On VW Necklaces and Blue Ticks
If it suddenly becomes easy to get a status symbol, don’t be surprised if it stops projecting high status
"Close-up of VOLKSWAGEN trademark sign on a car" by Ivan Radic is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Way back in 1986, the Beastie Boys released (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party). The video, which received heavy rotation on MTV, showed Mike D wearing a necklace with the Volkswagen emblem. It caused an overnight craze among teenage boys.
Many older boys saw stealing a Volkswagen emblem as a way of projecting values that they saw as masculine, such as fearlessness, disregard for the law and swagger. Volkswagen cars became targets throughout the US, the UK and other countries. The German company cleverly undercut the trend with an ad about designer labels getting ripped off. The company said any kid (or car owner who had lost an emblem) could get a free Volkswagen symbol just by sending in a letter.
Suddenly, all the bad boys found their younger brothers, cousins and neighbours wearing Volkswagen necklaces, but without any of the fearlessness or disregard for the law and only a little borrowed swagger. They had just written a letter to a multinational company! Almost overnight, the necklaces went out of fashion.
There are interesting parallels with Twitter’s blue ticks. The company, which was founded in 2006 and had become one of the top ten sites on the internet by 2013, has always treated journalists as anchor tenants. What, you might ask, is an anchor tenant?
Imagine that you own a large shopping centre. The most important rental contact will normally be with a big supermarket chain. These clients are called anchor tenants, and the owners will offer them a discount on normal rental prices.
The reason is simple. Think of a family that starts going to the supermarket for a big weekly shop. They might want a coffee or a snack beforehand or afterwards, so a coffee shop nearby makes sense. The kids might get a little whiny, so a shop selling toys or computer games in the same shopping centre can be used as a treat to get them out of the house. The family might also stop off to buy some clothes or some shoes on their shopping trip.
Until Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, journalists used to love Twitter. Many of us used to do at least some of our work in public on the platform. We used to use it to give us feedback as we developed a view. We had so much fun that we were even willing to forgive Twitter for enabling bot armies and toxic reply guys. Many of us even made new friends on Twitter.
Twitter rewarded some (not all) journalists with blue ticks. This was roughly equivalent to discounted rent for an anchor tenant. It recognized that a site full of reply guys would have been no fun at all. Someone had to produce some original content for all the reply guys to react to.
In my opinion, Twitter was always too stingy about giving out blue ticks. Without wanting to come across as being bitter, I am a genuine journalist with one of the world’s few journalism unicorns and I never managed to get one! Musk should have made it much easier for journalists and people adjacent to journalism (for example, bloggers) to get blue ticks.
Instead, the narcissistic businessman went down an anti-woke rabbit hole. He listened to various gurus and conspiracy theorists who profoundly disliked the negativity of those pesky fact-checkers. In 2023, he decided to take away the legacy blue ticks from journalists and give new ones to anyone who would pay for one.
Suddenly, Twitter was full of reply guys who thought that paying eight dollars a month gave their rather boring views an equal weighting to those of people who do a hard job full of legal risks in public. I couldn’t help thinking about the younger brothers, cousins and neighbours of the bad boys in 1986, who wanted to look hard, but didn’t realize that writing a letter to Volkswagen wasn’t exactly the same as vandalizing a random car late at night.
The lesson should be clear: if it suddenly becomes easy to get a status symbol, don’t be surprised if it stops projecting high status.
Some of the reply guys and Musk fans will wonder why people like me don’t just go and pay eight dollars a month for a blue tick. Unfortunately, we are already producing content, like this essay, and giving it away completely for free. Charging us for the privilege of giving away our work adds insult to injury.
At the same time, crypto sales people and other similar types will be happy to pay eight dollars a month as they can easily calculate the return on investment. Expect Twitter to become increasingly flooded with scams and angry reply guys, as more thoughtful voices drift away to sites like Substack, where essays replace Twitter threads. If this trend continues, Twitter will eventually make about as much sense as a shopping centre without a supermarket in the basement.
For many of us, the modern internet began in the late 1990s with the beta launch of Google. I remember testing it out as a foreign correspondent in Madrid. My first search was “Banco de España” and the Spanish central bank’s website was the first site to show up. That seems a little banal now, but it was revolutionary at the time. Strange as it seems now, it would have taken many minutes to find the central bank’s website using earlier search engines like Yahoo.
Musk’s latest version of Twitter goes against the grain of the revolution wrought by Google in the late 1990s. Many official sites that fail to respond to his shake-down will lose their blue ticks. Meanwhile, con artists will find it almost comically easy to impersonate official voices.
I don’t often make predictions in this column, but I will make an exception this week. At some point in the future, there will be some kind of disaster somewhere in the world. Musk’s misguided policies will enable fake news, conspiracy theories and bullshit to spread even faster than they did in the wake of 9/11 or the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. Many of the blue ticks will be for impersonators; and the official voices that didn’t pay will be marked down by the algorithms.
The consequences could be very serious indeed. If this scenario plays out as I see it, expect Musk to face an intense political backlash almost immediately afterwards. Who knows how it will end? The comments are open. See you next week!
Further Listening
Everything Is Free by Gillian Welch
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