The Broken Brains of Elon Musk: The Road Towards a Better Future Social Media (Revisited with WiRED platforms)
Twitter has broken our brains, yet we cling to these shards and believe each new tweet may be the one that mends our gray matter. No one typified broken brain syndrome better than Elon Musk, who in 12 days of owning Twitter has dissolved the board, laid off half of its employees, and railed against himself.
We talk with WIRED platforms about the changes coming to Twitter and how the changes may affect the future of the social network.
Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren suggests rethinking your relationship with social media.
Solar Keys at GadgetLab: A Micro-Blogging Show for Silicon Valley Tech Trends and Analytical Speech Recognition and AI-Generated Voices
The person can be found on the micro-blogging site. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is a fighter. You can hang the main hotline atGadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Solar Keys is our theme music.
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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions, please review the episode audio.
So usually, on this podcast, we’re going to try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what’s happening in Silicon Valley. There is only one story in tech that everyone cares about, and that is what is happening on the street in San Francisco atTwitter.
We are going to interview them like we would a normal person. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.
I like that when we started this show, we said we would never put on AI voices unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. Twice in five episodes.
You were wrong about this not being a show filled with people, and you were wrong about the fact that it wasn’t a show with people. So two strikes for Casey.
Right. Also, they had just been in this situation where their former chief security officer was complaining that they had really lax security practices and filed this whistleblower complaint. And now, the fact that all the Twitter engineers are just printing out the code base and leaving it around Twitter headquarters —
Yeah. Sometimes, as a reporter, you get a tip that is so silly that you don’t think it’s true. So when I got this tip that Elon and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true.
Two of my sources think that that does not sound right to me. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!
So why is this funny? This is interesting, why? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are not evaluated by how much code they have written.
If you show up with a lot of code, that is not a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? And then, sort of streamlining it. So.
Who prints the code? Like, it’s not like — like, I was surprised that the coding programs actually have a Print button in them. That is not the thing you are going to be bringing to your daily review.
It’s like, two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification. It is like a change of plans. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. We need you to shred it if you have printed out any code, so you just bring it in on your laptop.
There is just the boss in charge who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and everyone is kind of laughing at him. But it’s not — it’s not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.
It is not. One thing we should state is that the folks at the company are very focused on figuring out who is a good engineer. So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.
I speak to people who get calls late at night from randomTesla engineers, telling them who’s really good on their team. Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?
And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?
And who can we lay off? That is a sort of hidden piece of this. This is a code printing fiasco, so we need to fix it. Then, on Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to Twitter Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.
So Twitter Blue, however many people subscribe to it, has never been a major source of revenue. But the Elon folks who are under this huge pressure to start making money in a hurry have been looking for new revenue ideas. And one revenue idea that came up, basically right away, was to make people pay for Twitter Blue in order to keep their verification badges.
$38 million a year, if all of those people pay $8 per month, is what that would be. Twitter’s second-quarter revenue was $1.18 billion. I don’t think anyone with a verified account will pay more than $8 a month, even if they are verified.
Yeah. People, including Stephen King, the horror author — he tweeted, ”$20 a month to keep my blue check? I will be gone like Enron if that gets implemented.
Stephen King has written many horror novels and has paid $20 a month for his verification badge, which was frightening to him.
Tony La Russa sued the company after he was being impersonated, which started the process of verification. And he was basically like, this is harmful to my reputation, that you have these fake Tony La Russas running around. It is only natural that such a thing would exist. And now, the question is, are you really going to charge people for that privilege of just not being impersonated?
I got verified, like, a decade ago, because someone at the news company that I worked at put my name on a list, and all of a sudden, I had a checkmark by my name.
Why do I need to keep my little check mark? The problem is that I don’t know about Twitter, but I just want to make sure that I’m not the real Oprah
It’s not about this person. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. And so Twitter needed a way to basically allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they purported to be.
I think that this is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this — Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, right? You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.
Right. And I think it’s fair to say that over the years, like, people have come to see these checkmarks next to your Twitter name as sort of a status symbol, right? It means that you are who you are.
Right, exactly. The idea was that people who were verified cared about being verified so much that they would pay a fee to remain verified. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.
Now, that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire Twitter timeline meltdown, where users are saying, no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I pay for Netflix. That is more than I pay for anything.
It seems crazy to keep my little check mark. Stephen King responded to a reply from Elon that we need to pay the bills. There isn’t necessarily a need to rely on advertisers entirely. How about $8? So Stephen King has become the pricing consultant for Twitter verification.
Well, here’s my theory about it, real quick, is that I think that inside Elon world, and inside, frankly, a lot of right-wing sort of circles, there’s this idea of the blue checks, right? The people on Fox News and other conservative media outlets always talk about the blue check crowd of people onTwitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are very self important and care about their checkmarks.
And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.
Yeah. I have always been in favor of letting people who want to verify themselves be part of the plan. It is more than making people pay to keep their badges. You could get a Badge if you pay.
It seems to me that I am trying to keep an open mind. This could work. I have often thought that people who are power users of Twitter should be paying something for some of the features that are being talked about here.
It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It matters to us. News organizations use all kinds of software solutions to do their jobs. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.
Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Where Do We Stand? Where Are We Going? How Will We Go? What Will They Do?
It was back at it at the Krispy Doughnuts one more time, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. The culture has also moved on. The code base for the Vine is 10 years old, and the idea of it being revived and turned into a TikTok competitor is a really steep hill.
I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? That’s something they’re just going to have to put a ton of effort into. You’re essentially launching a new social network within Twitter. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. We will have to see if they can do it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out: A Case Study of a Collision Involving a Symmetric Employee
That’s right. They’re being told, you have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, you will be fired. You will be fired if it is past the deadline.
People are sleeping very little. Some of them are terrified, because they are sleeping in their offices. Some of them are on work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job, or they’re out of the country. So it’s serious for the people who have these jobs.
Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday. How are your day going so far? Anything notable happen today?
It is the same pattern for every day for last week, with everybody waking up to panicked messages via different channels. I think most people are smart enough to switch off of Slack and to other channels. We haven’t had any communication from anyone inside of us, so we are trying to chase rumors.
We reached out to them and asked them to respond to what the employees had told us about the company. They did not write back. The company has kept quiet since the deal closed.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Have We Learned in the Space Between Work? How Did I Learn? What Have I Done?
It was stressed out. I feel like the stress that I experience is related to trying to maintain this job while clearly looking for a way out and having zero support and acknowledgment from the people above me. Multiple rumor mill-based scares have already been reported.
First, of course, was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn’t happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.
Most of us have some savings to sit on. Some people don’t. We are entering a really hard hiring market in tech and it is nerve-racking not to know. We are entering the holidays.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Good Are You? Is Your Code and Your Team? What Are They Saying?
So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. You have not received an email stating who is in charge and the game plan for the next few days, even though most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned.
That is correct. We haven’t received any information except for what gets trickled down to us. Comms is very sparse. Messages in the company-wide channels are not answered.
And so what is that like, when, day to day, you wake up, and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing?
You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I have seen examples of people saying that code was written entirely by them and not crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hope that they will be on some preferred status list.
Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written, no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. There is a group called the [SIGHs]
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
“I can’t cope”: A tweet from a manager saying: “Life under mu-twitter-employees speak out”
Yeah, I reported on a message from a manager who said, basically, if you don’t know what you’re working on right now, work on something. Work on anything.
Someone sent me a post from Blind and I want to read it. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.
And multiple people have sent me this post. And I wonder if you’ve seen it. I won’t read the whole thing. The headline is “I can’t cope.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musket Two Twitter Employees Speak Out? An Inquiry into the How We Are Depressed and Illusionful About Elon
And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally outside our control. If we don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays, we won’t be here. If we leave we will be gone.
People are working ridiculous hours. I’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can’t cope. I am an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.”
So there are two camps at Twitter right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces. I think it would be better to be in the people who are going to be fired.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Do We Get What We Want? And Why Are They So Crying?
My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment, and in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves, applying to jobs.
And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas. The people I know who are on visas have no idea what’s happening to them. They’ve not been told anything.
So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because we’re moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.
I don’t think it’s due to people sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. There is some truth in that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Are Your Fears? What Are You Worrying About Twitter?
And I wonder, as you’ve been going through all this, if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk, and what fears you might have around the future of Twitter the service?
I would love to see everyone leave on the platform in protest. Many people may stay in the situation. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.
Scared and relieved. It will be scary if you can’t make ends meet. All of us who get fired will have a chance to chill for a day or so, and then wake up a few days later and try to find a new job. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Case Study With a Man Known for his “Nonnice” Contribution
Uncertainty. There are people who are not sure if they should continue working. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.
I mean, even in the lowest parts of engineering, people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features. And their only job is to write random code that no one’s ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes. And the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. It caught us off guard on a number of issues before they got to the public.
That’s complicated because no one really knew. This person was not a nice person, I suppose, in part due to groupthink. A lot of people thought that he should’ve been banned a long time ago because of his behavior. The whole thing sort of came from there.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: How Does he Go About It? What Did he Learn from the “Closed Paradox”?
I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. He will lean into it if it serves him.
After many years there, I think that the company has grown in many ways and not so well. I agree with people who say there are probably too many managers and engineers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow. The company has always been strong because of management.
You need a huge structural change in order to go through a change like this. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Say What You Need: That’s Almost Okay, but I Need To Go Faster Than It Needs
OK. So there’s an idea there that Twitter should be moving faster than it has been. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. What do you think about the fact that you have a three- or four-day deadline?
I lost my mind. I mean, having a three – to four-day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday, that’s normal. That is a little overwhelming. I may put in a few more hours. Need to get it done. It makes sense.
But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I don’t think I’d get asked to completely redesign Twitter Blue by Friday. It is completely absurd.
And the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that have to be dragged in, that’s like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.
Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You probably have to coordinate across a lot of people, right?
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. They have to completely reshift how that entire process works. We have to figure out what the whole services are in the company.
Yeah. Like if somebody had come to you and said, we want to redo Twitter Blue, what would be the time frame that you would be given that would make you say, yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that?
It’s up to you. If the change requires a ton of infrastructure changes, it could take quite a while because the Twitter platform is generally pretty slow. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.
But feature-wise, I guess if I had to give a round-about time frame, there would probably be something that could possibly be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Why You Shouldn’t Have a Privacy Check on a Profile
And not only is this an engineering problem, it’s a social problem. We need to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?
Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? And you’re essentially saying it sounds like that these deadlines are so short that this stuff may be released without any of that testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They are going to be loose.
Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. We don’t do user data because we don’t worry about that. It is a blue check on a profile.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk and the Return of Vine: What Do You Think? And How Do You Feel about the Recent Product Changes That Musk and his Inner Circle Attempt to Explain?
There are a couple of things. As far as Musk and his people are concerned, it depends on where you are in the leadership stack. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. Hopefully Musk likes it.
Think about it. He wants it done within a week if you present him with an idea. You have sacrificed every team around you.
God. I want to know how you think about the various product changes that have recently been proposed or floated by Musk and his inner circle, for example the charge of $8 a month for Twitter verification and the return of vine. How do you feel about those proposals? And do you think they’re good ideas?
I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. And I don’t know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren’t logged in.
Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. And if you linger and browse through some tweets, maybe you see some ads, right? A lot of people would agree that he made a relatively quick change that makes sense.
The one on vine is not the worst idea. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.
Yes, but sure. I mean, we do have all the original content from Vine. The nostalgia factor gives us an advantage in launching something.
But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I think every company has tried at least one. Is this something that we can do? There’s been mock-ups.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Tweet Employees Speak Out: Is It Really Necessary for You to Live Under Something? What Happens if I Can’t Go Back To Twitter
It’d probably be the most boring. You could make an ethereal horror movie, out of walking around with nothing.
There’s no communications. There are two people in a corner. It isn’t like the whole company went to an all-hands meeting and learned what was happening. Everybody is asking if we are ever going to see him. Should I continue to do my work? Do they still serve lunch?
We don’t know what might happen to your job as we record this. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?
Culture is real. I mean, culture seeps through the product. There were a lot of reasons for the way the company behaved. It can be frustrating in its own way.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Are They Really Mean? (Review by Casey Roose at NNLT)
I think people have seen this. So now we’re moving into the phase equivalent to “move fast and break things,” with no care for the people who are using it, which just sort of defeats the point.
Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. He has been speculating about the kind of labor law lawsuits that will come out.
It is impossible to understand their point of view, but we can guess from Musk’s Tweets that he dislikes the current system for people who do not have a blue checkmark. He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”
And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what’s happening at Twitter, you can send those right over to Casey. Kevin is his email address. The man is named Roose.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html
“Hard Fork” by Elon Musk: Living on the Lurkers, not in the Closest of World (the case of Twitter)
Davis Land made the film “Hard Fork”. Paula Szuchman edits us. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.
Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.
Musk said it was so small that it felt like it was coming from his own mind. It is good to be congratulate: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.
A few people are in charge of a small part of the internet. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
It would be easy for an electric car entrepreneur to mistake his own Twitter experience for that of everyone else when he follows a lot of extremely active users. It’s the same for reporters. Half of the users on the social network don’t even bother to give out their real names, with most of their posts being replies. They check in on current events and watch sports and celebrity news, but then live their lives. They are “lurkers.”
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Take your original thoughts and put them in another place.
Calore: Whether or not everything can happen in the next six or seven days or eight days or so according to GadgetLab
Michael Calore: In the six or seven or eight days between now and this episode airs, anything could happen.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/gadget-lab-podcast-579/
The end of the web? Is it really the beginning of the end of social media? — Lauren Reissner’s perspective on Twitter
Lauren is referring to certain professions. We’ve seen social networks come and go before, and we were just talking about this this week. We were talking about the beginnings of the end of the web, and maybe it’s just the beginning of this one. I mean, we will eventually all find another place together online to share our most mundane or, in some people’s cases, insane thoughts. On the other hand, there are larger issues about trust and platforms and social discourse and even democracy that are reflected in what’s happened at Twitter today and this year. I think I’m telling the truth. The saga signals the end of something that was essential to the consumer internet and the early days of social media, which was just about connecting. It feels like that’s not a priority anymore, and people are still connecting, but the platforms are really for amplification. They’re about amplifying hateful content, outrage, stoking the outrage. They’re not exactly the healthiest places to be.