You said you wanted to live in a world without zinc, Jimmy

The impending demise of Twitter is breaking even the brains of those whose brains may not yet have been broken by [gestures futilely all around]. You and I may look at a toxic, deleterious social network swirling the drain and think “Good riddance.” For many, though, Twitter has grown to encompass all that they perceive and are capable of perceiving, and the prospect of a world without it suggests nothing more or less than a void terrifying in its totality.

A particularly deranged example of this phenomenon can be found in this article in Wired, which used to be a publication about technology and the Internet. I’m unfamiliar with the author and I hope that I will not spend the remainder of this article dunking on her personally, only on the substance of what she’s written. She seems to be a marginal freelance journalist whose professional existence is a struggle to pick up paying assignments and earn not just enough money to eat, but enough to clout to have her next pitch accepted. Believe me, I sympathize.

But the article itself is a swirl of solipsism and loss-averse thinking. The author correctly and painstakingly details many genuine problems with Twitter and what she dubs “reputational and social wealth,” but then somehow concludes that the danger is in not dismantling this system. It’s really weird.

For the most part, the specific issues have to do with the unequal distribution of attention on the platform. Getting a link to your work retweeted by a — barf — “influencer” like Yashar Ali or Molly Jong-Fast can be the difference between steering or even participating in the discourse versus sinking silently and invisibly out of sight. The quality of the work is, at best, peripheral. All that matters is the attention.

In other words, the problem with the reputational economy is the same as with the financial economy. It is built to accrue value ever upward, concentrating more and more of its capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The idea of someone like Yashar Ali “deserving” this level of influence is irrelevant to the mechanism that has provided it to him, and any narrative that tries to make sense of it on any other level is bound to be post-hoc. As we watch the world’s wealthiest man make a hash of the network he bought for no apparent reason other than to be proved fucking right about something nobody else cares about, i.e. whether the previous administration was “woke” or not, it’s hard not to consider how overdetermined all of this shit is.

Elon Musk doesn’t deserve any of the wealth he has. He hasn’t earned it. He’s not doing anything worthwhile with it. The pachinko ball bounced his way, that’s all. If the world’s richest man weren’t Elon Musk, it would be someone else. I don’t mean that in a tautological way. I mean that when the system is working as intended, it’s going to get harder and harder for your poor, low-income, and even professional classes to figure out how they’re going to find money to pay for the things they need, while for the ultra-rich it gets harder and harder to find anything worthwhile to do with their money, because there’s just too damn much of it. That’s probably why they end up building rocket ships and overpaying for social networks that they immediately destroy.

Money goes upward. That’s what it’s meant to do. The reason it stops concentrating at the top isn’t because the money runs out, it’s because there are no more people to enrich. If Elon Musk had never been born, some other dipshit would be wealthier than anyone else in human history because that’s how the parameters have been set up. You can’t set the oven to “cold.” And the only reason we’re still doing it this way is because everybody is terrified of the unknown system that might replace it.

On the internet in the year 2022, that’s how attention works, too. Greater and greater attention is paid to fewer and fewer people and to works of less and less merit. In some sense, this isn’t new. As long as there have been writers and artists, there have been patrons, and maybe the only real difference today is the scale of the patronage. Whereas in the past a wealthy family might have been able to bankroll some hand-chosen artists, or a studio executive could green-light a hit film, today all it takes is a retweet to bring the masses running (not that they stick around). Those older systems still exist, but new ones came along and stole the spotlight.

I actually take some comfort in that. When Twitter’s gone, there will still be gatekeepers. There will still be those whose recommendation counts for more. The people who actually make shit worth paying attention to will keep doing what they’ve always done, and hope the bottle eventually points at them when it stops spinning. It probably won’t. But that’s true whether or not the bottle has a blue bird on it.