When Elon Musk reluctantly acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars, his role within the broader cloth of world history was unsurprisingly not far from his mind. In fact, the idea was such a looming force that with the deal still up in the air, he tweeted that he was buying the service “…to try to help humanity, whom I love.” But as he amplifies the microtrends of minority American society, Musk’s role as a liberator of the free and spirited is much more complex than he would seem to presume.

More accurately, Musk is a part of a decaying system, as brilliantly illustrated by Neil Postman and his fellow media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Postman forecasted a future similarly illustrated in the Aldous Huxley novel, Brave New World. Influenced by McLuhan’s early assessment of low effort media, Postman argued that Huxley was right to predict a dystopian future not brought about by an overwhelming dictator, but by our own predestined passivity.

Huxley and Postman both saw a future in which accurate, useful, and educational information was readily available but drowned out by useless entertainment made solely to bog down the mind. Postman diagnoses the source quickly in some of his most popular works, invoking McLuhan in arguing that “the medium is the message.” To this end, Postman often drifts into nostalgia arguing romantically in support of the written word and vehemently against what had become the modern information dump of his time: TV news.

News as an institution had hit its stride right as Postman published his piece. With ABC, NBC, and CBS creating separate divisions dedicated simply to cable news, advertisers saw a unique paradigm shift. Rather than dumping huge amounts of capital to reach an increasingly targeted demographic, advertisers could pay small amounts of money to reach the desired crowd. With more capital infused into the project, cable news became a 24 hour cycle, and with the expansion came poorly researched news and misleading material. Trust in the news eroded and was replaced with a didactic appreciation of certain channels, funded in part by advertisers who preyed on idleness.

Regardless of any future that the news might have had in Postman’s mind, he argued that there were more structural issues with the programming in his most famous work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, asserting that “We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.” Postman asserted that as long as we came to terms with TV’s innards, we could avoid some of its more dystopian side effects. Effects that he thought could eventually bring about that same Huxley-like future as we began to fall back into the passive learning that a TV encouraged. When Postman eventually retired in Flushing, Queens, he narrowly missed his chance to speak on modern proof of his theory in real time. 

Entertainment and news had begun to leave TV behind, replacing it with the first iPhones and personal computers of our time. Advertising needed more niche audiences, and personal devices awarded decentralized forms of data collection and distribution forms. Devices allowed users to pick and choose their “feed,” doing away with any objective information sharing we might have saved from the endless maw of entertainment news. Consumers became more and more entrenched in their ways, and the shared American tapestry began to show its age. Representing the movement of capital, Twitter was created in 2006.

After Apple announced its application of Podcasts into its dominant app iTunes, the secondary podcast corporation Odeo decided they needed to migrate to an entirely new market. To make the jump, Odeo’s leadership began asking their employees about any potential money making side-projects that they had conceived. Eventually reaching Jack Dorsey, the company discovered development on the bones of what he named ‘Twttr.’ Dorsey had developed the app as an SMS (Short Message Service) where users would be able to create personal blogs curated to their small internalized crowd of friends. After purchasing the Twitter domain, Odeo and Dorsey got to work developing the service’s initial infrastructure, testing it first internally at Odeo, and then finally publishing it publicly in July of 2006.

Less than a year after its release, Doresey’s work, now called Twitter, was broadcasted at the South By Southwest Conference in 2007. Massive TV screens would showcase live tweets as artists and comedians performed, stamping the entire conference with Twitter’s overwhelming mark. The zealous release would prove to catapult Twitter into massive popularity, as events like the 2010 World Cup and Michael Jackson’s death garnered floods of new users and their tweets. As Twitter matured into what Dorsey dubbed “New Twitter,” it emphasized individual profiles and allowed users to watch embedded videos from other sources directly on its website; both changes were made as an effort to carve away at Twitter’s competitors, Facebook and YouTube respectively. This paradigm led the company into the 2020s,  the corresponding pandemic, and its new prospective buyer, Elon Musk. 

Musk began his bid for Twitter in a blurry fashion, arguing that Twitter’s new policies on content moderation (resulting from prolific pandemic misinformation spread) endangered democracy. Musk quickly turned that bloviation into action, asking for a space on the company’s board of directors. What had started as under-baked criticisms of a company Musk was known to spend his little free time on had turned into a real business deal Musk appeared enthusiastic about. Twitter responded in a similarly frantic fashion, forcing a poison pill on itself in an attempt to prevent Musk’s rapid acquisition of a majority stake in the company. 

He began the pitch with promises to quintuple Twitter’s profit by 2028 and to let Donald Trump back on the platform. What had started as under-baked criticisms of a company Musk was known to spend his little free time on had turned into a real business deal Musk for which he appeared enthusiastic. Eventually, Musk issued an offer of 43 billion dollars to take Twitter private, putting the company’s eventual demise in motion. But almost immediately after the offer solidified, Musk’s initial vague pontification came to a strange reversal. He had begun to tweet ominous warnings about the proliferation of bots on the service, even going as far as to say that the deal was “on hold” until Twitter released what he called accurate information on its bot problems.

The warning snowballed for Musk, into what became an outright refusal of the facts at hand as he claimed that he had the right to back out of an already agreed upon deal because of his simple hunch. Unable to meet the strange and oftentimes seemingly random requests from Musk, Twitter sued to bring him back to the initial deal, arguing that “Musk’s conduct simply confirms that he wants to escape the binding contract he freely signed, and to damage Twitter in the process.”

Evidently, Musk counter-sued on the allegations of fraud he frantically threw at the company, forcing the legal battle into the Delaware state court.

As the two sides weathered an almost three month long endeavor, Musk came to realize that the court would ultimately side with Twitter, forcing him to pay a far greater price than 43 billion. Drowning in legal fees and shoved into the cockpit of a stumbling company, Musk finally acquired Twitter on October 28th, 2022 and promptly fired CEO Parag Agrawal and Policy Director Vijaya Gaddle.

Beyond his gratuitous and inherently public firing, Musk has made the Twitter brand uniquely his own in two ways. The first is cost-cutting. Within a week Musk had fired 3,700 employees. Accounting for employees who simply couldn’t work for Musk on moral grounds and thus quit, Twitter has bled a total of 5,000 employees. While Musk seems boastful, the company has been forced to grapple with the turnover, supposedly forcing the Human Resources department to create an “accidental firing” policy.

The second, and less concrete, way Musk has made his presence known is in his constant plea for a return to “objective” and what he calls “centrist” thought. Recent tweets calling for midterm voters to elect Republicans to “counteract” the Biden administration to create a more perfect democracy reveal an ideology that has infected the veins of the service, as he repeals content moderation teams and puts controversial forces like Kanye West back on the service (he went back on the decision after West posted a picture of a swastika).

Musk has largely reversed the progress Twitter made after the 2016 election and COVID-19 revealed the company’s gaping vulnerabilities, by focusing his aggressive cost cutting tactics on outsourced content moderation teams, firing them by the thousands. In terms applicable to Musk, repealing content moderation has been proven to deal fatal blows to companies’ revenues. But more worryingly, Musk’s consistent push for objectivity in our digital landscape reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the product with which he is working. 

Too many algorithms and too little time make it impossible to find the infamous “both sides” of an issue Musk preaches about. In fact, Postman’s theory on the attentive viewer versus the sedated one applies almost perfectly to something like Twitter. Musk will continue to push for more conservative perspectives and even his own tweets, but fortunately neither represent any objective view of the world. Even if one were to reject the Musk-ideology that has become representative of Twitter as a whole, you would be faced with intruding opposing ideas that Musk has forced onto the precipice of the platform. These tweets are not true because they are widely disagreed with, and promoting them to achieve the idea of a melting pot of opinions doesn’t reflect back onto objectivity but rather anger and vitriol. Twitter is not built for discourse, but rather the quick emotional sound bites that Musk relies on.

Musk has largely reversed the progress Twitter made after the 2016 election and COVID-19 revealed the company’s gaping vulnerabilities, by focusing his aggressive cost cutting tactics on outsourced content moderation teams, firing them by the thousands. In terms applicable to Musk, repealing content moderation has been proven to deal fatal blows to companies’ revenues. But more worryingly, Musk’s consistent push for objectivity in our digital landscape reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the product with which he is working.