Ringmasters and Clowns
Elon Musk's public persona undercuts his plans for Twitter
"Ringmaster" by greyloch is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
In the years before social media, the corner of the internet where men take their hobbies much too seriously was dominated by forums. I was a member of one fun and argumentative forum, where a large number of men (and maybe one or two women once in a while) took variations on a shared hobby much too seriously.
One of the core members of the forum was a great character. He was extremely argumentative, opinionated and articulate, although let down by a tendency to generalize too much. As well as debating his partisan views fiercely, he would also viciously troll people he disagreed with. It was normally fine, but once in a while his sharp sense of humour would get a little out of hand and one of the moderators would ask him to tone things down a little.
Eventually, members of the forum failed to find a consensus on a divisive issue and some of the founders left to set up a new forum. There was a vacuum at the top. The big character was handed a moderator role. I remember thinking it would end badly - there is a big difference between a ringmaster and a clown. He was a fine clown, but needed a ringmaster to set him limits. The forum’s strong point had been its diversity of opinion, but when he was given moderating rights, he used them in a partisan way to punish his enemies and reward his friends. Needless to say, the forum soon died.
"clown zeeheldenfestival den haag" by Gerard Stolk (vers l'automne) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Fans of the circus will tell you that the ringmaster has a very specific role. He or she is meant to rise above the chaos and act as a neutral, warm-hearted and generous figure with a certain mystique, which at worst can be interpreted as blandness. On the other hand, clowns are flawed and human. Shabbiness, vindictiveness and incompetence are part of the act, along with pettiness. Clowns obviously make poor ringmasters; but that also means that ringmasters make poor clowns. The magic happens when they can find a way to work together.
Parliaments in liberal democracies are often described as circuses. We can see interesting parallels with ringmasters in the role of the Speaker of the House of Commons in the UK, which has roots going back to at least 1376. The speaker is elected by other members of parliament (MPs) at the beginning of a new term, after a general election or after the death of the incumbent. Some of the nominees must come from a different party. The speaker is expected to refrain from taking part in debates or from voting, with the exception of tie-breaking votes constrained by tradition.
The difference between ringmasters and clowns has become very topical following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, a platform once described as “a clown car [that drove] into a gold mine.” For some reason, the billionaire wants to run both shticks simultaneously, even though they clash. Many observers realized that this could be seriously problematic when Musk threatened to turn off Starlink for Ukraine.
The background was that Musk’s rocket company SpaceX made Starlink satellites available for free to Ukraine after the Russian invasion. This was a ringmaster-like act of generosity and neutrality, which provided an unbreakable internet connection to Ukraine. While Musk might not make any money directly, if Ukraine was able to fend off the invasion thanks in part to Starlink, he would establish its reputation as a crucial bit of kit in warzones and other disasters. SpaceX would be able to make a huge profit in the years that followed.
However, in September, Musk threatened to turn off the satellites after a disagreement or two with the Ukrainian government. Musk cracked a joke about it on Twitter. This untrustworthy behaviour is clown-like and is dissonant with the underlying strategy. Musk eventually reversed his decision, but the damage to his reputation was done. Of course, it isn’t the first time that he has seemed confused about which persona to adopt. Most people would realize that it is a terrible idea for defence contractors to smoke spliffs in public, but not Musk.
The dissonance between the two personas has come to the fore since Musk has bought Twitter. On the one hand, he sometimes talks like a ringmaster. He says that Twitter is the world’s “de-facto public square” and could be thought of as “a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence… with a lot of room for improvement.” He said its mission is “to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world.” Done well, the creation of a new digital institution could be an exciting project.
But then Musk lets himself down by forgetting that ringmasters shouldn’t act like clowns. He picks feuds with random users and refuses to listen to advertisers who are concerned about Twitter trolls making their brands toxic. Some of his tweets also have an unnecessary populist edge about cultural elites. This isn’t helped by tweeting conspiracy theories, even if he later deletes the speculation; or by confusing digital media managers with journalists; let alone telling users how to vote or banning comedians for impersonating him. More than anything, Musk comes across as resentful rather than neutral.
I think the key to understanding Musk’s clown-like approach comes from a tweet back in May where he described “wokeness” as “a mind virus” that will destroy civilization. Like many American libertarians, he has fallen into what I describe as the Goldwater trap - being so worried about the paternalistic tendencies of the left that he doesn’t notice that many of his new friends on the right are bigots.
Although I am worried about the future of Twitter, I am perhaps less pessimistic than many other critics of Musk. He knows something that many don’t: He plans to run Twitter as a startup. Anyone with startup experience can tell you that these organizations only have one advantage over older corporations - they are designed to be very flexible about testing new ideas. Most new ideas will be terrible and will fail quickly, but that is fine as long as you learn from the experience and keep the things that do work, as Musk has noted.
By moving fast and testing lots of ideas and iterations of ideas, startup founders can gradually build a project that wouldn’t have been at all obvious at the beginning. Major corporations, which need lots of committees before testing ideas, will never be able to catch up with a successful startup. The best ones will be able to grow exponentially after finding a winning formula.
So, charging heavy users of Twitter eight dollars per month actually isn’t a bad idea at all. It means that people who want to deploy bot armies will find it much harder. The first iteration of the idea, without verification checks on users’ identities, is fairly ridiculous, but hopefully Musk will encourage Twitter to tweak the rules in the future as the company tests different versions of successful ideas.
Musk has already deleted tweets spreading conspiracy theories, as mentioned above, and has walked back some of his whackier ideas. He has gone from being a free-speech absolutist to banning parody accounts that don’t make their status clear, almost overnight. If he continues to propose strange ideas, but then slowly tracks back to a more moderate position, with a bit of luck the end result won’t be too far removed from what his critics would have suggested in the first place.
Musk’s vision for Twitter as a cybernetic super-intelligence hinges on an analogy with a brain. Individual users are similar to neurons, in the entrepreneur’s view. The big problem with this analogy is that not all neurons are created equal. Some users will try to develop intellectual integrity and pay attention to feedback loops; while others will deliberately spread misinformation for nefarious reasons. As Twitter tests new ideas, it will need to develop algorithms that reward the former while punishing the latter.
It is also worth mentioning that startups tend to be quite tolerant of whackiness, particularly when founders are building in public. This is probably the reason why Musk thinks he can get away with being a clown-like ringmaster. If he wants to continue with this behaviour, my suggestion would be to try and develop a double act with a non-executive chairman or a new CEO, who can develop a neutral, diplomatic and warm-hearted persona, while maintaining a certain bland mystique.
One final piece of advice for Twitter’s new owner is that public goodwill is hard to earn and easy to lose. Slashing the platform’s workforce might make some kind of sense if you want to turn it into a lean and experimental startup. However, the vast majority of the world have never worked for a startup and never will. Most hard-working people are anxious about losing their jobs. A billionaire destroying the livelihood of ordinary people on a whim is not a good look. Slashing whole departments is not clever.
The bad optics are particularly troubling if your business model is based on connecting billions of ordinary people from across the ideological spectrum, presumably including left-wing people too. A recent survey shows that more Americans feel negative about Musk’s antics than positive (38.2% vs 19.2%).
The downsides of Musk acting like a clown and annoying legions of potential users by being too petty, small-minded and vindictive are clear. Early social media sites easily killed most of the forums that had been dominant before. However, not all of the first movers thrived - one of the first true social media platforms, Myspace, failed to build a functional business model. It should serve as a warning to Musk, who has already flagged the possibility of Twitter going bankrupt.
The people behind new sites like Substack and Mastodon are thinking hard about decentralized news and commentary. Twitter’s survival as the go-to social media network for news is by no means guaranteed, although the weight of numbers makes it an uphill battle for challenger brands. The comments are open. See you next week!
Further Reading
Management textbooks will need to be rewritten if Musk succeeds
Chesterton’s fence teaches us that reformers need to understand what they want to cut
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Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.