For a progressive left politics that has any genuine interest in the principles necessary for creating an alternative future, it is important to reflect on the perversity of incentives in our culture and society that are only amplified through Twitter.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

They say Twitter is flat, but in actuality it is anything but. In fact, Twitter produces rigid social hierarchies, superficial clique behavior and masses of like-clicking fans by amplifying some of human-being's most base instincts: vanity, arrogance, preening, performance, gregariousness, sycophancy, and obsequiousness brought on by its natural (here, American) response to operating in a public situations.

The Lowly, Lonely Twitterer

Discovering the fundamental structures of Twitter requires long-term engagement: getting likes, giving likes, retweeting, being retweeted, following, and being followed. At first, one follows-for-follow,which is how users interconnect with one-another without needing to make a decision on who is the more valuable or authoritative account. Here, most users will probably be spending their time retweeting and commenting on accounts with large followings and arguing with other small-following accounts in the threads generated by these users that provide the multitude of micro-public forums within the broader public space of Twitter. In this context, one will become accustomed to the fact that their comments are almost exclusively for the consumption of other users at the same level of the hierarchy.

This is important, because, cut-off from truly participating in the discourse that is happening all around them, and resigned to the rabble, one's calculus will begin to change: one will realize that likes come when one expresses simple agreement or disagreement in a comedic way with the originating tweet author and sparsely or not at all when they seek to deepen the discourse or express any kind of nuance, which is the assumed privilege of the large-following account. And since likes and retweets and replies are generally the only explicit way that one feels like they are participating in a social interaction on Twitter, these contexts compel users into social behaviors organized according to the stunted logic of cliques and partisans, drawn together into swarms sycophantically pandering for the recognition of large-following accounts that are the presumptive authorities.

Liberation at Last

After some (perhaps unending) time doing the follow-for-follow, maybe something one says catches a wider-audience and precipitates an influx of new followers; or after years of working the tweetscape one escapes gravity and the probability of remaining enmeshed in muted Twitter follow-for-follow link nodes and enters the domain of exponential effects such that tweets and comments in every instance have the possibility of vastly outstripping one's direct audience. In these cases, since it is reasonable that one may not be expected to follow-back tens or hundreds or thousands of new followers whenever one tweets something, the logic of follow-for-follow gives way as the link node is liberated from this impoverished form of Twitter to become itself an authority. Once in this position almost anything one says will get at least some likes, if not immediately hundreds, with comments and retweets to follow as those below now serve the same purpose they once did, but do it for them instead.

This situation produces new forms of (performative celebrity) behavior. Pandering, to the honed-over-time specificity of its following, which is the way the authoritative account will pass its time when it doesn't have much to say. Cultivating a cult of personality and personal experience by beginning to act-out celebrity-style behaviors that give their followings insight into their personal lives. Spectacles of public bird-fights that pit the distinctiveness of one authoritative-following against another. Obsequiousness and reformatted performances that attempt to transmutate a specific social group into another in order to expand ones following by colonizing, appropriating, or incorporating other 'close' groups.

New Considerations: Birth of the Sub-Tweet Account

The position of the authority comes with new considerations. One no longer feels free to expose themselves to any vulnerabilities that might come from any random thing they say, want to reply on, or new people they want to follow, and don't want to deal with the potential blow-back from whatever impression of validating others accounts their liberty might provoke. Honed distinction also presents the problem of statements undermining that distinctiveness through their lack of clear consistency. Finally, one may feel entitled to their position and, having lived the life of exile will feel that perpetuating that as a model is only natural. These, and many other exigencies give rise to the sub-tweet and astroturfed experimental accounts.

A sub-tweet account may be used as a bot-farm to amplify the main account, since it is always not enough for a single account with a lot of followers to tweet something for it to become significant, but retweets and likes and necessary, and a few are preferable to catalyze more. Maybe one has some scruples and draws the line at one or two accounts, or maybe they are a shady disinformation cutout for some Intelligence or corporate entity and use a thousand, flooding the environment with either amplification, attenuation, or noise. The sub-tweet account also gives an authority the opportunity to engage in conversations that might otherwise undermine the main account's public perception, or provide a means for one to experiment with ideas and other unknown, questionable actors and their ideas. A multiple account configuration also allows one to create multiple streams of meaning that make use of one's garnered authority in one domain to introduce their multitudinousness to the world. One account may tweet serious political commentary while another account sub-tweets related cultural memes that reinforce those same ideas, or vice versa. The alternate account might even be an entirely other venture aimed at comedy or parody that the main account nurtures into its audience, or the other way around. Multiple accounts may also be used to stimulate the production of discourse by producing examples of interaction that others then engage in according to the logic laid out in them. Finally, the sub-tweet account gives one the ability to parasitically scrape ideas from its subterranean network and to appropriate them for its own use as a way of offloading its burden to think and stay relevant onto unknown and unseen actors.

In each of these cases, the authoritative user is compelled into creating disingenuous forms of simulated authenticity. Twitter moves from being a place in which the low-count-following Twitterer moves from being an outcast, and being cast as such through the multitude of ways in which they are ignored, slandered, disregarded, disrespected, blocked and binned, to a the position of manipulating, or being manipulated by multiple accounts in an invisible network of opaque and subtly coercive social effects.

Interacting with others at the bottom of the hierarchy on Twitter, thus, becomes defined by suspicion, paranoia, delusion and disaffection with the possibility of redeeming interactions and no longer wanting to risk investing real energy into the platform. At the top of the hierarchy, on the other hand, Twitter becomes both a liberating form of anything-goes expression as well as a sociopathic form of puppeteering that, since Twitter is also home to the schizophrenic (e.g., Ticklers, using multiple accounts out of necessity rather than compulsion), these forms of delusion and their networks of constructed distrust, casts their account holder's behavior as arrogant and entitled, as well as reckless and wanton.

Dialogic Twitter

One of the most interesting reasons to use Twitter is because it is able to produce what other platforms aren't: discourse. Not 'discourse' in the casual sense of conversation; but, rather, discourse in the more fundamental sense of a dialogic communication between human beings. This is the experience of tweeting into the context and having the context tweet back, even though it doesn't address one directly. This communication isn't direct, and it isn't precisely between any two specific people: it is a poetic affirmation of being together that occurs simultaneously, coincidentally, as we transcribe, transmit and receive our written language. Twitter is structured to produce this profound form of human communion through the ways in which it allows speech to be directed at anonymous Others (i.e., using hashtags). This isn't unique to Twitter (it shares this with all forms of written publication that interconnect authors in a publicly accessible forum: e.g., books, journals, and magazines). What is unique however, is the size of the multitude (expanse) and the immediacy of it (real-time).

This raises the question of what an ethics for conduct on Twitter means. Because when one accepts that casual encounters with the speech of others in the public forum of Twitter can and does shape what one says, one must also be willing to accept that hiding behind the anonymity of constructed networks of obfuscation on Twitter isn't an authorization to do just whatever one wants. Consider that internet technology for Twitter seems to be doing for public discourse what it has done for so much of the rest of the legacy economy: authorizing a form of theft and appropriation. That nobody 'owns' anything, that knowledge is a common good has become an accepted ideology in the internet era. Downloading other's music, films, reading news without paying—all of these things are authorized by this internet ideology. In much the same way, Twitter's redeeming quality is based on the assumption that the speech that occurs there is a common good.

What happens on Twitter is over-determined by how it functions to produce social hierarchy. That is the overwhelming compulsion on Twitter. Because of this a conversation on an ethics for discourse on the platform will have a tendency to be perverted and cast as nothing more than disingenuous politicking for one's self and attempt to increase a following. This is what is unfortunate about Twitter: that honest conversations are almost always transformed into a negotiation of social hierarchy and all what one consumes becomes channeled into producing and reinforcing that social hierarchy. This isn't unique to Twitter. Even in the university system, theft and appropriation, taking from the 'common good' of knowledge and ideas is rampant. Being the first to publish, to make something of an idea is what matters. Much the same way that it does in the popular conception of innovation and entrepreneurship in the United States, of Facebook(The Social Network), Apple(Jobs), McDonald's(The Founder). We have become a culture over-determined by capitalist ideology, almost no longer capable of even imagining the contours of any other form of existence such that these facts are self-evidently true. However, for a progressive left that has become permeated with a form of radicalism that spans the spectrum from the Marxist to the militant decentered Multitude of the Occupy movement, this ideological frame and all of the subtle (technological) reinforcements and incentives towards it are of particular relevance.

Endless Reproduction of the Same

Consider that in 1937 George Orwell wrote the following in his The Road to Wigan Pier:

"The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage … or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leaning, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting."

And while the context has changed, and while this description describes more accurately the situation in Europe among radical leftists, and vegetarianism is now veganism, there is also such a sub-culture of activists in big cities in the U.S., as well as a common belief on the left, that advocacy on behalf of working people is possible and legitimate. One can advocate on behalf of another, and it matters little whether or not certain speech and ideas are attributed to specific people—what's important is that someone make something out of them. But Orwell asks us to consider more deeply the extent to which this is true. Is what one does ostensibly on behalf of the disadvantaged working poor really for their benefit, or is it for one's own? Because if what one is about is channeling authentic speech into their own networks to reinforce social hierarchy at the expense of elevating those from whom one takes their cues, then it is inevitable that while what one does may have the appearance and function of a working-class politics, it won't be long before these politics contradict one's own material security, at which point more delusional rationalizations will be necessary and...one ends up where the boomers are today.

And what does this all add up to? Progressive politicians on this #ForceTheVote push have right now given up the lie latent in that Twitter progressivism has almost nothing to do with anything other than self-interest as motivation. The extreme conditions of Twitter exaggerate these compulsions and render them visible to us in real-time. And so while it has always been the case that militant speech and radicalism on the left have been tied to a system of ideological purification and the production of superficial cliques and exclusivity, what we see happening on Twitter constantly every day should, finally, force us to confront this sad fact about the very structure of left politics. There are scant few who really are interested in using Twitter (or 'left' politics) for anything other than: having fun and making fun into itself an ideological argument based on resentment of authority and any compulsion to hard, simplistic work and/or reinforcing their economic or class position in the hierarchy generally and pandering either cynically or delusionally to the disaffected mass of the now online population in a radical language in the hopes of promoting themselves out of their precarious position in this wasteland economy by capturing the attention and commitment of others, which is a form of charlatanism (the academic expanse of literature on the misery of cognitive worker betray this fact, as do the subcultures of the bobo and the hipster, and how they eschew traditional forms of parental discipline while all the while sitting easy in the security of an inheritance). Twitter structure particularly and economic structure generally both seem to lead to the same political and economic end for a left politics, whether it begins that way, or whether it ends up that way.

It's (Finally) a Wrap

Looking at a progressive politics through the prism of Twitter, and looking at how it is articulated within Twitter is demotivating, and draws a bleak landscape. Even the most trustworthy and best-intentioned people produce for themselves a corrupted, perverted perspective on themselves and the hard, important work that they do. This is unfortunately what one has to consider when they look at the potential of Twitter for a progressive politics. It is an amazing organizing tool, it does allow for communication across hierarchies of social status, class, race. It has played important roles in social movements across the world. It does provide a forum for public discourse that is every day vanishing. But it is also what it's been described as here. And it is also everyday falling victim to demands that even the stunted, easily corrupted potential it contains for social movements be censored and further undermined. It's a very difficult situation right now on the left and barring some catastrophe or some seriously radical break with the system of incentives and economic conditions leftists face, its hard to imagine what principles any longer have the possibility of producing a future for the left and even what the most basic contours of that future looks like.