Brad Littlejohn: Taking over Twitter

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, November 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Well, today we introduce a new kind of commentary on our program.

You may have heard of WORLD Opinions. It’s a part of the WORLD family of products and for more than a year now, WORLD Opinions has provided commentary at WNG.org.

EICHER: Today we introduce you to one WORLD Opinions writer, Brad Littlejohn. He’s founder of The Davenant Institute, Senior Fellow of the Edmund Burke foundation, and headmaster of a classical school in Virginia. Here he is now discussing Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN, COMMENTATOR: When Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the acquisition cemented his position as one of the world’s most powerful men.

Within days, Musk announced sweeping changes to everything from the company’s philosophy and its leadership to its business model. This included thousands of layoffs and an $8 monthly charge for the verified blue-check status reserved for key influencers on the platform.

At first glance, these changes might look a lot like what one would expect for the takeover of a troubled company: The new CEO comes in, cleans house, and tries to create new revenue streams. However, Twitter is anything but a typical company, and Musk’s changes have implications much bigger even than the $44 billion price tag of his acquisition would suggest.

Twitter resembles nothing so much as a pre-modern feudal domain transposed into a techno-futurist key. Its users, far from representing a typical customer base, are actually the firm’s producers, generating the most precious resource of the digital age—attention—which Twitter then effectively sells, in place of the staple crops of an earlier economy. Like peasants on a medieval manor, these users have partial ownership rights—use rights—over the invisible yet valuable terrain of digital real estate.

Twitter’s rulers, in return, provide users with protection—against hackers and haters—although such protection is often crowd-sourced from users themselves, much as a medieval yeoman might grab his longbow to join in repelling an assault on the lord’s domain.

As a feudal domain, Twitter is less a business than a polity, so it is no surprise that the conflicts that have riven it in recent years have been political conflicts involving rival visions of the good and clashing claims of justice. Twitter’s former leaders vaguely understood this, and tried to instill order by the means most familiar to them—the opaque, top-down, bureaucratic governance of the modern state. Musk, however, grasping the platform’s feudal logic, has sought to re-establish the rowdy yet transparent personal rule of a modern-day warrior baron fond of the joust and the hunt.

Viewed from this standpoint, Musk’s recent changes make sense. The lord of the manor does not need a board of directors, just a few loyal lieutenants. Nor does he need a vast army of clerks setting policy; the more direct his access to the denizens of his domain, the more effective his authority. And if there is going to be hierarchy and status on the manor, a class of knights and squires on sleek chargers, their shields embossed with blue check marks, well, then, the squirearchy should be expected to pay for this privilege.

The rules on such a domain will be far fewer, the jostling will be rowdier, but acts of insubordination and disrespect to the hierarchy will be punished quickly and severely. Just consider Musk’s announcement that users falsely impersonating influencers will be permanently suspended.

The difference, of course, is that no medieval manor had 400 million residents. And if chaos or unrest struck, it was unlikely to spread faster than the pace of a mule. Today, a viral Twitter controversy can spread around the globe at literally the speed of light.

Musk is betting Twitter can serve as a vibrant virtual commonwealth that helps hold accountable the politics of real-world commonwealths around the globe—without allowing the platform to be overrun by the 21st-century equivalent of marauding Vikings. Let’s hope he succeeds. With everyone from Justin Bieber to the world’s leading heads of state relying on Twitter’s attention economy to shape public discourse, the stakes could hardly be higher.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, November 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Well, today we introduce a new kind of commentary on our program.

You may have heard of WORLD Opinions. It’s a part of the WORLD family of products and for more than a year now, WORLD Opinions has provided commentary at WNG.org.

EICHER: Today we introduce you to one WORLD Opinions writer, Brad Littlejohn. He’s founder of The Davenant Institute, Senior Fellow of the Edmund Burke foundation, and headmaster of a classical school in Virginia. Here he is now discussing Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN, COMMENTATOR: When Elon Musk took control of Twitter, the acquisition cemented his position as one of the world’s most powerful men.

Within days, Musk announced sweeping changes to everything from the company’s philosophy and its leadership to its business model. This included thousands of layoffs and an $8 monthly charge for the verified blue-check status reserved for key influencers on the platform.

At first glance, these changes might look a lot like what one would expect for the takeover of a troubled company: The new CEO comes in, cleans house, and tries to create new revenue streams. However, Twitter is anything but a typical company, and Musk’s changes have implications much bigger even than the $44 billion price tag of his acquisition would suggest.

Twitter resembles nothing so much as a pre-modern feudal domain transposed into a techno-futurist key. Its users, far from representing a typical customer base, are actually the firm’s producers, generating the most precious resource of the digital age—attention—which Twitter then effectively sells, in place of the staple crops of an earlier economy. Like peasants on a medieval manor, these users have partial ownership rights—use rights—over the invisible yet valuable terrain of digital real estate.

Twitter’s rulers, in return, provide users with protection—against hackers and haters—although such protection is often crowd-sourced from users themselves, much as a medieval yeoman might grab his longbow to join in repelling an assault on the lord’s domain.

As a feudal domain, Twitter is less a business than a polity, so it is no surprise that the conflicts that have riven it in recent years have been political conflicts involving rival visions of the good and clashing claims of justice. Twitter’s former leaders vaguely understood this, and tried to instill order by the means most familiar to them—the opaque, top-down, bureaucratic governance of the modern state. Musk, however, grasping the platform’s feudal logic, has sought to re-establish the rowdy yet transparent personal rule of a modern-day warrior baron fond of the joust and the hunt.

Viewed from this standpoint, Musk’s recent changes make sense. The lord of the manor does not need a board of directors, just a few loyal lieutenants. Nor does he need a vast army of clerks setting policy; the more direct his access to the denizens of his domain, the more effective his authority. And if there is going to be hierarchy and status on the manor, a class of knights and squires on sleek chargers, their shields embossed with blue check marks, well, then, the squirearchy should be expected to pay for this privilege.

The rules on such a domain will be far fewer, the jostling will be rowdier, but acts of insubordination and disrespect to the hierarchy will be punished quickly and severely. Just consider Musk’s announcement that users falsely impersonating influencers will be permanently suspended.

The difference, of course, is that no medieval manor had 400 million residents. And if chaos or unrest struck, it was unlikely to spread faster than the pace of a mule. Today, a viral Twitter controversy can spread around the globe at literally the speed of light.

Musk is betting Twitter can serve as a vibrant virtual commonwealth that helps hold accountable the politics of real-world commonwealths around the globe—without allowing the platform to be overrun by the 21st-century equivalent of marauding Vikings. Let’s hope he succeeds. With everyone from Justin Bieber to the world’s leading heads of state relying on Twitter’s attention economy to shape public discourse, the stakes could hardly be higher.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

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