hours a day in-season. The laborer in New York city takes two hours every day to commute into the city and then does the same back out again. No one is buying them lunch. What makes you so special?
You fancy yourselves as guardians of the people but if you were even a little but honest with yourselves, you’d admit that you were just promoting your politics at the expense of what others believe. Revelation: the country doesn’t share your politics. Take a look at the congressional map, by county. While the Senate and executive branch are almost evenly split, congressional districts give you a more accurate and proportioned idea of what parts of the country might sympathize with you or not. It’s a sea of red of course. Of course, you own the big cities, many of them now living in squalor under long term one party Democrat rule and abuse, if you so choose to own that, but it ain’t much to brag about. All that red though, those aren’t your friends, and they don’t appreciate their views being silenced. It seems you don’t like or respect them anyway. In fact it’s probably worse than that. Based on your demonstrated distain for their them and their values, you seem to regard them as 3/5 of a person at best. Sad.
You bought into the culture of tech and the nature of that beast is that it’s about go through another destruction-rebirth cycle. You know tech so why would you have thought that once you were on the inside, you’d get the same level of security as Mr. Ward Cleaver? You act like you deserve it to be different for you. Your supportive pundits act like tech has never uprooted anyone’s life before, that you’re the first. People in your town were pretty gleeful to roll over ‘Mainstreet’ mom and pop businesses that had stood for generations; all for the good of new efficiencies that came with tech. Fair enough; so now, I suspect that it’s your turn, Darwin. Maybe now, Twitter doesn’t really need a Secretary to the Administrator Supporting the DEI Outreach Liaison…or some such woke crap. Twitter became a welfare state for wokies and like it or not, you still live in a capitalist world. Musk will indeed do it better, for less, and perhaps also turn a profit someday but even if he doesn’t, it’s still worth it if he can fund Twitter off the proceeds from his real-world changing technology companies, the ones that provide more capable services to the world than you’ll ever dream of, but don’t let that stop you from trying. Go ahead, build your own platform now; one where you can exclude as many people as possible because that’s surely a winning formula.
We don’t feel sorry for you, sorry for thinking that, but it’s true.