Plain English with Derek Thompson - Elon Musk’s Meltdown, the Death of Twitter, and the Chaotic Future of Social Media

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Today’s episode is a wide-ranging one, from breaking news in tech to the philosophy of social media. The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel joins to discuss Elon Musk's bizarre and crude comments at The New York Times DealBook Summit, the corporate meltdown of X, whether its demise would make the world better off, the fragmentation of the social media landscape, and its implications for audiences and news-makers everywhere. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail].  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charlie Warzel Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody. It's Austin Rivers from Offguard, and I've got some exciting news. Offguard hosted by me and my guy Pasha Gigi is officially moving to our own podcast feed. We are now dropping two shows every week. Me and Pasha go way back and talk so much hoops already that we figured it was time to fire up the mics and let you in on these conversations. Every week, Pasha and myself will hit on the biggest stories happening around the league. Tap into the show twice a week on our new Offguard feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today's episode is a wide-ranging one. It's about Elon Musk, the corporate meltdown of X, the fragmentation of the social media

landscape, and the implications for audiences and newsmakers everywhere. We begin, as we must, with Musk, and Elon's recent comments at the New York Times Deal Book Summit, which could very well mark the beginning of the end for X, formerly known as Twitter. Some background here. For years, Musk had... increasingly dabbled in various conspiracy theories on the site that he bought, and this had driven away some advertisers. On several occasions, for example, Musk had promoted one of the stranger

conspiracy stories the last few years called Pizza Gate, which is this long convoluted ludicrous story that somehow connects high-ranking Democrats to a pedophilia ring and then draws in a pizza joint called comet ping pong, which is actually 10 minutes from my house, fine establishment. That was obviously crazy, but for some reason Elon Musk kept tweeting about it. The coup de grasseau came a few weeks ago, and this sounds so bizarre to read out loud, but it all happened. A small-fri white nationalist account was berating a Jewish user on X, and in the process accused Jews of, quote, dialectical hatred against whites. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, logged online, somehow saw this small-fri white nationalist account, and replied to him writing, quote, you have said the actual truth.

The fallout was immediate. Companies like Apple, Disney, IBM, pulled their advertising, announced suspensions to their relationship with X. More companies followed. Musk apologized for his post, but meanwhile, millions of dollars were flying out the door. All of this is the context in which Musk appeared at the New York Times Deal Book Conference on Wednesday. Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him about his reaction to losing big-time advertisers, given that his company requires advertising to survive. And this was Elon Musk's response.

If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. But go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you're in the audience. That's Bob, as in Bob Eiger, by the way, the CEO of Disney. So, look, there are some narrow questions to ask here.

Questions like, is he trying to destroy the company? There's no shortage of commentary on Musk's business strategy at X, but the bottom line is that he bought a bad business in Twitter at an inflated price, and he made it a worse business. I think, personally, Musk has two competing self-interest here. I think he likes to talk shit, and I think he likes to make money. And in this case, these two interests are catastrophically misaligned, because the more shit he says, the more money his business loses.

Now, whenever we do a show on Elon Musk, whenever I talk about him on this show or in Bill Simmons podcast, the negative feedback is bimodal. One big group screams at me for being an Elon Musk hater, and then another group screams at me for talking about him at all, when there are all sorts of other problems happening in the world. Before we dive into the show, I want to actually quickly respond to both these criticisms because they are reasonable in a way, but I think both wrong. Number one, the idea that I'm rooting against Elon Musk at Twitter or X is absurd.

Three years ago, if you asked me, from my opinion on Elon Musk, I would have told you this. Anybody who can simultaneously build the world's most valuable car company, which, by the way, accelerates us into exactly the clean electric future that I want. And then as a side gig leads the world's most sophisticated rocket system is worthy of my admiration as a business mind. As for Twitter itself, I am notoriously, embarrassingly, addicted to the damn thing. So the only reasonable position for me to hold was to desperately hope that Elon Musk would make Twitter better, make my experience of the internet better. I was rooting, if anything, for him to wildly successful. succeed. The fact that he has not is disappointing to me. I'm rooting for none of this.

Now, as for the claim that Musk is unworthy of our attention, I would direct your attention to a New York Times article from November 19th this year. The headline is, quote, the White House may condemn Musk, but the government is addicted to him. The deck is rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single technologist with views that it has so publicly declared repugnant. Elon Musk, through Starlink and SpaceX, has the power to provide or deny internet in war zones. The Pentagon and NASA rely on his rockets. Tesla sells one out of every two electric vehicles in America.

It is wrong to call Elon Musk the most powerful person in the world, obviously. That's crazy. but I don't think it's crazy to call him the most uniquely powerful. What other individual has this portfolio of power who has a button that can provide internet in Ukraine and Gaza and also launches reusable rockets that the Pentagon and NASA depends on and also sells one out of every two electric vehicles in the country?

Of course, we should be interested in whether this person believes in collaboration, or conspiracy. Today's guest in talking all things Elon X, the bigger story of Musk's temperament and the future of social media, we welcome back to the Atlantic's Charlie Worsell. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Charlie Worsell, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So I wanted to talk to you about Elon Musk and X. I hope we do spend the bulk of this conversation talking about the moment in social media beyond Musk and X. But let me first start by acknowledging your wisdom and my stupidity.

Because when Elon Musk first bought Twitter, you came on the show and we talked about the future of Twitter under a Musk regime. And I said, look, hey, no one knows how this is going to turn out. I think it could turn out fine. At least we have a user of the platform running the platform, a user who, by the way, has very successfully led several world historic businesses. He could add features and value that could make my experience of Twitter better. and you said,

no, no, I don't think this is going to work out. I think it's going to be a disaster. And at least, I should say, for all the Musk fans out there, from a business standpoint, a disaster is exactly what it has been. I think it's pretty interesting that I try to analyze Elon Musk's

acquisition of Twitter from a business perspective, but by analyzing it from a personal perspective, you actually correctly predicted the business outcome. Let me give you the stage here to gloat if you wish, but also to answer my specific question, which is why do you think you got this right?

Well, thank you. That's very, very, always nice to have the ego fluffed a little there. I think, so there's a very specific reason why I went with what I went with back in, I don't even remember when that was, but like 18 months ago. And it was specifically right at this moment when Elon was like flirting with, you know, like joining the board of Twitter. Like he had just purchased like an ownership stake, but not the full, like purchasing the

company. And he, there was all this like, you know, we were all on pins and needles about what was going to happen. And he went to the TED conference in Vancouver. And he talked with, I think his name is Chris Anderson, the head of TED. And he was just putting these, these kind of softball questions to him. Like, why do you want to buy Twitter? Why are you interested in this?

and he was giving these answers about like content moderation and the way that a platform should work that were very like just an immediate red flag to me of wow this guy's never thought about this once in his life like he's never thought about content moderation he was just like Twitter needs to abide by you know like the rules like the like the law like all speech has to immediately follow the law and that means free speech and it was like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa like, no, like there are, you know, books of scholarship and classes that you can take, you know, on First Amendment law that all speak to the fact that, you know, these are super complicated issues. Like, it is not, I'm going to put my stamp down and fix this problem.

And it seemed like he had, A, not thought about it at all, but B had thought about it from this almost like engineering or, you know, like, factory process, like, you know, similar to like, well, you build the rocket part this way, right? Like you do this. This component is built that way. Stamp it, you know, ship it. This is, you know, how the car is going to run. And that's not how these things work.

Like, these are messy human systems. This is all, you know, like, you have to take in the idea of the law. You have to build in, you have to, you know, build in like the messiness of human relationships, bad actors, whatever, right? And the fact that you're the main rule of running a social network, which is you are not going to please everyone all the time, and you're really never going to get it, quote, unquote, right. There is no right.

It's just, you know, what side you come down on, on difficult questions. And when I heard those things, just sort of like the ignorance confidently stated about it, I was like, this man doesn't know what he's doing. Like, he may be really good at, you know, getting rockets to land, you know, on their sort of on the launch pad, or, you know, bring electric vehicle. into the world in a really interesting and meaningful way, he is not going to be capable of doing this, just simply because he thinks he has an easy solve.

So that really is kind of it. Like, I just saw the temperament. I just saw sort of the arrogance and the confidence with which he stated that. And I was like, I think he's going to probably speed run, you know, the history of Twitter executives falling flat on their face. And that's kind of what's happened,

except way worse. It's been such an interesting lesson in the transferability of expertise. I think that Elon Musk is a brilliant manager of rocket scientists. And if you believe in the transferability of expertise, you think, well, if you can develop a reusable rocket to a degree that is more technologically sophisticated than anything invented in the entire history of the world by any country, well, obviously you can learn how to squeeze a little bit more money out of Twitter. But your point, which I think is so well taken, is that being super PhD level at chief

executiving a rocket company actually has nothing to do with understanding a social media platform because what makes cheap rockets possible has nothing to do with what makes a platform for human bitching, which is what Twitter X is, appealing to advertisers, which is what Twitter's business is. I think we should acknowledge here that, you know, Musk ultimately didn't want to buy Twitter. He was dragged to court by the board of directors. Ironically, Brett Taylor, now a board member at OpenAI, its own insane tech story that we talked about just last week, was one of the people dragging him to court. He made the acquisition because he was forced to do so after he didn't want to close. And maybe that's why he did not seem to have any kind of plan for how to actually

turn this bad business. Twitter was never a good business, this bad business into a slightly better business. The news of the day is the ongoing fallout over Elon Musk's anti-Semitic commentary. And the brief news there is he endorsed the Great Replacement Theory on Twitter, essentially acknowledging this person's comment that Jews are inherently anti-white. He said, ah, yes, you speak the truth. People legitimately and predictably got incredibly pissed about this. Disney, Apple, IBM, lots of companies pulled their advertising from the Twitter platform. Musk seems to apologize, sometimes seems not to double down,

certainly to be sort of brazen about his right to endorse all sorts of conspiracy theories. And then at the dealable conference when talking to Andrew Ross Orkin, tells Bob Iger, Bob, as he calls him, Disney, Apple, and all of these other advertisers that they can, quote, go fuck themselves. And he repeats this several times. Go fuck yourself. Look, this is one of these news events that I don't think we need to spend like 15 minutes sort of pulling apart like all of the consequential, oh my God, what does this mean? But what was your reaction to the go fuck yourself comment. I mean, like, very honestly, I'm not, I'm not, like, concerned in the way you would be about, like, you know, a family member about Elon Musk's, like, well-being,

seeming well-being and, like, radicalization. But, like, there is sort of, like, a general concern. And I think we'll speak to, like, why we should care about, you know, the stability of a guy with as much wealth and power as Elon Musk. But, like, it struck me, and I'm not trying to do this as like a medical diagnosis at all. I'm just talking about like purely the personality that's being projected seems like someone who's like who's not doing great, right? Like it like there's just a volatility there. Like and there's, you know, I think there's a thing that happens sometimes where like the way that people present themselves on Twitter especially, but on social media is so different from the way that you see them, you know, in the real world. Like they'll fire off like a mean spirited

argumentative tweet and then you'll see them, you know, in reality. And they're like, they're doing great. and they're like normal and rational. But like he seems to be projecting the same reality in both of these circumstances. And it really seems like one of like a guy who is extremely embittered, extremely embattled, like paranoid to some degree. And, you know, there feels like like a retreat inward, right? That there is just this small group of people who are, you know,

who are not. consumed with the mind virus, you know, the quote unquote mind virus that he talks about, the woke mind virus, and that those are the people who he is, you know, pandering to, who he is, you know, whose favor he is, he's trying to court at all times. And it's this, like, contingent of edge lords and, and just, you know, kind of, obviously, like, white nationalist to some degree, but just, like, trolls and, and people who are, have this very, like, grim, negative vision of the world and what is happening to society. And those are the people that he just seems to be getting closer and closer to and

starting to replicate. And his outward persona is becoming that of, it's worrisome, you know? Like there just was, at one point he turned to Andrew Ross Sorkin and called him Jonathan and was like, you know, Jonathan, I'm only here because we're really good friends. And Sorkin's like, kind of doesn't, you can tell, doesn't really. know exactly what's like it's taken aback by this and i felt kind of similarly like sirkin's name who is is andrew right just to be clear right sorry jonathan sarkin yes yes and and it just it felt to me like there's there's some like funny elements to this obviously like there's there's drama there's

but but to me it's it's a really uncomfortable feeling because i feel like this is a person who if this was your family member, right, who was just posting the way that they are and communicating with these types of people and you would be concerned about their trajectory, right? This is a person who kind of started off being more of like a playful troll on social media and has really, you know, run through this kind of like internet brain rot world

and seems to be doing quite poorly, right? Like there's a lot of stuff that I won't get into, but, like, you know, speculation about, you know, issues with custody of his kids. Like, there's just a lot going on. And it really actually, the person who it reminds me of is Alex Jones around 2017, who was having very clearly these family problems who was becoming more and more erratic. And, I mean, he's always been an erratic guy, but I was profiling him at the time. And it felt like, oh, every time I see this person in public, there's like an added edge.

and extremism and paranoia there. So I don't know. It's honestly unnerving to me more than anything else. Yeah, you could make the case that the smartest reason to care about Elon Musk becoming more of a reactionary or more of a conspiracy theorist or sometimes even just more of a,

you know, a Democratic Party antagonist and so forth, actually has nothing to do with X. It has everything to do with his jobs outside of X. Like the New York Times recently published this report on the fact that the U.S. government is addicted to Elon Musk technology. The U.S.S. government has billions of dollars of contracts with Musk. The Pentagon relies on him for spy and command of control satellites, rely on him for Starlink satellites that can provide internet to Ukraine and Gaza. And in each of those cases, Musk essentially played the role

of the international politician. If people don't remember, he refused to have Starlink support a Ukraine attack in Crimea. He helped to negotiate internet access for people in Gaza with Israel. From the New York Times, quote, Starlink satellites are now critical to deterring China because they are far more resistant to Chinese efforts to disable them

than the Pentagon's own communication satellites. End quote. We are talking about a man who has a kind of international and even quasi-intergalactic power in terms of his satellite technology. that's sort of unprecedented. And it is alarming in a way that's uncomfortable to talk about

when you have temperament issues with someone like this. It's already, you could argue, even without temperament issues, even if he had the temperament of an angel, you would say, that's a lot of power to rest on one guy's shoulders. And now you throw in the fact that his day-to-day presentation on the platform that he owns is resembling Alex Jones in 2017. I certainly don't want 2017 Alex Jones to be in charge of a global satellite system. but the reality is that Elon Musk is in charge of the global satellite system.

This is really where I actually want to push the conversation. I mean, to what extent do you start to worry about his temperament colliding with his extraordinary international power, especially in the skies? I think it already has. I mean, I think we've seen, you know, with some of the stuff that played out in Ukraine, I think we've seen his own, you know, politics or his own ideas about the, the world, you know, crash into this infrastructure that he's in control of. It's, it's, it's quite worrying.

And in some ways, it's, you know, the, um, the silver lining to his erratic behavior on X is that it, it is drawing attention to this because he has, he's long been erratic. I mean, when, when I've, I really first started reporting on Musk only back in 2016. And, you know, we were reporting in the, mostly in the context of Tesla and how he ran that operation. And you see the seeds of all of this, right? He is like a really mercurial boss. He, you know, he pushes people to the limits. He, you know, a former Tesla employee described him as like a child king, right?

Like one of those people with tons of power and extremely erratic. and you know, you knew that he sort of wasn't always making the right choice, but he's the king. You have to do it or, you know, you'll get sent to, you know, the gallows or whatever. So for people who are listening and thinking, are these guys trying to psychotherapize Elon Musk from afar, we do not know what's going on. So let's, for the purposes of the rest of the conversation, let's take mental health off the table entirely. We can stipulate that Elon Musk has the mental stuble. of a Zen monk, okay?

Granted, stipulated. It is still notable that someone with world-leading satellite, internet, and rocket technology can be so lured by a conspiracy. Like, for the Musk fans out there, and I know you are,

it is possible to simultaneously be impressed by reusable rockets and self-driving capacities of Tesla and also be concerned that the CEO is one funny tweet away from believing any number of debunk conspiracy theories. This, I think, is really where the rubber hits the road here

for people who wonder, like, why talk about Elon Musk? This is why the U.S. government is becoming ever more involved with this person in international affairs, in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He has the power to provide Internet access to our allies and people who are in conflict with our allies. His politics matter because he has real power to shift and shape global affairs.

Yeah, I mean, when you think about his political involvement, he launched, he and X launched Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign. Like the whole like softball interview, all of that, like, he did that. And it wasn't like, he is actively participating in this far right political project. and that's to the point where I've, in the Atlantic, written that, you know, even if he doesn't think he is, he is playing the role of a far right activist. Like, he is raising, you know, the, he's helping the causes of a far right movement with the things that he is doing, whether he thinks he is or not. And so, yeah, it's, it's incredibly, it's incredibly fascinating. It's, it's definitely alarming. But, you know, I, there's also a way in which you've sort of alluded to this,

I don't know what can be done. You know, like that's what's fascinating about this. There's a little bit of of stuckness here, right? That is, and I know we said before we talked, we were going to limit like the Trump comparisons, right? But there's a little bit of that same feeling. And I've, you know, talked publicly about how difficult it is right now to cover Elon Musk because you're,

just sort of stuck in this in this position right like we know who the guy is we know what his interests are we know the positions of power that he occupies um there's a little bit of like it's hard to figure out what the next thing to say is and that's why i mean i appreciate this part of the conversation putting in context his global influence here because it is not just the case that he has a politics that clashes with a sort of, you know, more mainstream sentiment and we're all up in arms about it. This is a conversation about power. I want to step back here and put myself in the mind of someone listening along who thinks, you know, you guys are just being ideological.

You're just defaming this incredible business person because of your liberalism. If that's what your self-talk sounds like right now, I would ask you to put the shoe on the other foot. If you think we're being unfair, truly ask yourself. How would you feel if the chief executive of Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing or any other significant supplier for the U.S. military or the U.S. government, imagine if this chief executive announced weekly that they believed in some new Uber Marxist far-left conspiracy. Imagine that they announced on Twitter or Instagram, who cares, that they thought the GOP had its own Pizza Gate conspiracy to kidnap and hurt children. I think you might take issue with anti-American left-wing conspiracy theorists

being the government's most important business partners. So, yes, to close out this point, when the most powerful private citizen in the world who controls the skies over war zones reveals himself to be a sucker for conspiracy theories on the website he bought for $44 billion, that matters to me. Okay, I want to move on from this point about Elon Musk

to talk more broadly about social media because the demise of Twitter has done a couple things. Number one, it has taken what used to be the kind of global square that was Twitter and fragmented it into Macedon and blue sky and threads and a bunch of other social media sites, including, of course, X. And this is also coincided with the rise of TikTok,

which I think in many ways has, certainly for Gen Z, displaced Twitter as the central place to commentate on news. You wrote this in the Atlantic, and I want to quote you and get your reaction to what you said. Quote, major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. The internet has never felt more dense,

yet there seemed to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all. all the noise. One-stop information destinations, such as Facebook or Twitter, are a thing of the past. The global town square, once the aspirational destination that social media platforms would offer to all of us, lies in ruins. Its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle. This may be for the best in the long run, but the immediate effect for those of us still glued to these ailing platforms is one of complete chaos. End quote. I think you nailed something here, that the decimation of Twitter X is not just about that platform. Something bigger

is going on when it comes to the berserk fragmentation of social media more generally. Why don't you just expand on that? I've been thinking so much about this lately, and especially with regard to other emergent platforms like TikTok, right? Like, I think we saw, gosh, I can't, time is eluding me with the holidays and the open AI chaos and everything. But there was this this moment where this controversy popped up that you know,

Gen Ziers and young people on TikTok were finding Osama bin Laden's letter published a year after 9-11 and sympathizing with it, right? And there is this real worry sort of in the broader context of what's going on

between Israel and Hamas and this, you know, these that there's this group of young Americans who are like kind of falling for Bin Laden's old ideologies. That turned out to be basically not true. I mean, there were certainly a few people who had found this and made some salacious TikTok videos about it.

But it turns out that, you know, mostly this was something that a journalist saw and got worried about and made a viral, tweet about and then this this like you know this fake thing uh this fake trend essentially uh bubbled up as something that was viral when it really wasn't and i think that this speaks to this disorientation right there's a you know a platform like ticot is so much different than twitter instead of you know having like a pretty you know chronological or reverse chronological feed it is a algorithmic

recommendation system where you don't really choose TikTok chooses what it's going to show you based off what it thinks you want to see. It's also video and not text. It's a lot harder to trace what is happening on these platforms. It's a lot harder in general right now to

understand what is popular on the internet. What is a trend? And that is, you know, that's not just difficult for people like you and me who are trying to figure out what's going on. It's actually it's kind of scrambling to our understanding of what's happening in certain places, right? Is TikTok showing us, you know, more sympathetic Palestinian content or more sympathetic, you know,

like IDF content? Like, we have these arguments and disagreements about, like, what is happening in the world because it's really important the scale of different social movements, of different, you know, what people are consuming. And I'm saying all this to say that, like, the chaos that I was trying to, to describe there is one of this disorientation. There used to be, especially for journalists and for the media, these spaces that were very, it felt like you could wrap your arms around them. It felt like, and I think part of that is because they are, they were text-based. There were, there were more

analytics that people could tap into, that you could see. What is, what is trending, how much, where did something start, right? What is the genesis of a Gen Z. person talking about, you know, Osama bin Laden and reading that, that letter that he wrote, you could kind of forensically look through this. It's a lot, you can still do it on platforms like TikTok, but it's a lot harder. And so I think that there's this way in which there is more internet out there than ever before. There is more to comb through. But our experiences, not just as journalists, but as like every single consumer of media is so fragmented. It is so based off of our own preferences, what, you know, what it is that we like to see. And there's this way in which we've

talked forever about filter bubbles, right? And, you know, maybe that was true. Maybe we were trapped in our own filter bubbles. Maybe we're not. Now we really are. Like there is a very, like, these experiences that we're having on the internet are siloed. And I think that that is, it's making it, it's making it a lot more difficult to even talk about, you know, reality and consensus in a way that's going to feel like, like it matches somebody else's. I don't know. It's a really fascinating time.

And I think that what has happened with Twitter or X over the course of Musk's tenure has really accelerated that. Because for better or worse, Twitter slash X, that was the platform that, you know, the media was on. And it was sort of feeding itself to some degree. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, it was legitimately, it was a space where news was happening. It was also a space where news was reported.

And so there's a centrality there that I think gave the internet a little bit more of a feeling that you could, you know, you could kind of contain it. You could understand what was happening on it. Now it's disorientation. You just said so many things that I want to ask follow questions on. And I'm just trying to keep my thoughts in order. The first thing that I want to at least comment on is that there's something so profound and interesting about the miniaturization of celebrity

in the 21st century. The idea that to be a famous person, I feel like in the 1980s or 1990s, right, to be a young Tom Cruise, to be a Merrill Streep in the 1970s, 1980s, there was a kind of global consensus about the nature of your celebrity. But there are YouTube and Facebook,

and podcast and TikTok stars who, by certain quantifications, are much more popular than Merrill Streep was in whatever, 1986, whenever out of Africa came out. And yet, I have no idea who they are. Like, their popularity is almost paradoxically,

both broader and more invisible than celebrity used to be. And there's something very profound about the fact that Taylor Swift is dating an NFL star, because in some ways, Swift and the National Football League are like the last two pillars of the broken temple of mainstream culture from the 20th century, or at least from the early, early 21st century, I guess Taylor Swift is almost too young to be a 20th century phenomenon.

That's just the first thought that I had, is that the miniaturization of celebrity in the 21st century is such an interesting wrinkle to me, and I think you pointed out a really interesting aspect to it. The second thing is, you know, I keep wondering to myself whether the extent to which Twitter or X is being phased out as a cultural driver, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Like, maybe we aren't all supposed to be in a room screaming at each other. Maybe it's better for social media to be more like a million different big group texts than one ginormous group text.

How do you feel about the degree to which this sort of fragmentation of news media, social media, if that makes sense, or news social media within which we discuss the news? To what extent do you think the fragmentation of that is a good or bad thing? I think that there are elements of it that are really positive.

I mean, getting away from the architectural incentives of Twitter, and by that I mean, like, the way that Twitter makes you, respond to other people, like the behaviors, the sort of incendiary kind of commentary and infighting and bitching, as you said, like Twitter incentivizes that as a platform. It gives you more attention the more you perform a certain way. So I think getting away from that architecture is really helpful. And I think you can see now there's, it's really helpful to like log in to X now and take a look at what it is because

the way that I sort of see it and think about it is like all of the people who were like bulwarks against that, right? Like people who were just there to try to distribute news, to try to make sense of the world, to try to be funny and make you know, shit posting jokes, whatever, right? Comedians, all sorts of different

sports, all sorts of different elements of Twitter that were kind of acting as a final like wall of the dam to like hold back all of this stuff. A lot of those people have left. And so now Twitter is sort of like it's perfect like id, right? And it's just grim and dark and just people screaming at each other. So that's to say, I think it's good that we're getting away from that. Where I think there are issues is in this phenomenon that I was trying to describe earlier,

where we don't have as good of an idea of what is happening online. Like, I think that that is really tricky. I mean, just speaking, with like political content. Like there's so many politicians right now like Marsha Blackburn just talked on the, uh, in Congress on Monday about, you know, banning TikTok, Josh Holly. There's a lot of people who are, who are, you know, even a little bit by, there's a bipartisan sort of desire to, you know, either ban TikTok or, you know, that TikTok is an agent of the Chinese government, etc. There's a lot of kind of conspiracies and not conspiracies about it and a lot of consternation. And a lot of this revolves around.

you know, political content on the platform. What is it incentivizing? What is it pushing, you know, the youth towards, what ideologies? If you look at what's really popular on TikTok, it's dances, it's the weirdest possible stuff, right? Like all sorts of strange sound trends. Like, if you go, just go to TikTok.com, you don't need an account, go to the Explorer tab, and just go and look and see the millions upon millions of views.

of like the weirdest sort of most random stuff. Like I saw there's one of like a Spanish farmer milking a cow to like a weird, you know, like K-pop song. That's one of the most popular pieces of content on the platform this week. It's not political content, right? It's not this stuff. So I think there's a way in which as we move into this fragmented nature, there's good stuff about that. Like I do think there's a way in which that can be healthier. We all shouldn't be in like, you know, like the global.

Town Square is often, you know, more just like a battlefield than anything else. And it's good to move away from that. But if we don't have an understanding of what's playing out on these platforms, bad actors and people with political agendas can use that to say that something's happening. And it's not easy to verify that and, you know, and shoot it down. And then we get these sort of, you know, incorrect narratives about what people believe and where people are going, you know. the kids are all right or the kids are radicalized or the kids or whatever. We're going to get more of that, I think, as we move away from centralized senses of social media. I think it's so weird and interesting to think about the phenomenon of false claims of virality going viral.

It's such a weird, paradoxical thing, but it's totally true. You know, you mentioned the Osama bin Laden letter and the fact that, you know, just a handful of journalists' observation, that some kids were reading these letters and crying and sympathy on TikTok suddenly became this enormous thing. It made it seem like all of Gen Z was suddenly sympathetic with Al-Qaeda when in fact nothing remotely approaching

that fact was reality. There's something in a way that feels like we're going back to a previous world. It wasn't always the case that popularity of ideas was easy to measure. Certainly, to take things way back,

in the late 19th century, when newspapers and ideological newspapers were really proliferating, there was no sense of a mainstream in American culture. There was no CBS or ABC or NBC that could essentially collate the ideas of the masses and say, here's what people think. You had nothing like modern polling to essentially tell people what the average American thought. You had elections, and elections to a certain extent were among the only ways that anyone could really understand what the rest of the country was thinking. You had these sort of quadrenial polls

that ended with a new president. And in a way, I feel like the fact that you having more social media platforms with very hard to discern popularity metrics means that in some ways we're going back to that highly ideological and highly fragmented past

to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when there was really much less of such a thing as like objective news as we now think about it, there were a lot of ideologies that were clamoring for attention. And yeah, I wonder whether that's the model of what we're seeing going forward

as we have sort of more platforms, more outlets, and fewer of the kind of monopolies that have defined either news or social media platforms in the last few decades. I've been trying to write about this or just report around it, right? And one of the things that I did last week

was I went on Google News and I just searched for the turrets. went viral just in like what are the news things and it's so interesting to see how in like the tabloidification of that right like the way in which everyone from you know like fox five in you know you know bora illinois to the daily mail to you know people magazine to whatever right um even established even like the new york times um the way in which went viral is is basically just this cheat code to write about something and just say like, it happened or it, I want this to matter.

Like there was one about like a grandma at a Dallas Cowboys game, like going viral on the, like doing something on the Jumbotron, and it went viral. And it's like an excuse you can see for people to discuss this, for this person, this random person to be dragged into an intentional spotlight. And I think that that's super fascinating because when you go through the Google News thing, I would then click through to like the,

you know, the original piece of content, right? Like, what are they determining is viral? And sometimes it was 10,000 views, and sometimes it was 100,000, and sometimes it was whatever. And then you have the other world of that, which is like the TikTok thing, the guy milking the cows to the K-pop song,

45 million views. Like, we're talking like Seinfeld finale, you know, like territory. Cheers. Must-C-TV territory. And yet, like, that doesn't actually qualify, right? Because it's not about this very specific kind of tabloid-y sense. It's really weird, man. We're in, like, such a strange era of the internet.

And I think you're right. I think it could be this kind of retreat back from this, you know, like almost like an online monoculture, right? Mm-hmm. In Hitmakers book I wrote in 2017, I said, viral is a fancy word for, this thing is popular, and I don't know why. and the I don't know why part is really important because when Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift becomes the number one song in the country, nobody says cruel summer went viral.

It's fucking Taylor Swift. Like, we know why it's popular. She's the most popular artist in the world. When Barbie makes a billion dollars at the global box office, no one says Barbie went viral because we know how it became popular. But when something becomes popular

and it surprises us, when its popularity journey, It's sort of its journey through like the information cascade is left dark to us. Then we say it's viral as shorthand. This thing is popular and I don't know why. So just a brief nugget. I want to close by talking about some of the implications of the phenomena that we're talking about for news media. For a long time, you and I were party two and present at several revolutions in news's long relationship.

with social media, where, for example, it seemed obvious that the way to build a news brand of the future was to yoke it to Facebook as BuzzFeed tried to do, or to go deeper into Twitter, or to go deeper into LinkedIn, or to open up accounts on Instagram or YouTube. But I do feel like as social media has become more fragmented and as it has become less reliable as a source of good business for news publishers, there's been a shift in news media from, let's call it, from width to depth, from width to depth, that the future of news seems less about, quote, unquote, going viral, going popular and not exactly knowing sort of what social media platform is going to be the wind in your sales, to how do we create an audience that we develop a relationship with over time,

a subscriber audience, we developed a relationship with over time, and monetize that audience directly, and even sometimes, there's a downside, I think, to depth, coddle them, you know, risk even becoming captive to this audience that we rely on for our weekly, monthly, yearly subscription revenue. What do you make of this, do you agree with this shift from width to depth in news economics? And do you think it's altogether a positive trend? Yeah, I mean, as a journalist, like, who works at these different places, who's worked at these different places, I mean, some of the part of retreating into the depth is, is great because you're not, there is a way in which these, you can, chasing sort of like the social media, you know, brand of all that is you're chasing a very specific. window, right? Like, there's a moment for this take. Like, you have to, you know, throw the paper airplane, you know, into the door that's closing. And that means often reacting very quickly,

perhaps, you know, not smartly, perhaps writing an incendiary headline that oversells a premise and, you know, dissuades readers. There's all kinds of, you know, shitty incentives there. But then, you know, the rise of very strong paywalls also kind of kind of suck. for journalists, right? Like, I want as many people to read my stuff as possible, and I hate the fact that there are certain people who, like, they have a point when they, you know, reply to me on whatever social network and say, like, you know, you say this is incredibly important and I can't access it, right?

Like, that sucks. So, I mean, I sympathize with that. And I think that that is hard, right? Because we're at a time when, you know, trust is waning in institutions everywhere, especially the media, and, you know, to sort of put, you know, close the shutters on, on our windows is, is I can see how that would look a certain way to certain people. Obviously, there's economic imperatives there. So I think it's, I think it's tough. I also think that there's this other thing happening, which is something I wrote about recently, where I think that there is a, there is a sense, and it's part of what you were saying, that, you know, readers are also breaking up. up a little bit with news. Like, they're checking in on news less frequently, according to, you know, certain studies from places like Pew. And I think that they are relying as well on this, you know,

this depth idea, which is the way it works sort of from the consumer standpoint is, you know, relying on parasycial relationships with certain personalities, whether there are creators on YouTube or TikTok who talk about the news or whether it's a specific newsletter writer, right? Whether it's you, Derek Thompson, and someone's just like, I'm just going to read what he has to say about this. I'm not going to, you know, I don't need to go wide. I don't need to look at other things. There's a way in which that retreat is a little bit scary, I think, because, you know, I think we do want people reading broadly. We do want people engaging broadly with things and not, you know, sort of going to the person who may or may not coddle them, like you said. So I, I, I, I,

There's so much happening right now. And I think it's all, like, every single part of this that we talked about from, you know, the fact that we have no idea who the musical guest is on Saturday Night Live on a certain time all the way to, you know, paywalls, like whether we know what's happening is popular on Twitter or TikTok or whatever. It's all related. It's all part of this like sea change in the internet. And I think, you know, we've established very well the internet is real life. that these things matter. And I think we're in this profound period of disorientation right now. And it's affecting everything.

To bring it all the way back to like Elon Musk, I think it's profoundly affecting him. He's erecting this world, right? This ideological world that is paranoid and angry. And like we're watching that affect this man, you know, as he's on stage at the deal book conference. So I just see this as, you know, it's a really interesting time for people who do what you and I do because there's so much to, you know, to like mine here. But I also think that it's kind of, it's a scary moment especially.

Like, for me, it all really hit home, you know, with the war in the Middle East and with what's happening with, you know, Israel and Hamas. it sort of really, you know, brought forward the stakes of this disorientation and this, you know, these alternate realities that everyone is able to erect and these filter bubbles they're able to create. Yeah, I think it's so interesting. You know, so much of what you said is just it's grist for like a thousand other episodes. I will say lots of people will sometimes ask me, how do we get back the kind of trust and objectivity and news that we used to have, in the 1960s, 1970s, how do we get back

to Uncle Walter Cronkite? And my answer to them, invariably, invariably, is it's never fucking happening. You're comparing this moment of absolute chaos and competition in news media to a moment where there was

artificial scarcity in television channels. There were three channels that basically got 100% penetration of the television watching news audience. And as a result, it was in a completely different world. It was a world of scarcity. And we are headed into a world where every time a new podcast launches, a new media company opens, a new newsletter is launched, that new newsmaker has to justify their existence against the cacophony of existing news products.

And the best way to do that is to argue that the rest of the media sucks, which creates a dynamic where every new news media organization or individual, is rationally incentivized to argue that, quote, the media, end quote, sucks, which leads to this scenario where everyone hates the media, but everyone loves, as you said, their own newsletter person, podcast person, individual organization is telling them, everyone else sucks, trust me. That is not an environment in which you were ever, ever going to yield trust and objectivity in the media writ large.

It's a world that's going to be, as you said, chaotic and sometimes even violently chaotic to live through, beserking emotionally. And it's possible that you, me, Elon are all struggling in our own way to get through that emotional berserking. Charlie Warzel, thank you very much. This is a really fun conversation. And I'm glad that we hit the Elon stuff, but quickly pivoted to the more important questions of social media technology and the way it's sort of swirling our minds. Yeah, it's fun to be disoriented with you. Thanks. See you, man. Thank you so much for listening. Plain English is hosted by me, Derek Thompson, and produced by Devin Manzi.

Some great news for you all. As you probably know, we are returning, have returned back to our normal schedule of two pods a week. So be on the lookout for new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like our podcast, please rate. Give us five stars. Subscribe wherever you listen. And I'll see you later.