As you probably know (even if you don’t want to), the social media site Twitter was recently purchased by Elon Musk for $44 billion dollars. He immediately took the company private, fired a good chunk of the workforce in what sure looked like performative and arbitrary ways and with relished Big Male Energy meanness. As advertisers fled (still flee), he tried to assure them that their invitations to purchase their goods and services wouldn’t appear in users’ feeds flanked by hatred and bigotry. But over the weekend he decided to reinstate some of the site’s worst actors, including the former president.
Even at its best, Twitter has always been a mixed bag, often hard on women and minorities, frustratingly slow to grow and change for the better, both as an experience and a tool. But that stupid website has also become a locus of culture, full of writers and journalists and creatives and intellectuals, including some of the funniest and most clever people I’ve ever known. For some it serves as a powerful tool of protest and organization, and for all it provides access to communities that so many can’t find or access easily in other ways. Over time, clusters of accounts have formed constellations connected by interest, shared experience, or by the sheer pleasure of trying to make themselves and others they respect laugh. I’ve been pleased and proud to be among some of these stars, constantly astonished that people have found my weird thoughts worth noticing.
Being on Twitter these days feels like watching someone bang on a machine shedding parts until its works inevitably seize up. Why is Musk doing all this? Probably because he can. As the owner, he can fire whomever he wants, kick out and let in users as he likes, bend the algorithm into his preferred shape. It’s his toy now.
Much has been written about Musk Twitter — probably too much — and I mention it here only as a symbol and symptom of how we, at least in America, must make our way through the world. I’ve seen pleas from some Twitter users not to abandon the site, to persevere in the face of rising hate in order to offset the growing toxicity for the good people who remain and to fight to make it better. Problem is, it’s hard to see the point. Musk’s imaginable wealth, and the wealth he has recruited from others, has insulated him from any meaningful consequences. Even if he were to lose all $44 billion dollars, he would still have money for a million lavish lifetimes. There is literally nothing we can do to change Twitter if he doesn’t want it to change — no argument, no protest, no resignation, nothing. Nearly everywhere you look (government, courts, health care, major industries) you find whole swaths of society captured by the wealthy who seem immune from consequence.
My son M is a sophomore in college studying music industry, and my daughter Q is a senior in high school looking at colleges who will welcome her into the woods to read books and to think hard about ideas. Nearly every part of the world shouts at them not to do these things. M really wants to be a performer, music producer, and general creative, and he’s more than good enough to be all of that. But the notoriously difficult music business has lurched toward the unsustainable. As M put it to me recently, music has become content — just another ore strip mined to power websites like Tiktok and not something that people are expected to pay for, which means it’s no longer thought of as something artists should get paid reasonably for producing. And a range of artists used to be able to earn livings from streaming fans coming to live shows, but venues now take an ever-increasing percentage of the door and merch. At the same time, ticket prices are becoming increasingly absurd as resellers control more and more of the market and extract monopolistic fees. (See, for example, the latest Taylor Swift ticket debacle.) It should be easier to support musicians by buying their music and t-shirts and going to their shows, but so many people who will never make a single song have gotten rich inserting themselves wherever they can, and those folks seem to be the main ones thriving in the music business these days.
Similarly with Q. She often opens books and finds herself looking back, and she wants to keep doing that in college and maybe forever. Many of her classmates are applying to STEM programs for college and have trouble understanding why she as someone who is also good at math and science isn’t doing the same. Who could blame them? We are constantly told that studying the humanities doesn’t pay, constantly asked “what are you going to do with an English or Philosophy degree anyway?” Better to learn calculus or to code.
As you might gather from the somewhat pessimistic paragraphs that have brought us to this point, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about resiliency. All sorts of talk rattles around these days about how millennials and Gen Z don’t really want to work, how younger folks would rather “quiet quit” than keep their heads down and “pay their dues.” This is all nonsense, of course. Quiet quitting is simply not a real thing, just an invention by some employers who’ve found their employees no longer thrilled by the prospect of working extra hard for no extra pay and no job security, especially when they have options. After all, no one should be resilient just for resiliency’s sake; we need a purpose to persist, at least some reason why we should believe that it’ll be worth it.
M and Q have maintained their senses of purpose and have persisted in spite of everything, as have many of their friends and classmates who have left one college for another or who have left college altogether to think things through. Their generation also seems to be taking mental health more seriously than any other, and I’m hopeful that many of the old equations of striving and success and happiness will ultimately have to be refactored. We can’t — and shouldn’t — expect them to fix entirely this world that was handed to them broken in so many ways that they can’t seem to change, and we sure can’t blame them for struggling within structures designed to set them up for failure. I do hope they break a few things on their way through.
I also can’t help but draw optimism from their proper resiliency. Here I am, again, reaching for a poem to explain me to myself, in this case “Meditations In an Emergency,” by Cameron Awkward-Rich.
If it comes to it, will be sad to leave Twitter or for it as I know it to leave me, but I refuse to persist there while a feckless billionaire destroys it just because I’m supposed to suck it up. All sorts of skies stretch above us in which to hang our constellations. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. I will continue to carry my son’s guitar home from every show I can, my body moving itself as his beautiful whole self comes into me through my ears. I will put my shoulder right next to my daughter’s against the biggest ideas so that we may push together on what puzzles us, what makes us human. And throughout I will have my hand on my heart — on my stupid, full heart.
These days it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that thinking people are a dying breed. Then someone like you comes along to give us hope. Parents like you, who have stepped up and taken the job of child rearing seriously, are giving us citizens like M and Q that will hopefully be able to sort out the mess that the world has become. PS - more than a few smart people have fled Twitter to mastodon.org.
Thoughtful and engaging as usual. Such a timely topic that's important that we all put our minds to thinking about.