This Is Your Brain on X

Shifting the Vibes Again

On his Substack, Vincent Bevins has a very insightful piece entitled “The 'vibe shift' was a leveraged buyout.” The argument is that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a successful political move that poisoned the conditions of political discourse:

By elevating the posts of his paying supporters Musk changed the rules of Twitter; that was the whole reason he bought it. Theoretical equality was abolished. Then, he simply programmed the website to promote himself and his ideological allies.

Elon Musk obviously succeeded. By purchasing Twitter, he made himself more central to global politics and was able to engineer a right-wing shift on the site. I barely log on anymore, but I still know far more about reactionary culture than I did in 2021. I am familiar with a wide range of flavors of racism now, and I understand all kinds of racist posts at a basic grammatical level. I know what London is actually like, but I also know what libertarian “founders” in Texas think London is like. All of that is inevitable if you have any contact with x.com. Musk used Twitter to help get Trump elected and exert even more personal control over the state. The SpaceX IPO in June briefly made him a trillionaire, so it’s not like revenue problems at a microblogging site he bought with funny money matter much to his overall project.

My own assertion, itself vibes-based and therefore entirely unfalsifiable, is that the “vibe shift” was the unconscious cognitive effect of hanging out on Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. It was experienced, and only needed to be experienced, in the minds of the US American media class. One of the main skills required of contemporary journalists is the ability to detect which way the wind is blowing, to carefully trace the hidden boundaries of discourse. For those who spent too much time on his platform over the last four years, Elon made the left appear less popular (in the middle-school sense).

Bevins is describing something very much like Henry Farrell’s idea of “malformed publics,” a more subtle formulation than the '“misinformation” frame that suggests that the main toxicity of social media is not that can get you to believe lies or propaganda, but that it alters your notion of what’s normal and acceptable to believe or say:

The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.

This isn’t brainwashing - people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen people change with their algorithms and it’s pretty scary and sad.

I do think one thing Bevins understates a little bit the political downsides in creating one of these hall of mirrors, which we can see clearly on display now: the people inhabiting these publics think they are broadly representative of the world at large, rather than quite subcultural. The X-ing of Twitter made the Trump administration and right-wingers more broadly think they had a mandate for their most extreme ideas because they only saw a world of chuds staring back at them. The opposition also risks becoming demoralized because they also see this world of total idiocy.

I know I do this a lot, and I’m very sorry, but I kinda predicted this a long time ago. In 2022, before the Twitter acquisition I wrote:

An outline of the institutional shape of this [reactionary tech] politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation. Just memes, nonsense, idiotic enthusiasms and fads, etc.

The shittiness of X is the point, so to speak. It’s a slag heap, a mental waste dump, a sewer. Currency exchange was the wrong metaphor; It’s some kind of industrial waste product recycling process. Instead of writers and intellectuals coming up with ideas that filter into the culture, they are totally dominated by the conditions of discourse of social media. For example, look at the recent piece by Helen Andrews in Compact—she’s doing exactly what I thought would happen, turning gutter-thoughts into something more respectable sounding. She literally takes a racist shitpost and spins an essay out of it:

The term that I prefer for the ideology we saw in 2020 is race communism. The term “gay race communism” originated with the pseudonymous X account Drukpa Kunley in 2022 and entered the public record when it appeared in print in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. It started as a jokey epithet, but, as a straightforward description, it has much to recommend it.

No it really does not, but that’s besides the point for now. Her entire essay is full of Twitter-like pseudo-ideas, like evidence-free assertions that industrial accidents have happened because the jobs diversified their hiring, which is an entire genre of racist posting. My first thought on seeing it as “Wow, they are totally out of ideas.” The posters are in charge, writers apparently just translate it all for the squares.

But it’s a little too easy to be smug and say, “Well, that happens to dumbs dumbs, but not me.” No, it happens to all of us. Social media forms a huge part of our reality, it shapes our perceptions, it is literally what we perceive for a large part of the day. It shapes our language, as Willy Staley perceptively wrote about in the Times magazine:

The incentive structure of the platforms can now produce new units of culture practically without the need for human will, or more precisely by warping our will to suit its needs. The slang term itself is but a grain of sand around which copycat posting behavior collects, until it becomes large enough to pass through to the offline world. It’s just like how slang used to work, only completely different — shaped not by the needs or wants of a particular scene, place or subculture, but by the incentives and logic of scaled digital networks.

If you haven’t become addicted to a social media platform, you may not be aware of what, exactly, goes on inside the head of someone hunched over a phone. It’s not clear that addicts are aware of it either. Jonah Weiner, a contributing writer for this magazine, wrote about this phenomenon on Substack, in a way I found alarmingly accurate. He described the experience of thinking in tweets, rather than normal thoughts, even when he was far from his phone, in this case washing the dishes and finding he was low on soap. His first thought was to water it down to make the bottle last longer. But then, everything that followed was deranged by the internet. Instead of having normal thoughts, Weiner wrote, “Thanks to Twitter, I’d think something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, ‘The masculine urge to water down the dish soap … ’ or ‘The two genders [picture of brand-new dish soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap].’” It goes on from there: “Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy”; “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap.”

Every one of these joke structures is immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent a lot of time on X: What Weiner is describing is the imitative behavior that sustains and nurtures memes. But more important, he’s describing what this behavior requires, which is the hijacking of your frontal lobe by the incentives of the platform. Disappear into your phone for long enough, and your phone will disappear into you, putting you to work for the platforms even in your downtime. People have taken to calling this “brain rot,” which isn’t a bad term for it at all, not just because phone slang is stupid and annoying — though it is — but because it really does rework your gray matter.

Newspeak isn’t enforced by Big Brother, we love to speak it. Makes you feel with it or part of it.

One thing that helps me think about this is Martin Heidegger’s concept of Das Man, translated The One or The They. Basically, it’s an inauthentic form being according to social norms. Instead of authentically choosing to do something or be someone, we go along with “what one does.” We talk as others do, we repeat the same clichés and phrases, etc. Das Man is felt as an authority. without a clear source. It’s society, man. It’s also an unavoidable part of our being human: you can’t be authentically choosing your true self all the time, we all live much of our lives in—or as—Das Man, but hopefully one can also step outside of it from time to time and say to oneself, “I’m not doing that anymore, it’s not me.” Or, “I’m sick of repeating that bullshit.” Social media just reveals this overarching existential condition of inauthenticity very starkly. AI is also kind of just Das Man embodied: it’s an aggregate of social knowledge without an author, without a character, a voice, or a self. This kind of impersonal, abstract domination seems harder to escape as it becomes the very air we breathe, but, by manifesting itself in specific technologies, perhaps we are just able to see more clearly and quickly what social existence has always entailed.