Enter the Pollux: Twitter is Now Controlled by the Worst Person You Know.
Twitter is rapidly imploding, and there's no clear contender to replace it
I know it’s got something to do with me becoming an old man but the personality type I find the most infuriating by far is what I’ve come to call the Pollux.
You know exactly what a Pollux is, even if you can’t put your finger on exactly what it is that makes one. It’s a certain type of swagger carried by young men, almost always conservative or at least reactionary, typically rich or at least very comfortable. Trust-fundish. Smarmy, but not in a convincing way. I call it Pollux because it’s exemplified by Pollux Troy, the younger brother of Nicolas Cage’s character in Face/Off.
A Pollux is usually way more smug than they’ve earned the right to be. Some are accomplished in their own right and some are just lucky accidents, but none are inspirational figures because they have no desire to inspire others even for pretendsies. They’re just the crab that finally dragged itself out of the bucket and dumped a load of sand on its friends behind it. They’re the type of shithead who’ll cut ahead of you in line and then turn around and look at you like this:
I don’t know if sociopathy is the right word for it because they’re not without emotion—their skin is extraordinarily thin—but at the very least a Pollux tends to think that empathy is cute, weak, and a dire personality flaw. Making people upset is just funny, it’s something they do to pass the time like making a cat chase a laser pointer. All they want to do is get a reaction out of people, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, but negative reactions are preferable because they’re more extreme. Pollux wants to affect people, because blending in and having no specific impact on the world is kind of like their own hell.
They’re trolls. They’re your Rittenhouses and your Yiannopolouses and your Shkrelis. They don’t want to get your attention for any greater cause or purpose. The attention is the goal, it is its own end-in-itself. And when the Pollux mentality is coupled with real world power, their potential to cause damage is huge.
I bring it up because the biggest Pollux in the world right now is Elon Musk. He is also, unfortunately, the richest person on the planet. Someone who drives you absolutely mad because not only is he a Pollux, but like so many Polluxes he failed upward.
Like Donald Trump, another notable Pollux, Musk is a clear example of how extraordinarily easy it is to make money once you have a lot of it. He’s an investor, not an inventor, and nobody would have any problem with him being labelled as such if he was a boring personality. But, like other Polluxes, Musk has developed a cult following made up entirely of other people who think making people upset is in-and-of-itself funny. If a Pollux cannot reach a large number of people on their own, they will latch on to one who can, and begin to see themselves as kind of an extension of that person.
Of course, the worst thing you can possibly do to a Pollux is upset them. They will not eat crow, instead they will throw absolutely every resource they have into destroying whatever offended them, and their followers will form a human armour around them. This is what Donald Trump did after Barack Obama offended him at a party, and it’s what Elon Musk did when he couldn’t stop Twitter from dunking on him.
Now, those who have been paying attention to this whole ordeal from the beginning have already pointed out the obvious – Musk had no intention of actually buying Twitter, very similar to how many people suspect that Trump never had any intention of actually becoming president (it’s kind of spooky how parallel the story arcs of these two men are). Musk wanted to intimidate Twitter by swinging his money dick around, and then pulling out before climax. The plan was to humiliate Twitter with his story about how he investigated and discovered that the company was worthless and nothing but bots, remember?
But anyone who knows anything about Musk’s personal life knows also that he has the weakest pull-out game in the history of mankind. What he doesn’t appear to have realised at the time was that he couldn’t get as far into the deal as he did without making the purchase. Like, it’s against the actual law to do that.
So now Elon has accidentally paid $44 billion for a company that isn’t worth anywhere close to $44 billion. And that’s not to say he lost that money, either – that’s not how being rich works, you don’t just withdraw $44 billion from the bank. That money was loaned to him against his assets with the promise of paying it back. To do that, he has to take a company that is not profitable and make it pants shittingly profitable. Somehow.
Here's the next problem with that – Elon Musk has no idea how to run a company like Twitter. Arguably, he doesn’t know how to run a company at all, but he super duper doesn’t know how to run Twitter.
Musk is a salesman. He knows how to hock shitty cars. That’s something he’s pretty good at. Everything else he does is garbage. His wacky ideas don’t even get far enough along the production stage to fail as miserably as they certainly would if they were allowed to come to fruition. Remember when he wanted to rescue some kids trapped in a cave by sending a submarine in after them? When a professional cave rescuer explained how that wouldn’t work, Musk’s Pollux came out and he tried to destroy that man’s life.
Twitter isn’t selling a product. It’s not selling anything. That’s its primary hurdle in operating under capitalism, because it’s less like a company and more like a utility, like the telephone. Everybody uses a phone company, but nobody has brand loyalty to the phone company they use, nobody buys phone company merch, and you can still talk on the phone to someone using a different company.
The important way that it differs from a utility is that it has community. It has a precarious kind of egalitarianism that actually breaks and supersedes the caste structure that dictates our normal lives as everyday people set apart from public figures and entertainers. It’s stupid and corny, I know, but I’m still kind of titillated knowing that this month alone I’ve had brief real casual interactions with both Duncan Jones (the film director and son of David Bowie) and Patricia Arquette, who was my absolute biggest childhood crush (shut up).
People really like this about Twitter. Big time entertainers and small time content creators promote their stuff together and to each other. Celebrities, fans, and subcultures coexist in an ecosystem which is, of course, also just fucking crawling with Nazis. Keeping speech free in this ecosystem while also keeping it safe and relatively comfortable is extraordinarily difficult and it is incredibly fragile. You cannot, cannot, cannot come into it and just Pollux the fuck out of it.
Enter Elon Musk.
In a frankly mindboggling display of misunderstanding what Twitter even is, Musk’s first order for the company has been to make the celebrities pay to use it. Because they’re the ones with the disposable income, I guess? But the celebrities, with their willingness to produce content for and interact directly with their fans, account for a huge amount of the draw, if not overwhelmingly most of it. Musk doesn’t get that this is like asking the actors to pay the filmmaker. And when public figures point this out to him, he doubles down on his shitty personality, first by either talking down to them or outright telling them to fuck off, and them sniggering about it “behind their back” without apparently realising that you can’t talk about people behind their back on public Twitter.
That’s another aspect of the Pollux – they’re not sycophants. They don’t do that. Musk won’t plead or bargain with anyone because there’s nobody he considers his peer, let alone above him. You either work for him or he shows you the door, no matter who you are. That’s why, as odd as it my seem, Musk and Trump don’t like each other and don’t pretend to. Polluxes repel like same poles on a magnet, competing egos.
I like Twitter and I really don’t want to see it go away - I think it’s an immensely useful tool for creators and I wish I’d joined it much sooner - but it really seems like Musk’s china shop rampage has already damaged its supports. Public figures are leaving in droves and people are already noticing their follower counts plummeting and people delete their accounts. All we can really do now is watch to see what a Pollux does when he discovers his bird app is an albatross.
I think that the answer here is obvious: you sell the damn thing to Alphabet, claim victory, and run. The other thing about Polluxes (Polli?) that you don't point out is that they are immune to failure, not inasmuch as they cannot fail, but that they cannot be convinced that they have failed. If you ask Donald Trump about his defunct swindler classes he would - to this very day - defend them as being the very height of business education. Failure doesn't register, but self-preservation does.
Alphabet is about the only company that can hope to use Twitter for any purpose other than a tax write off. Twitter is a good source of consumer information that they can't necessarily get right now, so as one of the world's biggest data brokers, they can gain soft credit of the social network that nobody else could hope for. Facebook wishes that it could, but the SEC would presumably axe that deal before it even hit the table. Google, though? Their social network crashed and burned. They're not in the market anymore. They have a much stronger argument for being allowed to buy this turd.
I suspect that's what's going to happen. Fudgie the Fail here is going to keep poking at the thing with progressively stupider ideas until he finally gives up, the stability lets the stock gain a little bit of value, and then turn around and sell it to the only people who would want it in the first place. I actually suspect that a year from now we'll all be back on Twitter and all of this nonsense people are getting up to now will be long forgotten. Every celebrity and content creator needs to maintain some kind of presence and every competitor is in some way inferior (really, Mastodon - you want people to pick a server, knowing nothing whatsoever what effect that will have?).