Suddenly, the White House wins Twitter
Plus even more glimpses of the AI tsunami: they're taking our arts prizes!
Abruptly last week, the White House’s Twitter feed changed character. After years of bland explanations of new incentives and laws (“The Inflation Reduction Act will advance environmental justice with programs to: - Tackle pollution in port communities; - Seed state and local clean energy financing banks to help disadvantaged communities; - Provide funding for Tribal communities to boost their climate resilience”), at about 5.30pm East Coast time on August 25 it took on a rather different tone.
Now, it started quote-tweeting Republicans who were being critical of the just-announced plan to forgive $10,000 of student debt. In a six-tweet thread, it thoroughly dunked on six of them, beginning with Marjorie Taylor Greene:
The format is known on Twitter as “this you?”, in which someone’s hypocrisy is bluntly thrown back at them.
Naturally, the Republicans (aka GOP) complained bitterly that PPP loans aren’t the same at all as student loans; PPP loans were made to businesses which were forced to pause during the pandemic in order to keep them afloat, whereas student loans have no such stricture. This, of course, completely missed the point, which was that they’re both called “loans” and the GOP folk named didn’t pay them back, and secondly that complaining about this sort of treatment means you’ve lost the argument.
People noticed. According to the Washington Post,
Democrats responded with enthusiasm, with nearly 200,000 people retweeting the thread and more than 700,000 liking it as of Friday afternoon, making it one of the White House’s highest engagement tweets ever. The White House account gained more than 49,000 followers Thursday and more than 71,000 on Friday, far more than the couple thousand it generally gains per day, according to data from Social Blade.
Everyone’s looking for the person who did this (in a good way)
Who was behind this abrupt change in approach? While nobody’s confirmed it for sure, the strong suspicion is that it’s down to Megan Coyne, newly hired as the Deputy Director of Platforms at the White House. “Platforms” meaning social media, I think. She’s a New Jersey native—her Twitter profile has a shot of her, and her page background is Tony Soprano holding court on a New Joisey sidewalk—who came to prominence by running @NJGov, the social media account for the state of NJ. She started as a campaign intern and quickly became the social media director, turning the account from something fuddy-duddy into one that would suggest to disparagers of the NY district to “delete ur account” [sic]. Her biography is pretty brief, but given that she only graduated in 2019, she can’t be older than mid-20s. (Her photo bears this out.)
Which tells you where we are now with social media and politics: at the national level in the US, it’s become about how well you can drag someone on Twitter as much as how much your message resonates. And if you’re part of a generation that has grown up with this activity as part of the background noise, as natural as a car radio to kids in the 1950s, you’re ideally placed to make waves.
This isn’t to disparage Coyne or her work; the dunking thread is an absolutely perfect pairing of the message and the medium, in a way that would be almost impossible to do well in many other formats. It would sound a bit leaden in a speech to list the six hypocrites. But as a series of 280-character zingers in which you also quote the people you’re dumping on, catching them in the very act of being hypocritical, it can’t be beaten. Even better, you know that Twitter will alert them (or their social media manager) of the dunking.
This is the newest side of politics. Of course, old-style politics still goes on: Joe Biden still had to twist Joe Manchin’s arm in private to get him to vote for the giant bill that just passed Congress. Lobbyists still lunch and schmooze pols. But now there’s also the public forum, which increasingly resembles the arena from Gladiator, where big beasts vie to be seen slaying would-be challengers and, yes, dunking on political enemies.
Always with the warming
The only expectation is that this spectacle makes us more polarised. It adds to social warming. You delight in the White House dunking, or you protest that those two sorts of loans aren’t the same at all. You don’t begin a reasoned discussion with your political opponents about the efficacy or social desirability of loan forgiveness. Arguably, the politicians have already had that discussion among themselves, but that seems to leave the broader citizenship out of the debate: we’re just left with two sides and the obligation to pick one (unless you don’t live in the US, in which case you watch with a slightly amused detachment).
And who likes this process? The party that’s doing it. In this case, that’s the Democrats. But it’s only playing catchup. The GOP leaned into the memeification of politics years ago almost by default because D••••• T•••• was so good at using the medium. One thing that he showed was that “being good at Twitter” requires being a bit unhinged. You have to be happy to say pretty much anything about anyone, and indifferent to the response. Normally this is impossible for someone hoping for a career in politics, but events demonstrated that this was no longer true. In the attention economy, memes and insults are an excellent investment. The GOP Twitter account is a pretty constant source of gripe-y discontent aimed at its followers, though you’d have to say it doesn’t stick to any topic apart from hating Democrats. Meanwhile its target, @TheDemocrats, flits between sniping back (“Republicans are trying to hide their extreme agenda to ban abortion without exceptions by scrubbing their campaign websites. They know how out of touch they are with the American people. We must hold them accountable this November”) and jolly positivity; the latter is natural for whichever party is in charge. Once you’re in opposition, you want to act infuriated. (You may even actually be infuriated.)
Like so much on Twitter, it’s surface froth that even so manages to polarise and separate. For sure, politics has never been a world of bipartisanship where friendly rivals work out paper-thin differences to alight on a beautiful compromise. But for all that Coyne’s work has delighted Democrats (and the writeups in papers will have taken it beyond the Twitter audience), it’s hard not to see it as anything other than the increased hardening of the political arteries in the US.
And yet, and yet.. as discourse goes, it definitely has one thing going for it: it’s comprehensible. Earlier this week Ben Thompson quoted from one of the Federalist papers written by Alexander Hamilton, of which this is an excerpt: I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted.
To which I say: pardon? It takes some time to unravel. This is the problem with discourse from a couple of centuries ago: our modes of language have changed so much. Perhaps these days Hamilton would be using Twitter too, and dunking on his opponents. At least he’d be less likely to die in a duel.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami: now they’re winning arts prizes!
It’s only been a week, but things are really motoring along. (Which tsunami? This one.)
• First, there’s a project called Stable Diffusion, which is basically Dall-E in a Linux-friendly wrapper that anyone can download (if they know how to install it on Linux). Of course that latter requirement is pretty steep. But I think you can be confident that there will be packages for MacOS and Windows within a month or two. It’s a little shy of 5GB—a very feasible download.
• Second, following on from that, there’s a Twitter account called deforum which is collecting peoples’ work that uses Stable Diffusion where they’ve then made videos with it.
Oh, you wanted to see some of the videos? Fine, but remember, you asked.
• Third (because if you’re anything like me, you’re blinking quite hard after watching those two), an AI drawing won the Colorado State Fair fine art competition. Well done, MidJourney! Except it was a person who claimed the prize—a Discord user called Sincarnate.
Predictably enough, there are lots of furious artists out there, complaining about how they’re being displaced by damn machines. Though when you read his description of how he generated it, you may reconsider the question of how simple it is. “I have been exploring a special prompt [to generate an image] that I will be publishing at a later date. I have created 100s [sic] of image using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens [generated images], I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after upscaling with Gigapixel AI.”
He calls it “Theatre d’Opera Spatial”. Here’s the image he put on Discord, showing the winning ribbon too.
All it needs is for the systems to learn how to enter these competitions and they’ll be away. Or will competitions specify that entries have to be human-only?
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
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