We Are Trapped on Twitter. This is Why There’s No Alternative

Back in the early days of the tech industry, there was a continuous launch of social media platforms. It wasn’t settled, back then, that there would only be Meta products and Twitter. So there were all kinds. Launching and dying and launching and dying all the time. It was very dynamic, and in the Valley even in 2009, we were using all kinds of new things as they launched to us first.

Social media startups were always trying to way to launch and go viral. Twitter itself took off when it was lunched at SXSW, an important consumer tech conference — another example of how the first users of technologies are always in the industry itself, important when you are trying to figure out, I.e., why Reddit was a hate site. Foursquare as well was launched at SXSW and enjoyed popularity for some time, though it is not longer with us, probably because no one could share location information safely because of organized doxxing coming out of the industry itself.

Point being, for anyone trying to launch a social media platform, they were trying to figure out a way to have a viral success. Finding an opportunity or an angle to catch a wave. The payoff for an opportunistic platform shift, could be huge: Reddit became an astronomical success BECAUSE a website re-design of its competitor, Digg, was so widely hated by its users, that everyone immediately switched over to Reddit. This coup was a major event in Silicon Valley, showing that you could both lose all of your users overnight, and that you could become king on someone else’s fleeing subjects in the same moment. In retrospect, these events must have scared the shit out of venture capitalists… Digg had $50 million in venture funding, a respectable amount at the time, and overnight, the value of the company went to 0 … because its users weren’t happy with decisions made by management and left right then and there.

This set a tone for a number of consumer products, where a competitor was always standing at the sidelines waiting for you to trip up, wanting to get your users, and get in on the market; every time Twitter had downtime, which it did all the time then, you’d see someone else trying to sneak in from the side to take advantage of the opening. Everyone was well aware that social networks followed power law and that sudden, extreme, unpredictable shifts from one social network to the next were not only possible but happening around us in real time. This… is not so great for venture capitalists, actually.

Watching Twitter transition to new leadership under Musk, is remarkable, because of the enormity of the opportunity for someone to launch a viable competitor to Twitter. (Please don’t tell me Mastodon is viable, anything that requires someone not in tech to use the word “server”, is out of the game). This is a wide-open opportunity to disrupt an existing social media space. You have a dramatic change in leadership, a change that is massively unpopular and threatening to the platform’s most vital base, you have a highly motivated and active group of users. And not insignificantly, our technical abilities to create and launch global networks, are much further than they were in the early days of web 2.0. Still incredibly difficult, but fully achievable.

All of the attention has also created a huge frenzy of viral activity that is literally just sitting right there like a rocket ship for someone else to jump in it: in this moment, you could say you are launching a competitor to Twitter and the entire world would be talking about it. You even have an opening for a social good argument; a more ethical platform that supports social causes, which is appealing to many especially the liberal/left Twitter core audience. (In a cascading effect, the right is only on Twitter because the left is; the Left is very insular and doesn’t engage much with the Right, we fight with each other internally instead). There is some precedent for social issues in particular being a impetus for platform change; a little benefit corporation called Ello offered a no-ad policy, and also didn’t require LGBTQ-hostile real name policies at a time that Facebook did, sparking a huge wave of adoption in about 2014. 

The general sentiment and feelings of users towards tech, in general, also makes this moment ripe for a disruption of Twitter. After so many years with just Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, people WANT something else, they are sick of being fucked around with by these companies — they just want to make sure they can keep their communities on the next thing. People are VERY upset that a platform they are so invested in was so open to capture and manipulation, and they don’t feel comfortable or safe on the site. This is a massive break of trust. People are sick of tech monopolies and they are sick of tech monopolists, who are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as stupid, incompetent, egomaniacal; the recent FTX scandal has the left even more wary than ever. 

You have a perfect storm of timing, media, outrage, and deep desire and clear need for an alternative. If you need more evidence that venture capitalists and tech elite simply don’t give a shit about you, millions of people are literally screaming that they want something besides Twitter, and all of the sudden, there’s a shortage of white boy college dropout geniuses willing to see an opportunity and take the leap. As they say in the Valley, timing is everything: it’s equally fatal to be too early as too late. The time is now.

This perfect storm and… nothing. If you thought that Silicon Valley was somehow teeming with life and innovation, this should be a sad wake-up call that this is not the case. There are not other social networks being worked on, there is not funding available for new social networks, there will be, no new social networks. Marc Andreessen, the most powerful venture capitalist in the Valley, has a major investment in Facebook and he threw in with Elon to buy Twitter. You can bet, he and his cronies are not about to let Twitter users waltz merrily out the fucking door after paying $44 billion for it; which, lets be clear, is a huge amount of money even in Valley speak for tech elite to be personally handing over. If the VCs allowed an alternative to Twitter right now, Twitter would die. And they know it. Not only that, they would lose the reason why it was purchased in the first place: to influence the political landscape of the United States by terrorizing the left into a brokenness so profound that VCs and tech elite are able to take over huge parts of the country with ease. This whole op hinges on them keeping leftists/liberals on the platform. Who would the fascists attack on Twitter if the left wasn’t on it suddenly? 

 Even though tech is supposed to be “competitive,” this is no more than a marketing justification for why tech has gained such a foothold on the necks of other industries. They are the opposite of a competitive industry; they are a monopolistic one. Nothing else will be built, even in the face of the clear, mass need for a huge sector of tech’s constituents to get onto a platform that is viable for their very reasonable purposes. These users are not just disgruntled, they are SCARED and actively to being fed to roving 4chan gangs led by tech billionaires on the fucking site. This is no longer a panopticon we are choosing, in exchange for some access to its toys and trinkets; tech’s monopoly building means that this isn’t a matter of what we pick; there is very simply not another option. 

One of the reasons Twitter was worth so much is because… Twitter has a captive audience. The fact that Elon bought Twitter, is far less disturbing than that no one else, will dare to touch the 10s of millions of Twitter users, who have been totally absorbed in this conflict over the direction of the company, and their deliberant alienation and abuse — Elon knows damn well that there isn’t another place to go, and that none of his cronies will be allowing any others. We WANT to leave but we CAN’T. That is why Twitter was worth so much: it has the left out in the open with no other options. Targets. If there were any alternatives, we would all simply… go to them. 

It should give us all pause to think about what tech is able, and willing, to do to us, the people who are driving their fortunes. The comfort with which they are trapping us and unleashing hell on us just for forward their own personal agendas. 

 I hope this is a wake up call. They are telling us that we will use what they want, when they want us to, that we are captive on sites, that we have no rights as users, that they are not loyal to us as users even though we are the ones who drive their businesses, that they will not build things for us that we actually need, or let anyone else do it either. People are feeling a significant need for a new platform, they are highly motivated to make another platform succeed, and they have a lot riding on the potential of another platform. 

Nothing. 

I think we all need to be extremely serious about what this moment means for us politically, and the dire, urgent need to rip our comms out from venture capital and tech elite control. We can build alternative infrastructure as long as we are willing to genuinely financially support it; and we do have enough money on the left to do this if we take the “according to his abilities/according to his needs” principle. I think that we NEED to fund and build an alternative social network by raising money and hiring computer programmers to build it. Without venture capital, and without tech elite having a paw in it. Something we feel can belong to us. We are headed into a very difficult time, it will be marked by increasing tech takeover. We need at least one piece of infrastructure that we control. Just one thing. And from there, maybe more. 

The time to create an independent technology arm of the movement is now.