From the archives: Solving for X, The newest addition to the meta alphabet
How to wreck a platform, in 280 days or fewer.
I’m relaunching plus/minus next week after a hiatus— so to build your anticipation, each day this week I’ll be resurfacing some stories from the archive. Each is unchanged from the original version, so I’ll let you be the judge of how well they stand up!
First up, my coverage of Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter, from July 2023. See you next week! —Josh
In Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle, impressionable protagonist Mae starts a job at a company known as “the Circle” whose logo, which adorns the book’s cover, is “a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center”. The company is a satirical hybrid of Google and Facebook (as they were known before their respective restructuring as Alphabet and Meta, on which more soon): characterised by sunny Silicon Valley optimism, abundant employee amenities, and a cheerful desire to monopolise all the world’s information and communication. Midway through the book, the Circle’s grandest ambition of all is revealed to Mae by its mythical, khaki-wearing co-founder, Eamonn Bailey. The Circle company, it transpires, wants to permanently eradicate privacy by encouraging employees, politicians, and eventually everyone else to “go transparent” by wearing cameras that continuously record their every move and deed. This is how “the Circle will become complete”, Bailey explains. “A circle is the strongest shape in the universe. Nothing can beat it, nothing can improve upon it, nothing can be more perfect. And that’s what we want to be: perfect,” Bailey continues, as “the ‘c’ in the logo closed to become a perfect circle”.
So far, so Orwellian. But what makes The Circle a satire fit for the internet age is its parodying not just of the very real and weighty power of Silicon Valley, but also of its faintly ridiculous pretensions: the vacuous slogans, vague imagery, and vast promotional campaigns designed to normalise and legitimise often invasive innovations. As a handful of the largest companies expand into ever more spheres and sectors through spin-offs and acquisitions, they need a new lexicon to encompass and explain what it is they actually do.
Google and Facebook used rebrands to eschew specificity and embrace abstraction.
This helps to explain the increasingly abstract brands that are currently voguish in Big Tech. Take for example the two companies already mentioned: the companies formerly known as Google and Facebook. The names embody the nerdiness of nineties tech: a googol, lest we forget, is 10100; a face book was a thing people used to find one another on the nascent web. Google’s 2015 restructuring created Alphabet Inc (domain name abc.xyz), a holding company which allowed it to “run things independently that aren’t very related”, such as its life sciences divisions and its secretive R&D wing called, um, X. Meanwhile, Facebook’s rather more mocked reincarnation as Meta in 2021 was widely seen as an attempt to move past the company’s many scandals and pivot towards the “metaverse” it was helping to construct. But at root, both companies used these rebrands to eschew specificity and instead embrace abstraction: an alphabet is just a set of letters, while the Greek prefix “meta” connotes self-referentiality.1
All of which brings us to, you guessed it, Twitter’s rebranding as X—or more precisely as 𝕏, an upper case rendering of unicode character 1D54F, whose copyrightability is presently up for debate on Twitter sorry, on 𝕏. Elon Musk, it should be noted, has a longstanding connection with the letter X: X.com was an online bank that merged to become PayPal in 2000, SpaceX is his space exploration company; and in April Musk created a new AI company, X.AI and renamed the company that operates Twitter X Corp. But with the rebranding has come an attempt to relaunch, and vastly expand, what Twitter actually is and is for. In a series of tweets (or whatever they’re called now), Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino pitches the rebranding as an attempt to be an “everything app”:
“The future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”2
Cue Succession comparisons—as well as the reminder that “everything apps” or “superapps” are already a thing, most prominently in China in the form of WeChat. And indeed, Musk has been publicly mulling the creation of such a superapp for over a year (which feels like a decade in Musk time). However, the central point of curiosity here is why exactly we should believe for a second that X Corp can execute on this vision. Yaccarino claims that “There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything.” But the “transformation” that has taken place during Musk’s ownership to date has mostly taken the form of destruction, in a not-terribly-creative form. Twitter’s communications and safety teams have been gutted and its offices almost entirely shuttered in places like Brussels and Brazil; its once-integral blue tick programme has been cheapened to the point of meaninglessness; and earlier this month users were limited in how many tweets they could view, which is—or was—really the point of Twitter.
The “transformation” that has taken place during Musk’s ownership to date has mostly taken the form of destruction, in a not-terribly-creative form.
At the risk of lamenting the loss of a platform that had had a decidedly mixed impact on political discourse even before Musk’s takeover, it’s worth reflecting on the centrality of “old” Twitter as the internet’s newspaper of record. The first 12 years of tweets were collected and archived by the Library of Congress. Tim Berners-Lee tweeted from the middle of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. And early Twitter played a coordinating role in revolutions and disaster recovery, provided discursive space for Black communities, and divided the internet over the colour of a dress. Twitter did all this by keeping it simple—often to the point of infuriating anyone who just wanted to edit a damn typo. It kept content moderation light compared with its rivals—permitting porn, for example, and offering users more control over moderation through muting and blocking tools. It let journalists and bloggers embed tweets, and allowed researchers and activists access its API to its vast tweet corpus relatively cheaply, greatly expanding its off-platform reach. Modest changes to Twitter’s interface or functionality, like adding threading or doubling the length of tweets, felt like cataclysms. After over a decade, it even made a profit for the first time in 2017.
The pivot to “X” is a frantic U-turn and only the latest and most dramatic attempted distraction from Twitter’s financial, infrastructural and social decline.
Musk’s takeover has been an unmitigated disaster for the societal position that Twitter had carved out for itself, fitfully, in the 16 years since its splashy breakout at the tech conference SXSW, where a large plasma screen displayed live “twitters” from attendees. In terms of revenue—the metric that Musk likely cares about most given the debt he still needs to service on his October 2022 purchase—the company has not recovered from the exodus of advertisers not wanting their promos to appear next to unmoderated hate speech. Seen in this light, the pivot to “X” is a frantic U-turn and only the latest and most dramatic attempted distraction from Twitter’s financial, infrastructural and social decline. “X” is not going to solve the problems Musk’s ownership has created and amplified. When pledging to buy Twitter, seemingly on a whim, Musk might have assumed that compared with launching rockets, operating a social media platform wasn’t rocket science. As it turns out, it’s much more complicated.
The text copied rather than embedded because Twitter turned that feature off in April.