The machine stops
Plus make your own AI video! Make your own AI anything! It's AI all the way down!
Flywheels are a marvellous invention. As seen at scales ranging from the potter’s wheel to big industrial factories, the flywheel becomes both a store of energy and a method of smoothing out fluctuations in supply and demand of energy: if the system to which the flywheel is attached starts to slow down, the momentum of the wheel will speed it up, and vice-versa. (The Wikipedia entry is a fabulous rabbit hole of the theory behind this.)
But you don’t want the energy to leak out of the flywheel. If the system attached to it doesn’t keep contributing to the system’s momentum, the stability will be lost. Let it all deteriorate far enough and the inertia of the wheel that used to work to the benefit of the system by making it hard to slow down instead makes it hard to speed up. Eventually, the machine stops.
This principle came to mind as the latest Twitter dispute played out over the past couple of weeks. Elon Musk un-verified the New York Times, labelled the publicly funded BBC “government-funded media” and called NPR, the US broadcaster, “state-affiliated media”.
The “state-affiliated media” label, according to Twitter, denotes
outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.
The most basic research would have shown that this isn’t true of NPR.1 But of course calling NPR “state-affiliated” is just Musk’s little joke. James Clayton, the BBC journalist who interviewed him earlier this week, observed in a radio interview that “he takes life as a joke… He has a very, very puerile sense of humour.” (The discussion starts at about 2’20” here on BBC Sounds.) For Musk, it’s not about the facts. It’s about whether he thinks it’s funny, which must be excruciating for anyone forced to be reliant on him. (He made lots of laboured jokes about “BBC”—a sexual acronym—in his Twitter feed. Truly, he’s a much less pleasant version of the kid from Big.)
NPR however didn’t think this was funny. First it stopped tweeting, in protest at the label. Musk changed it to “government-funded” on the basis that a tiny sliver of its funding (1%) comes from the government. (On that basis, everyone and every company in the US that received a Covid cheque or has received a tax refund is “government-funded”.) Then on Wednesday NPR announced that it had had enough: the @NPR account, with 8.8m followers, having joined in April 2007, had done with tweeting. Ditto @NPRPolitics (2.2m), @NPRHealth (1m), @NPRBooks (778k), and @NPRExtra (494k). (It’s not clear whether NPR Music, Planet Money, and Science Desk have followed suit, but I’d expect so.)
NPR offered quite the burn in its parting shot:
It isn't clear that a withdrawal from Twitter will materially affect NPR's ability to reach an online audience. NPR's primary Twitter account has 8.8 million followers — more than a million more than follow the network on Facebook. Yet Facebook is a much bigger platform, and NPR's Facebook posts often are far more likely to spur engagement or click-throughs to NPR's own website. NPR Music has almost 10 times more followers on YouTube than it does on Twitter, and the video platform serves as one of the primary conduits for its popular Tiny Desk Series.
It wasn’t just NPR. Other local stations affiliated with NPR have started doing the same: Colorado Public Radio and Nevada Public Radio headed for the exit too.
That point about “engagement or clickthroughs” is important. In fact, it’s key. There is zero point having a garbillion followers on a social network if nobody ever comes to your site from it. A long time ago when Twitter was quite young, I was in charge of the @guardiantech feed, and we put all our links out via bit.ly, which allowed analysis of how many clicks a link had had. When I ran an analysis, it seemed that we’d had a million extra visits via Twitter, which was incredible. Except.. that wasn’t true. There was a flaw in how bit.ly measured “clicks”: lots of systems did a lookup of what the shortened link resolved to, in case the user actually clicked it, and bit.ly counted that as a click, when in fact no such thing happened. We were getting nothing like that million. Measuring real clickthroughs matters. An NPR reporter said that it gets less than 2% of its web visits from Twitter. Given that, why would you stick with a place that misrepresents you?
Meanwhile PBS (2.2m followers), which makes shows such as Sesame Street, hasn’t tweeted from its account since April 8, and its PR person says that it stopped when Twitter—well, Musk—labelled it “state-affiliated media”, which was then changed to “government-funded media”2. Lots of outlets got this response when asked about it:
“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” PBS spokesman Jason Phelps said in an email. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”
This is where I begin to think about the flywheel. Social networks rely on the network effect: initially a small group goes there, and then others join because it’s the cool place to be, and then more join because those other people are there, and then it becomes essential to belong if you want to take part in whatever the network’s good for. In the case of Twitter and media , that’s spreading and finding news: connecting with readers and sources, with mutual benefits for both.
Many media organisations rushed to get onto Twitter when it first started: NPR joined in April 2007, just over a year after the first tweet, and PBS in January 2008. It’s quite an achievement, though not quite the one he’d perhaps want, to persuade them to leave the platform after that period.
There’s a definite feeling, on Media Twitter, of the flywheel slowing down. Journalists have left. Journalists are tweeting less. There are other outlets where things are happening—TikTok and Instagram, and now there’s also Substack Notes, as well as Facebook (remember Facebook? Remember when there would be a scandal about Facebook every month or so?). Or podcasts: when Radio 4’s Today programme wanted someone to talk about the latest episode of Succession (you know, Connor’s Wedding), they sought the co-host of one of the biggest podcasts analysing it, rather than someone with a giant Twitter following.
The energy of attention is being dissipated elsewhere. Musk’s attempt to throw up walls around his site, by preventing Substack links from being retweeted or Liked and stopping tweets from being embedded on Substack, only served to reinforce the appearance of desperation and to make people—especially Substack writers, a group with an intense focus on visibility—figure out new ways to spread their message. More energy dissipated.
Musk’s excuse for this was to claim that Substack was “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their clone”. (By which he meant Notes.) Substack pointed out that it was just using Twitter’s API, like anyone would: I’ve been getting notifications literally for years from Substack that people who I’m following on Twitter have joined it. Sure, this blocking harks back to what Twitter, an aeon ago, did to Tumblr to stop that then-nascent network hijacking its social graph. But that doesn’t explain why Twitter wouldn’t allow embeds on Substack. (But that’s why I’m not including any here; who knows what the policy might be by the time this goes live.)
Musk’s response to these departures has been to try to incite division on the site. The social cooling inherent in having fewer media outputs putting content has to be counteracted by a bit of social warming - specifically, ragging on NPR: “defund @NPR”, he tweeted, and of course his stans jumped on it. The current tactic seems to be to stir up division as hard as possible, setting the “ordinary user” against “the media”. Of course Musk doesn’t like the media; he doesn’t like the way that journalists report stories which show his companies or him in a bad light. He pretends he’s all for free speech, but we know that’s a lie (witness: blocking Mastodon links, blocking Substack links). More and more, there’s a desperation, and the best way to understand it is that he’s both trying to be the main character of the day, and stir up trouble. (Notice how he isn’t giving out usage figures or user figures any more.)
His ambitions do seem to be bigger: he wants Twitter to be, or be part of, “the Everything App”, like WeChat is in China. The instant problem one can see is that China is a single country, whereas Twitter is spread across many countries, with different legal and financial systems and cultural rules. The first part of this would-be transformation is a partnership with eToro that—brief pause while I roll my eyes—
“will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro”.
Seems like a great way to make the crypto scammers go away, huh. Maybe that’s where he hopes to get the next flywheel going: bring all the stonks investors over from Robinhood. I’m going to be sceptical (which, full disclosure, is my default position on most things) and say that this will be a difficult task this at a time when money is tight, inflation is higher than for years (even if falling, that still means prices are higher than they were; they’re just rising less quickly) and some American banks are looking a bit sketchy.
Twitter isn’t dead. Yet. But the longer we wait, the closer it comes to that point where the flywheel loses all its momentum, and the machine stops.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• Make your own AI video! No experience needed!
• Have a chinwag with ChatGPT from your Apple Watch. Or, OK, your iPhone. Or Mac.
• Turn amateur drawings into animated videos. Thanks, Meta? (Try it yourself.)
• Finally, you can actually hear the lyrics to Ice Ice Baby, while also watching scenes from The Matrix.
• Telling GPT-4 to draw a unicorn, day by day. Only day four and it’s getting better at it.
• Amazon will offer a generative AI product called Bedrock that will be available to AWS customers. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, plus OpenAI. That’s the four computers in the world sorted.
• A (looks pretty) complete guide to using Midjourney to its fullest extent. Enjoy!
• 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.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat.
Wikipedia explains that most of NPR’s funding used to come from the US government, but that was way back in the 1970s and 1980s. That stopped being true long ago. Now, about 70% of its funding comes from corporate and individual sponsorship and fees from stations that rebroadcast its programmes; and those stations themselves receive a small amount of their funding from the government. Overall, about 1% of its total funding is from the US government.
PBS gets about 15% of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is a federally-funded private corporation. So you could stretch a point and call it “government-funded media”, but in that case Tesla and SolarCity and SpaceX are government-funded too. Arguably, you need a substantial minority—33%, 40%?—of funding before that’s important. But as the government doesn’t actually get a say in what PBS does, because it comes through a third-party organisation, the label looks less truthful.
"I’m going to be sceptical (which, full disclosure, is my default position on most things)" - damn right!
Left twitter over a year ago, haven't missed it. Much prefer the longer, more thoughtful pieces on Substack (and the absence of trolling and rubbish from idiots)