Thread by Samuel Johnson

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Twitter has tried to make itself unsellable, but Musk is calling their bluff. If you have less than 44 billion they'll tell you to take a hike, and if you have more than 44 billion they'll put you under federal investigation. Let's talk about why: 🧵
What is special about Twitter is not the platform itself or the business model. The business model is deeply unprofitable. Twitter represents a form of soft power that has almost no price in a civilization that depends heavily on narrative control.
People often wonder why Twitter has so much smaller of a user base than Facebook, Instagram, etc, and yet the appearance is very much that of Twitter being upstream of all other sources. *Who* uses Twitter is what makes it special. Every major figure of cultural responsibility.
When Twitter went live every media outlet and every agent of every celeb pressured them to make one. I've seen journalists say this themselves that it was demanded.

Why?

Because Twitter was designed as one big public-private cooperative "Inception Machine".
If important people are here and highly active, that means you have access to them to a degree. You do, I do, but more importantly, *bots do*.

Once hooked up to the dopamine drip, you can control the supply with fake engagement to trigger pavlovian feelings and responses.
Powerful groups of people have come to the conclusion long ago that rather than spend resources convincing people something is true or viable, they have decided to surround them with rhetoric and gaslight them until they've convinced themselves.
This was always a thing, but kicked into overdrive in 2015.

This is part of the reason for Musks fight regarding the number of bots on the platform. Because it both defrauds Twitters advertisers with fake engagement numbers and is key to gaslighting power.
Imagine you're an attention hungry journo, and your work is validated by how much the public reads and engages with it. Every anti-Trump or anti-Racism focused article goes bonkers, and articles about anything else flatline.

What do you choose to write about? Trump/Racism.
This is also why when you look at the average journalist or think tanker, they can have hundreds of thousands of followers and get absolutely ratio'd by 10k frog accounts. Because our followers are actually *human*.

Journo countersignals regime? They bleed bots/engagement.
That's why these people get more and more insane, as they attempt to read the tea leaves of what gets them a lick of the ice cream cone. It causes them to get more extreme and inane.

"Why didn't I get hundreds of likes with my hot take?!"

These followers provide fake consensus
This feels to me like a government sponsored public/private partnership where @jack was never allowed to be fully in charge after a certain point. It also feels like the ultimate brainchild of @CassSunstein

"Nudge Theory".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
Nudge Theory is essentially inception. It's creating a choice architecture that incentivizes doing what those implementing it want. At it's core, it's social pavlovian conditioning without consent.
This is why you see nonsensical articles like "Why the pro-life movement is creating a diaper shortage" or "How eating meat is racist."

It's all just Journos trying desperately to capture propaganda arbitrage in order to look important enough to keep paying.
Just look at the average journo at a major publication. They'll have 300k followers, most of their threads that aren't "Current Thing" focused will get piss poor engagement, and when they tap what is "desirable" content they shoot up into tens or hundreds of thousands in likes.
This makes Twitter a powerful tool for the ruling class, because in lieu of needing to onboard or brief assets to contribute to their narrative enforcement, they can simply perform inception. This is cheaper and more secure, and a measure of answer to "How many are involved?"
And if you incept every journo at every major publication to be just another dopamine addicted rat in a skinner box, then you have your answer to how these narratives can turn on a dime without these people being read into any of it. The panopticon catches those that resist.
In hacker terminology, these high society elites *and* the midwits who work for them, have effectively been "owned" and don't even know it. Psychologically hacked and cracked. This has been going on for literally half a decade at this point, if not longer.
@TyrantsMuse has discussed this from the frame of "Psychosecurity" as a measure of how easy you are to incept, and what sort of liability that poses to your organization, because inception doesn't just work from one source.

He's actually been defining and charting this criteria for a tool. As a treat.
But in addition to this method of manufacturing consensus among the powerful to push downstream, it obviously has its own enforcement entities that walk around scything the tallest flowers on the parts of twitter that are dissidents. But it's a game of whack a mole.
The double edged sword of all the important levers being on twitter is that *we* can ratio them too, and slap their psychosecurity around from this platform...

It's why I enjoy the bird app. And as always folks, remember:
Keep fucking with me, you know who you are.

Bunch of prissy wannabe hall monitors who think they can treat Americans like helots.
Don't forget to check out my totally cool book reviews at bullfrogreview.substack.com
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