ALT A chat app interface in which Manson Family member Susan Atkins writes "Sure thing! I'm a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys. Growing up, they were always my favorite team and I still follow them religiously to this day. In fact, I have plans to attend their next home game in Texas! As for myself, well...I was part of a notorious cult known as The Manson Family in the late 1960s and early 1970s that caused terror throughout California. Nowadays though, I just enjoy football and spending time with family."

ALT A screenshot of a chat from the "Historical Figures" app in which Saddam Hussein gives generic analysis of the NFC Championship game

ALT Future Four: Twitter’s business and platform both die In 90 days all that is left of Twitter, Inc. is Musk and Jason Calacanis sitting in an office surrounded by empty cans of Bang energy drink, trying to ban a lean-addict shitposter who keeps creating multiple verified Archer Daniels Midland accounts all tweeting “Marina Oswald could get it 👀 👀 fr fr.” Eventually the shitposter gets bored and logs out.

ALT Future One: Twitter’s business and its platform both survive This is still, I will admit, even after the last two weeks, my baseline expectation: Musk reverses some of his most damaging decisions or ideas, like turning verification into a payola scheme. He heads off the biggest revenue threat to the company -- advertiser fear that the CEO of Twitter will post, I don't know, conspiracy theories about Nancy Pelosi's husband -- simply by posting less. He works out, possibly in some kind of supportive group therapy with David Sacks and CatTurd2, whatever counterproductive feelings he has about Twitter verification, and fixes it so that the parodies taper off. He loses a lot of money, yes, but after a year or two, the business stabilizes. The site itself works a bit worse, and its profit margins are relatively slim, but it has less bloat and more diversified revenue from selling a mix of ads, subscriptions, and weird little badges that dorks want to buy for some reason.

ALT Future Two: Twitter’s business survives but its platform dies You can sort of imagine a different future, where Musk’s plan/threat to demote and downgrade the accounts and posts of unverified users is fully enacted as described, and his steep cost cuts aren’t totally damaging to the site’s function. People protest, but Musk holds firm; if you want to get engagement on Twitter, you need to pay. Employers generally refuse to expense the cost of verification, and many of the super-users who think of themselves as above pay-to-play quit to start newsletters or Discord chat rooms, all of which get abandoned in less than a year. The incentives and economics of the platform turn even further toward porn, nutrition supplements, crypto scams, and “content creation,” and the vibrant culture of semi-anonymous shitposting on Twitter is all but wiped out. Twitter ends up in a weird space between Substack, YouTube, and AM Radio, populated by a mix of camgirls, boomer-politics accounts and MLM-adjace

ALT Future Three: Twitter’s business dies, but its platform survives Or what about this: Musk reverses enough of his bad decisions to retain the platform’s valuable user-base and audience6 of elite figures in the representational industries -- media, politics, entertainment, tech, and finance -- for whom the site has become what John Herrman once called “an entire professional context.” But because advertisers don’t care about this audience (since its main use for Twitter is to learn gossip and wage war on enemies rather than to buy things, and because it shares the platform with furries, plushies, college football fans, and other perverts), and because no one wants to pay a subscription to read what they think, Twitter goes bankrupt.

ALT Future Four: Twitter’s business and platform both die In 90 days all that is left of Twitter, Inc. is Musk and Jason Calcanis sitting in an office surrounded by empty cans of Bang energy drink. When they finally manage to ban a lean-addict shitposter who keeps switching IPs to create a verified Archer Daniels Midland account that tweets “Marina Oswald could get it 👀 👀 fr fr,” a silence falls: That was the last account.

ALT The truth is I can’t really tell what Musk thinks Twitter is -- if he actually does imagine it as a “common digital town square” dependent on transparency and authenticity, or if he agrees with the resentful Silicon Valley freaks he’s surrounded himself with that it’s a game of hierarchical social positioning, or if he thinks of it as both or either depending on the last person he talked to. Over the past week he hasn’t acted like a person with a real plan, let alone a clear concept or theory of balancing the tensions of an advertising-funded social-media platform. Instead he’s made impulsive and contradictory decisions, acted out for attention and approval, and attempted to appease varying intransigent groups of users before lashing out when praise wasn’t forthcoming, all the while complaining and posting vaguely resentful memes. He’s been acting, in other words, like a message-board moderator.

ALT Longtime readers know that one of the running arguments of the Read Max newsletter is that social media platforms, and especially Twitter, are essentially overgrown message boards and web forums of the kind that defined the social experience of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s therefore vindicating of our theory to see Musk settle so quickly into the familiar social role of “forum mod,” a job that I particularly associate with personality types like Musk’s -- self-impressed, easily wounded, and above all extremely unfunny. I’m not the first person to point out that in terms of precedent, Elon’s week of management looks less like Mark Zuckerberg’s time at Facebook or either of Jack Dorsey’s stints at Twitter, and more like the reign of the late Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, who founded and moderated the infamous and influential forum SomethingAwful.