Weekly Scroll: Elon's Endgame
Plus! Livestreamers in jail, confused Catholics, and the Immigrant Song
Infinite Scroll was in the National Observer and Politico - twice! Welcome to all the new subs from the past week. The Weekly Scroll is our once-a-week update on what’s happening across social media. We follow the nonsense so you don’t have to.
Reevaluating Musk and Twitter
Over the past two years I’ve written a ton about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Much of that has been in a fairly negative light. But post-election, it may be time to reevaluate how we think about Musk’s entire project with the bird app. From Ben Thompson at Stratechery:
What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!
This, more broadly, gets at why Musk is so hard to discuss: a focus on his accomplishments, particularly Tesla and SpaceX, are so significant that it seems reasonable to excuse the means; at the same time I am sympathetic to those so offended by the means that they oppose him in principle. What cannot be denied, however, is that he is consequential.
I broadly agree here. If you view Twitter as an isolated business whose goal is to generate profit, Musk’s tenure has been a disaster. If you view Twitter as a social experience and a community, it’s still a disaster. The site is hemorrhaging money and users. But if you view the purchase of Twitter as a tool to accomplish other things that Elon Musk cares about, it’s hard to think about it as anything but successful. The new X was one of several online tools that the Trump campaign used in their digital-first campaign strategy. Musk got his guy elected and will now likely get a massive amount of regulatory leeway for his other companies. He may even get a formal role in the government!
This isn’t the only way in which Musk, social media and the Trump administration may be merging. There are rumors swirling that Musk may purchase Truth Social, the Trump-owned social media network. As above, Truth Social is an abysmal failure when viewed purely on business terms. But it would be a mistake to think about it purely in business terms. A purchase of Truth Social would be a semi-legal way for Musk to openly bribe Trump and show further loyalty, and a merger of Truth Social and Twitter would definitively turn it into a right-wing echo chamber.1 Keep your eye on that space.
Where are Threads and BlueSky?
Whenever I think about the big picture of Twitter’s long dark journey into X, I inevitably think about BlueSky and Threads. Early on in Musk’s tenure I published some think-piecey analysis on whether or not Threads or BlueSky would be the ultimate winner in the race to replace Twitter.
At the center of those pieces are two competing theories of how social media networks flourish - Status vs Scale.
Status theory says that what users really want is the site with the highest social status. You go to the social media site with the hottest posters and the coolest niche communities. Scale theory says that what users really want is the site with the biggest scale. You go where there’s the most content, where most of your friends are, where most of the action and conversation is happening.
BlueSky is working on a theory of attracting the most dedicated posters, the most incredibly online communities, and becoming the place where the most active and interesting conversations are taking place through sheer quality of posting. Threads is banking on scale - thanks to the Instagram connection they have hundreds of millions of users already.
Over the last year, things have largely continued in the same vein. BlueSky continues to have funnier and better posters on average. Threads is a comparative wasteland of vacuous nothing-posting, but it sure does have a LOT of it. For all of Threads’ size, I still haven’t seen a single significant cultural moment come out of Threads. BlueSky, by contrast, is attracting entire communities at once like the Swiftie migration that’s currently underway. Threads is actively discouraging anything that looks like politics or coordinated action.
It’s still not clear to me which theory is going to win out, but I do think I’m going to begin testing the waters on those alternative sites, starting with BlueSky, to see how it looks over there.
Libs Doing Election Denial
Speaking of Threads! Apparently the one thing a certain kind of liberal learned from Donald Trump is how to do election denial. Taylor Lorenz has an interesting report in User Mag about how Threads is filled with election denialism. I guess this makes sense - all the most rabidly anti-Elon people are the ones who left Twitter. But on the other hand, I’ve been seeing viral posts about this on Twitter as well:
User crackdaya got 200,000 likes for this nonsense. And they were far from the only example. It’s probably too much to ask, but it would be great if the left didn’t immediately recreate MAGA/Q-Anon insanity in blue raspberry flavor.
Johnny Somali
The title of Worst Person on the Internet is hotly contested, but livestreamer Johnny Somali has a hell of a case. For context, Somali (real name Ramsey Khalid Ismael) is a content creator best known for traveling to other countries and acting as disrespectfully and provocatively as possible in order to please a fanbase mostly made up of edgy 13 year old boys. Some of his greatest hits include
Going into restaurants and playing extremely loud music, then refusing to leave
Traveling to Japan and taunting Japanese people about the atomic bombs dropped over Nagasaki and Hiroshima
Yelling ‘Fukushima’ at Japanese construction workers
Zoom bombing random Zoom calls
Traveling to the Western Wall in Israel and taping pictures of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein to the wall
Sexually harassing a female cop in Israel
He’s been arrested for his behavior several times, banned from multiple countries, and has even been physically assaulted by enraged locals. But somehow his recent trip to South Korea topped all the previous stunts. Johnny filmed himself in front of a monument to South Korean ‘comfort women’ - who were victims of sexual slavery to Imperial Japan - while twerking, giving the statue a lap dance, and even making out with the statue. He somehow managed to sexually assault a statue! I didn’t even think that was a thing you could do! And a statue specifically famous for the basic idea that sexual assault is bad!
This did not endear him to the Korean public. Vigilantes began tracking his movement in Korea and he’s been repeatedly beat up, to the point he can’t actually go out in public any longer. And worse, the Korean government took notice. On November 2nd it was announced he’s facing charges for drug use, assault and trespassing and is barred from leaving the country. It was also announced over the weekend that he’s facing additional charges from an incident where he deepfaked a Korean streamer to depict him kissing her.
There’s a real chance he could actually spend time rotting in a South Korean jail, which I think would cheer a lot of people up. As someone with absolutely no specialization in South Korean law but who does read things online, South Korea seems to take drug laws very seriously. And Johnny has made himself a public nuisance to the level where members of South Korea’s parliament have taken notice, so there may be political points to be scored by throwing the book at him. Here’s hoping!
We’ve often talked about how the internet structurally encourages extreme content, but it’s nice to see one of the worst people in the world actually getting what’s coming to them for once.
Vatican Online
Some people, usually older folks, just don’t understand how the internet works. They manage to be ON the internet without being OF the internet. Sometimes this is grating and annoying. But at other times it’s hilarious, like when you see your uncle post on Facebook GOOGLE MY GRANDSON BRAYDEN’S KARATE PICTURES.
The Catholic Church seems to be one of those institutions that doesn’t quite get the internet. Not Catholics themselves, plenty of Catholics get the internet. But the Vatican doesn’t. For reasons presumably known only to God2, the Catholic Church has introduced a new anime character named Luce to represent Catholicism.
According to the Vatican, Luce was “created from the desire to enter into the world of pop culture, so beloved by our young people”. It’s a bit cringe to think that what young people really need to understand the Beatitudes is a rocking anime waifu, but at least it’s cringe in an earnest and hilarious way. It’s very Buddy Christ-coded. If you do understand the internet, though, you’ll realize the next sentence that’s coming. What does the internet do with any female cartoon character? They make porn of them. So, so much porn. Luce is now an AI-generated porn sensation (link mostly SFW). Rule 34 is not a joke, it’s practically an immutable law of the universe at this point. Of course this was going to happen! Did anyone in the Vatican realize this? Did they bother to ask a teenager?
Also in adorable Vatican mishaps: The pope is repeatedly using the #Saints hashtag, apparently not understanding that it’s hardcoded to support the New Orleans Saints football team:
I mean, the Saints are 3-7 so the Holy Father isn’t wrong when he calls them poor and meek.
Links
Garbage Day asks Where is the lib Joe Rogan? See also NYMag. Repeat the mantra - it’s always on Infinite Scroll first. They even fall into the exact trap I predicted - Garbage Day speculates it could be Dropout/Sam Reich when it very obviously cannot be, for the purity reasons listed in last week’s post. Garbage Day is emblematic of the ‘internet trend reporting’ space in that it’s often very insightful but completely, totally captured in a left wing bubble.
A fascinating story from Chinese DoomScroll about what spontaneous internet-driven protests look like in China. ‘Biking at Night’ has already been cracked down on, but I’d imagine young people will just move on to something else. Chinese DoomScroll remains highly recommended.
Today in Posting is the Most Powerful Force in the Universe, there’s a YouTuber attempting to spend an entire month in solitary confinement with NO LIGHT. It seems to be going poorly. It never ceases to amaze me the ways in which people will ruin their lives for content.
Also in that direction - influencer receives lifetime ban from the NYC marathon after bringing several unauthorized e-bikes on-course to film him while he ran.
Nick Fuentes was doxxed after proclaiming ‘your body my choice’ and then may have assaulted a woman who rang his doorbell.
Posts
Martin Scorcese narrates his daughter’s makeup routine
Twitter has become more right wing since Musk’s purchase, but it isn’t yet a right wing site. There’s still a lot of posting from all angles of the political spectrum, as well as a lot of non-political posting.
In this case, literally?
I've been thinking about the "lib Joe Rogan" question more, and I wonder how much is just the medium. We never saw left-wing talk radio take off either.
I check in on BlueSky once a day, and there's really some good people over there. But it also represents much of the worst of the censorious left. Yglesias tried it for a few days and stopped because he was treated like a Nazi. Something similar would surely happen with Chait if he tried. Jesse Singal would be hanged in effigy on BlueSky. There's plenty of ordinary liberals over there who aren't like this, but they've stood by for the browbeatings. The sad result is that, for left of center people, BlueSky is far too much of a frustrating monoculture.