Empty boxes

Maybe the only people interested in the Twitter drama are the people like me who have social and cultural capital tied up in it. Where else do my opinions have any convertible worth? By unilaterally purchasing the vault in which all this social capital is stored (and the primary means by which it circulates and valorizes itself), Elon Musk has created a kind of hostage crisis, but it’s not entirely clear what he wants or if we can simply post our way out of it, even if everyone is posting about him.

Musk’s demand for tribute in the form of subscription fees has already been muddled and partly retracted; his conduct toward the employees and brand advertisers that the company needs to function suggests that he has been more interested in shooting the hostages than negotiating terms. It’s not entirely out of the question that he bought Twitter precisely to eliminate all that capital in the hands of his perceived enemies (the “media elites” impeding “citizen journalists”) in a great bonfire of the vanities. Perhaps some recondite tenet of effective altruism requires that one spend as much as possible to silence skeptics in the name of the future, or perhaps in Musk’s idiosyncratic mental bookkeeping model, if you spend billions to destroy other people’s billions, it all balances out or you even come out ahead.

A comparison to the FTX bankruptcy may be appropriate here. If Sam Bankman-Fried can singlehandedly vaporize that much value overnight, wouldn’t it be incumbent on a potentate like Musk to top him in a potlatch-driven fit of sheer expenditure? Together they are making Bataille proud, so many victims to their sovereign recklessness and waste.

When billions of dollars of “value” disappear in a matter of days, it can make you wonder whether that value ever really existed, and if it did, precisely what form did it take that it could be so fragile. If crypto is ultimately backed by nothing but a collective sense of other people’s gullibility, then that can be understood as a pool of social capital of a kind, one that can quickly be drained in an instant. The social connection that made it possible isn’t intrinsically valuable; the networks can conduct doubt as well as faith.

In an interview with Bloomberg’s Matt Levine from April, Bankman-Fried tried to explain how the yield-farming schemes popular in the crypto world “worked.” It’s not the most lucid description, but it begins with Bankman-Fried positing that crypto could be likened to a company that makes an inscrutable box that does nothing in particular but that everyone sees (or believes other people see) as an investment opportunity. “They probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that's gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It's just a box.” Through the Tinkerbell magic of decentralized finance, you can link an “X token” to what the box does (nothing) and get people to believe there is a climate of interest around what the box will eventually generate.

X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or other cool things that happen from this box. And of course, so far, we haven't exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don't know, you know, maybe there will be, so that's sort of where you start.

This is not unlike how Twitter (or social media more generally) started, with no particular mission, just an empty box that people repeatedly put a few characters into, creating the impression of dynamism. Suddenly, cool and important things seemed to be happening in the boxes and value was organizing itself out of the emptiness, hinging on people’s expanding willingness to look at the boxes. But what if someone came around and made sure that everyone knew that the boxes were always empty?

In Bankman-Fried’s example, his box accrues a market capitalization, despite doing nothing other than organizing people’s speculative interest in itself, capitalizing on its own mystery, on whether the box that does nothing may ever do anything. Levine protests, “When you describe it in this totally cynical way, it sounds like it should be zero,” which merely echoes Bankman-Fried’s point, because the value of the box is in its ability to repel or conceal cynicism and inspire faith. He then proceeds to explain how investors could feed on each other’s enthusiasm and “it goes to infinity.” (This Slate piece, looking at this kind of willful delusion, likens crypto to false religion.) But at the same time, Bankman-Fried admits, thinking “about like cynically, what could happen here? Well, okay. So you've got this box and it’s kind of dumb, but like what's the endgame, right? This box is worth zero obviously.”

Yes, it couldn’t be more obvious now. Thanks to FTX, we can put a price to just how much social trust crypto managed to galvanize only to destroy, as it was going to do inevitably. It created a form of trust that could exist only to be squandered, that could be erased in hours and reversed into an even larger amount of cynicism. Crypto values are always vulnerable to this kind of reversal because of how self-referential they are; they are “kind of dumb” in precisely that tautological sort of way. The recursive loop at any moment can trip over into implosion.

One could argue that something similar is happening on Twitter, where an increasing amount of discussion seems to be about Musk and Twitter itself, tweets about tweets about tweets approaching a black-hole-level of density from which no ideas can escape. It’s becoming more obvious all of a sudden to those not especially invested in it that probably the boxes are worth zero. The feeds aren’t going to infinity. The capital that seems to be vested there isn’t worth what people think, and in fact it is possible to imagine it isn’t worth anything at all.

Where it once seemed that a vanguard was manipulating the boxes to make the zeitgeist appear and dictate the shape of the future, now it just seems like the boxes may as well be empty again. From a somewhat cynical project’s failure to remain believably constructive, thanks to its own incoherence as well as Musk’s sabotage, an even greater cynicism emerges, in which not only “social media is ending,” as Ian Bogost suggests, but beyond that, so too the ability to even think what society is.

One could even call it the “implosion of the social in the media.” Bogost concludes his piece by advocating for less communication. “To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often — and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well.” This seems like an easier attitude to preach from the pages of a national magazine than to practice. But has the problem with social media really been too many people taking up a broadcasting mentality, too many people having opinions who should know their place and stay silent? Broadcasting to scaled-up audiences of anyone was always a niche behavior, much like Twitter is a niche platform.

The “silence of the masses,” in Baudrillard’s analysis is a perverse strategy of resistance that amounts to a “massive delegation of the power of desire, of choice, of responsibility, a delegation to apparatuses either political or intellectual, either technical or operational, to whom has devolved the duty of taking care of all these things.” Today, in internet media, that devolution appears not as ersatz participation in a broadcast medium that reduces all connection and conversation to babble, but as passivity within media platforms’ cocoon of algorithmic recommendation, which makes a virtue out of powerlessness, an identity out of being told what to want rather than talking incessantly to promote oneself. The problem perhaps is not so much that people had the temerity to speak out across scales and contexts, but that platforms strenuously developed a surfeit of content and imposed algorithmic sorting to allegedly help us cope. There is “too much content” because platforms make money by manipulating and directing our attention, not because ordinary people have too much to say.