By All Law, Twitter Belongs to Us
We are all watching the Twitter debacle like we were at an $8/ticket circus and its time for the clown troupe.
Perhaps laughter is how we are sublimating the SERIOUSNESS of this situation: the first stone cast in a significant crack-down by tech billionaires, and a new height of totally uncontested rule. After indulging our little movements on *their* platforms for so long, they are done. They are not even trying to maintain the illusion of anything other than straightforward fascist authoritarianism.
I’ve written about our belief that we, as users of tech platforms, are somehow influencing what is built, how it is implemented, or are having our needs considered, in literally any-way, in exchange for our adoption. We think that services are giving us what we want with our “data”, rather than that they are TELLING us what we want and USING our data to exploit and extract from us. We think that the algorithms are “listening” to us for what we want or care about, so they can give it to us; when in reality they are ELICITING the reactions and behavior they want, the reactions their *actual* customers — advertisers — want. This has been one of the starkest examples in technology history of that illusion being ripped from our eyes, where it is demonstrated very much publicly that billionaires very much don’t give a shit about us, and that nothing in the company is based on what is best for us, and that they can, at a second’s notice, screw everyone over, change all of the policies of the site, start ban hammering dissenting voices, and adopt ever-further extremist political constructs for running the company. And they are FROLICKING, they are DANCING, they are stomping GLEEFULLY on any pre-existing illusion that there is even a very very basic level of respect for the people who are ACTUALLY making Twitter: us.
But I think it also demonstrates something else, or calls attention to something else, and that is: that the entire structure around Twitter, Twitter the corporation, is just scaffolding on top of what is a very simple equation of [our contributions + code produced by workers = Twitter]; the corporation is simply the structure around it that artificially centralizes this system, that feeds on this system, that extracts from this system, that operates as a parasite on the system. The company’s leaders and owners and so on, are replaceable — a company’s board is replaced with another, one set of billionaire owners are replaced with another. Twitter stands.
When I model out what Twitter actually is, materially, and from a material perspective, I see a bunch of data coming out of the users — huge streams of stories and photos and thought and records and analysis and song lyrics and sections of books and long threads full of documentation and primary sources and our hopes and dreams and our relationships — I see it held together with a technical mesh that makes it possible for us to see everyone ELSE’S stuff as well, a mesh that is making it possible to navigate and to expose higher-level features like following, messaging and searching. That technical mesh is being produced by a relatively small group of workers, and that team itself requires an even smaller number of administrative workers to support it as well. And that, at is core, is what Twitter is: it is the things we make + some code and workers.
The giant machine that exists around Twitter, the corporate apparatus, is there only to extract value out of that ecosystem, to leech off of it, to press it out into money, to re-sell it to advertisers, to alter how it works to serve their various political goals, to put it on the public market and bet on it and turn a profit on it. If you removed the corporate superstructure, took it away — the code and the our stuff, the TWITTER ITSELF, is still there, totally intact, and complete in and of itself.
Twitter *IS* us, Twitter *belongs* to US.
And that is in the most foundational, the most essential, logics of law and property and self-determination. Twitter is literally just what we make, and the code that is around it. On the most natural, material level, it belongs to us, its users, and we should be the ones who are deciding the direction of the product.
We should literally be showing up to them and demanding our shit back.
Do you know how many people have gotten rich as fuck off OUR Twitter? Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey is now worth close to 5 billion dollars, building off his original Twitter stake; Ev Williams is worth close to 2 billion dollars. You probably heard that Twitter’s most recent executive team is walking out with golden parachutes, departing CEO Parag Agrawal netting about 40 million. When Twitter IPOed in 2013, 1700 employees became millionaires overnight. We have been keeping a LOT of people VERY rich for a very long time.
The point is, that if we owed the venture capital and billionaire class anything for Twitter, let’s say, early R&D costs, call it initial capital, call it management fees, whatever — if we owed them money at any point, they have been repaid again and again, and as you can see, people are CONTINUING to get rich as fuck off of our Twitter.
ENOUGH — there is no need for literally anyone else to get rich off Twitter; at this point, Twitter is just a piggy bank for them, and we cannot possibly be expected to keep paying these people.
Twitter belongs to us, and it should be run, democratically, and according to the interests of the people, with the only goal of producing fruits for its users. There is literally no reasonable cause for this other pattern of abuse and extraction to continue.
We can easily afford to pay, ourselves, a world-class engineering team that can operate the global infrastructure. Running sites at scale is not easy, however, we know a lot about how to do it and we are doing it very predictably and reliably for infrastructure serving billions of users. What is making these things costly is not workers — it is the predatory ecosystem of depraved and greedy capitalism that revolves around it, and it is driven, yes, by a very few number of people. What costs money is feeding THEM, what costs money is continually having to produce more and more multiple profits for them, what costs money is somehow finding a way to deliver them a 10x on their investment again and again.
With them gone, we would have MORE than enough money to pay the engineering team that is required to maintain the infrastructure and well as add new features and services where indicated through some kind of democratic process. While of course I’m not particularly optimistic that all of you degenerates on Twitter are going to do a better job of governance, at this point in the clown show, we might as well give it a shot. It is OUR clown show. We built the circus, we put on the suit, we stood outside selling the tickets, now it’s time to get in the car. Show time!
I believe there is an incredible amount of legal and economic precedent, to suggest that a take over of Twitter the corporation, even at the cost of casualties, is indicated. I believe that Twitter is OUR digital commons, that should not be run by a bunch of billionaires with no democratic processes because that is unsafe for the entire world, and for us, and it will absolutely get people killed.
We should be determining the destiny of this platform. Many of us have been using this service since the first days of the service, which launched in 2006. Yes, it has been 16 years. I have been on the service for thirteen of them. I have published over 3.5 million words on the site; that is 31 books worth of content over the years. That represents a really significant contribution to the commons — years of participating in movements, debates, political events, cultural developments and production, theoretical frameworks and a hugely diverse range of discrete communities. Twitter is full of people who have made just really significant contributions to the commons as well. What we have created on Twitter is a vast, vast library that has played out page by page over the years in great detail and expanse and beauty, and it contains a vast repository of human knowledge, it contains an essential history, and it is a site of incredible dynamism and production and discourse each day.
It is not SAFE for this to be in the hands of ANY billionaire or ANY centralized force.
Twitter is ours, and we should take it the fuck back from these psychos. They have no moral ground, no ethical ground, no lawful ground, to continue to hold us, trapped in a bubble maintained by a small engineering workforce operating on the orders of someone who is STILL trying to make money out of this. When is enough enough?
There have been calls in the Valley, for years, around the idea of democratic utilities, that these services which are so core to a democratically functioning society, should in fact BE run democratically, should be community-owned, should financially benefit the community itself, and should be safe from being used again and again and again as a pawn in billionaire’s games.
This would not be some wild experiment. There have been multiple attempts at a distributed social network, far before Dorsey’s new project, most notably Diaspora. There is a huge tradition of related thought here we get from the Free Software Foundation as well as a number of alternative models that have sprung up alongside the open source software movement, and a tradition of attempting alternative models for running software development, through collectives and co-ops, through crowdfunding and unions — demonstrating simply that there IS a tradition within software itself that is looking to models outside of the monolithic corporate formation. There are academics and practitioners all over the world who have thoughtful ideas about how this could be implemented, as well as those who have failed in efforts very similar that we may both learn from and give another chance. We are NOT just pissing in the wind here. This is not the only model that has ever been proposed, it is just the only one that has not been squashed to pieces by billionaires because it competes with their interests in Twitter.
Unseen in the template of the software product, the blueprint of the tech company that we see around us to the point of monopoly, is that there have always been competing notions. They just haven’t gotten very far because of you-know-who. (Andreessen Horowitz). And you’ll notice that the model I have described here, is the one for soooo many other tech companies; they, too, belong to us.
I think we are at this really important juncture in our “relationship” as tech users with tech companies and tech billionaires, when they are REALLY shedding the PR illusions and showing us entirely brazen acts of labor abuse and shows of force and power. They think we are weak. And they literally don’t give a shit about how we “feel” about it. We can bitch about it all we want; they no long respond even superficially to mass user discontent, showing how emboldened they have become. But again, this is
OUR
Twitter.
While these current events look like a unique instance, in that this billionaire is uniquely flagrant (as a sociopath, he thrives on attention, negative or positive), and in that they have carried this out quite openly — don’t let that fool you into thinking that this is a one-off. This is the BEGINNING of a new age of bad relations between OUR communities and their evil empire. This has been happening everywhere, and its only getting worse.
Twitter is not unique in being purchased/run/primarily represented by billionaires. Even where Musk is most heavily weighted in ownership of Twitter, the company’s interests still include a collection of OTHER billionaires. In the Valley, the people who run the VC firms are alllllllll billionaires, sometimes with astronomical net worth — take Peter Thiel’s company Founders Fund, a16z’s Horowitz and Andreessen are both billionaires (wanted by the People), look up any VC firm of reasonable contribution and there will be a billionaire at the top of it, deciding, in detail, everything that will be built and who will make money from it. So starting from the very beginning of tech companies, there is ALWAYS a billionaire within a single hop.
Which means we know where to find them.