(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. Writing about Twitter today, ugh. If you like the newsletter and want to help me buy a new camera lens, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
If you are reading this you probably know the main context necessary for this newsletter so I am going to breeze through it as quickly as possible. About a year ago Elon Musk, a homunculoid capital flow, bought Twitter for a lot of money for nebulous reasons. He got rid of user verification also for nebulous reasons and made the verified blue check purchasable, along with some other features. He occasionally logs on and threatens to tether more and more of the site to this eight dollar a month fee, either because he is demanding fealty from the site’s users in exchange for a functional product or because he sincerely thinks its the best way to generate money from Twitter, a website no one really wants to use. The former reason smells like neo-feudal late capitalist ideology, the latter smells like someone being a shitty businessman. Either scents could emerge from Musk’s glands.
As Wilmes likes to remind me, I can’t say I regret my time on Twitter: I made a lot of very close friends on the website and I got a lot of work from those connections. But second for second, I really wish I could give as much of it back as possible without sacrificing those friendships. It’s always been a gigantic shapeless pit of people engaging with the stupidest, neediest, parts of themselves, and also I was/remain extraordinarily bad at the kind of writing and thinking you need to excel there, which made most of what I posted a waste of my time. I have virtues as a writer: pithiness is not one of them. I should have been playing video games like a normal person, not posting like a clout starved sicko.
I write all this to say that I am not in mourning. I’m okay with Twitter alienating me because I don’t want to be there anyway. But sometimes, for work, to check my dwindling store of DMs, or because I haven’t mastered the compulsive itch that compels me to write “T-” in my URL bar, I go anyway. What I see is creatures.
One of the benefits of pledging eight dollars a month to the five or so people who still work at Twitter is that your shit gets the run of the algorithmic buffet. Because the only people who want to do this are Elon bootlickers, the vast majority of the posts getting shoved in your face right now are from clout chasing fascists. Twitter was once a terrible mass consciousness but now it’s just a fascist zoo where you stroll in, buy popcorn, and spend some time gawking at racists in their cage, ooking and throwing their own shit and waiting for the zookeeper to give them nutri-pellets. Soon, normal people will have fled en masse to the new subdivided social world, but right now inertia is keeping them around, and they’re reacting to this deluge by pointing and laughing.
Where does it all come from? Was this sentiment burbling in dark cauldrons, kept out of our eyeballs by respectable media corporations, mindful of the bad vibes around being a Nazi? Or is it new, the internet’s feedback loop made into Cronenbergian video flesh? Both, probably. Whichever it is, Musk’s Twitter, structured entirely in service to him, is the place to see it, luxuriate in it, theorize about it, shake your head at it.
I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. Why shouldn’t we stand in awe of what has been made in the hearts of man? Reckon with what Videodrome turns people into? Sure, the chit-chat pile got burned to ashes, but look at what grows on Elon’s back. People who have thought so hard about why Duschamp is bad that they made a chart out of it, declaring that any art that doesn’t make you feel like butter coffee is bad.
This guy got smacked a week or so back for posting pure Nazi ideology in pedantic chart form. Emily is probably right: it's time to walk away from this shithole. But isn’t there something edifying about seeing it laid out in front of you, how vapid and inane it all is, what an emaciated view of the world these people have to offer? Something good is what INSPIRES YOU, something bad is what MAKES YOU CONFUSED AND DETACHED. Reifying order, yes. Acknowledging the lack of order inherent in the universe? Don’t do that! Sure, it’s a cultural path that would inevitably drive society towards a perpetual cycle of hierarchical violence, but isn't it also just the dumbest?
But, it has to end soon, doesn’t it? The zoo needs to close and we need to stop feeding the animals so that they, hopefully, will endeavor to start eating each other in our absence. It was terrible, then it was really terrible, then it ended. Not everything we spent our time doing needs to be mourned. Sometimes dead is better.