One would like to dismiss all this as a puppet theater of an erratic universal genius. But with the open future of an enormously influential social medium like Twitter, the question of the future of our political public also arises.
As a global storytelling machine, Twitter is compelling. Twitter has an enormous influence on future industries such as technology, politics, finance, entertainment and the media: If you want to be noticed there, you have to be present on Twitter.
Incidentally, Twitter has advanced to become the number one elite communication network. Never before has a medium had so much narrative power. Twitter is the public sphere in the 21st century, or the – for a long time – uncontrolled disruption of the public sphere as we know it.
Where else (in Davos?) do you meet so many decision-makers, where else is so much social and economic power concentrated? Everyone who has something to say talks on Twitter – elite attention with the lowest possible access threshold.
We are facing the next major digital turning point. Facebook, Microsoft and now also Apple dream of walkable internet in the Metaverse.
And recently, the “New York Times” has asked its reporters to deal more with reality than with its mirrored and escalated image of Twitter. Social media as a dingy interlude in media history?
Is a new Twitter era dawning?
The following questions are haunting the digital space right now: Will Twitter soon be the first social medium of the crypto era? Can a new concept of freedom of expression be implemented through the decentralization of the platforms?
Again and again it is assumed that Twitter could be placed completely on a blockchain, equipped with its own cryptocurrency and forgery-proof user identities. Is this already the end of the era of platforms that generate value through attention and delivered the controversial business model of the 2010s, or are we only at the beginning of the platform age?
dr Eike Wenzel is considered one of the most renowned German trend and future researchers. He is head of the Institute for Trend and Future Research (ITZ) and co-founder of the MBA course “Future Trends and Sustainable Management” https://zukunft.mba
For more than ten years, world events have been taking place on Twitter, initiated by CEO and president tweets and fed into the traditional media (CNN vs. Fox News) for further escalation. But to this day, Twitter has never been able to really capitalize on it.
Facebook was successful in showing advertisers who we know. Twitter goes well beyond that, providing information about what we like and what excites us.
However, that doesn’t seem to change the fact that relatively few people are still on Twitter. With 436,000 users worldwide (as of January 2022), Twitter is now only in 15th place behind TikTok, Telegram, Snapchat and many others; Facebook remains the undisputed number one with 2.91 billion.
From the outset, the need for growth imposed by the IPO did not do Twitter any good. The listing has led social media to the controversial targeting system that regulators in Europe and the US are up in arms about. This business model cannot make Musk happy, it still consists – as with Google and Facebook – to over 90 percent from advertising income.
Twitter: the first social medium of the crypto age?
Almost as a parallel action to Musk’s desire to buy, the discussion about Web3 has been wafting through tweets and technology blogs for several weeks. Are we witnessing the beginning of a new era of the decentralized internet?
Much of this repeats the emancipation narrative from the beginning of the internet age in the mid-1990s. It cannot yet be decided whether Web3 is just a PR stunt by star investors like Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto scene or whether it marks a breakthrough in the new Internet freedom.
On the other hand, cryptocurrency, blockchains and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) still do not represent any substantial trends. Twitter’s in-house reform project Bluesky is shaped by crypto programmers and the evangelists of decentralized open protocol platforms.
However, it remains unclear whether blockchain technology can even get a complex platform like Twitter going. With Bluesky, Twitter – that was the status before Musk’s takeover flirt – still wants to get the digital-emancipatory curve. The Internet, which has a decentralized core in its DNA, should still be converted into a progressive and emancipative instrument?
Mastodon (4.4 million users, Twitter: 217 million) is one of the decentralized platforms that has recently emerged as an alternative to Twitter. When Musk announced the purchase of Twitter in April, tens of thousands switched to Mastodon. The number of hourly posts doubled (from 5,000 in early April to 10,000 in late April), causing temporary performance issues on the servers.
The young social medium is operated decentrally via various servers (private individuals, associations). The right-wing social network Gab used this in 2019 to move completely to Mastodon while fleeing justice. Experts who observe the behavior of right-wing extremists on the Internet in the USA assume that in future they could regularly emigrate with their content to peer-to-peer and open-source networks in order to avoid being observed by the judiciary .
Public needs topic relevance and discernment
Here the dilemma of decentralized network euphoria becomes tangible once again: They enable right-wing extremist activists to evade persecution and thus continue to represent dangerous contact points to right-wing content for the angry mainstream network.
At the same time, decentralized platforms allow marginalized minorities to organize themselves online. The political naivety of decentralization and crypto supporters has already prevented a lot.
It is unlikely that Twitter will become a DAO. So far, DAOs have been nothing more than a “group chat with a connected bank account”.
In the years leading up to Musk’s Twitter purchase, billionaires scooped up classic media brands for single-digit billions. But does Musk, perhaps the most influential billionaire of our time, really care about reinventing Twitter in the service of free speech? All no rocket science for Elon?
No, Musk is not about freedom of the press. And maybe what’s spinning around in his head, citing a noble term like freedom of expression, is even more anarchic than the current Twitter.
Musk’s vague idea of free speech follows the old neoliberal idea of freedom of expression: everyone can basically say anything – the most important thing will come out automatically at some point. But such a deregulated market for expression of opinion has made the interventions of right-wing populists and Putin’s troll farms possible in the past few years. We do not develop a functioning public through the technological solution of a blockchain, but through access for all people to the relevant topics of the future and through the production of the ability to distinguish.
Jürgen Habermas described it as follows: “A democratic system as a whole is damaged when the public infrastructure no longer draws the attention of all citizens equally to the relevant issues that require decision-making and when they prevent the formation of competing public, and that means: qualitatively filtered opinions , can no longer perform at a reasonable level.” Twitter and democracy, still a difficult story.
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