From the Chiasmus Archive: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS (PART 4). THE ERA OF 'CHERRY PICKING' ACTIVISM." (A.GLASS 2021)
*In light of Twitter now owned by the richest man alive Elon Musk, with the micro blogging platform recently delisted from the NASDAQ, to be no longer traded as a public company. I feel it is timely to offer Part 4 of Cults of the Culture Wars "The era of “Cherry picking” activism, as a back story analysis to a company that throughout its pubic exposure as a share listed tech giant, was indeed a money making machine. And that its evolution from social media interactions, morphing into political and socially motivated culture wars, to which extremes of the right wing perpetuated conspiracies and misinformation. What happens now, with Musk attempting to transform the Twitter landscape into his own version of a paleo-libertarianism utopia, maybe not that unknown. The billionaire has been offering clues, ironically via his Tweets, for many years.*
A.Glass (2022)
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The era of “Cherry picking” activism.
On July the 15th 2006, a small technological company named Odeo officially released a messaging platform called Twttr (Twitter), a lessor project from the main business model which was to be a music broadcasting system. The experiment in creating a platform based short messaging system (SMS) was initially seen by the company’s co-founder Evan Williams as a continuation of “microblogging” that he dismissed as anything viable, as he had sold his patent Blogger platform to Goggle in 2003 at an undisclosed sum, which was speculated to be between 3 and 4 million dollars. Williams with his co-founder of Odeo, Noah Glass, went ahead and tried to launch their main broadcasting project in 2005, but lost out to Apple’s expanding iTunes networks. In a desperation to restructure the company into another major project, Williams asked his software team to brainstorm an idea, Odeo’s engineer Jack Dorsey, during a brainstorming meeting, with a blueprint scrawled down with a pen on paper, came up with an idea for a platform network system via SMS’s, that allows users to share personal status updates. In the following year, 2006, Dorsey sent the first ever “tweet” under the platform named Twitter, which was coined by Noah Glass, Williams although seemingly skeptical of its success, launched the project as a public messaging system in the same year. In September 2006, Glass and his team, who believed in the Twitter concept, presented their workable platform to William’s and the Odeo board of directors, to which William’s continued to play-down Twitter as any profitable venture, however the company maintained work on the project and of the same year he wrote an email, now infamous in its digital history, to the investors that had shares in the company Odeo. Informing them that he felt the company was going sideways, yet at the same time disclosing to the handful of investors in his small company, of a new project called Twitter, once again down playing it as profitable venture and offering to buyback their share holdings. To which they all agreed, selling 5 million dollars of their shares back to Williams. To what many commentators, in retrospect, who have followed the meteoric rise of the social media platform see Williams as a chief hustler of ideas, going back to 2003 when he didn’t fully disclose the sale to Goggle of his platform Blogger, with former employees raising concerns that they weren’t properly compensated from the acquisition. But business is ruthless and so are the players in the money markets, despite social media platforms touting their open and egalitarian social interactions. It all comes down to the volume of its uses, Twitter in its early manifestation, even with William’s apparent grift in downplaying the phenomenon, it was Glass the co-founder of Odeo who pushed the idea of a status orientated messaging system aware of the psychology on its potential users, who said, “You know what’s awesome about this thing? It makes you feel like your right with that person. It’s a whole emotional impact. You feel like your connected with that person.”
In 2011 the 5 million dollars worth of shares that were bought back from the original investors of Odeo in 2006, on the back of Twitter’s success skyrocketed to 5 billion.
But, what the early shareholders missed out on, has been since capitalized multiple times over by the company and it current CEO, Jack Dorsey, evolving from Dorsey’s scrawled pen and paper idea and Noah Glass’s vision on a interpersonal messaging system to show people your everyday status, has now become a behemoth of the so called ‘social’ media world. With Presidents of countries, celebrities, billionaire CEO’s, news outlets and more importantly the political activism. Twitter is now a platform that has since superseded its initial intentions, gravitating “followers” onto various news fees, politics and general interests items. It’s appeal as a zero sum platform, all but free to the user, yet it does come with a hidden cost – personal information. Used and stored algorithmically to set product ads directed at the users of Twitter, by documenting their direction (“clicks”) via the intenet, it is by its standard a massive advertising program that allows a seeming endless flow of information. However, the trade-off is its disclosure and terms and conditions that most Twitter uses accept as a service that appears free and open, but within the company discretion to the limit of information revealed in a Tweet, initially allowing 140 letters, it has since up to 280 which included links. As the platform has been almost completely taken up by a politicized broadcast, Twitter also has limited, not by its intention, but design, the intellectualism of topics. Rather, it is has embraced rapid response of a headline styled Tweets, with its associated hastag as an attempt at setting a trend forming topic. As long as they stay within the user guidelines, that for a long time have been lapsed, which also included other social media outlets. It was until gun violence and mass shootings that “hate speech” and users issuing provocative threats of violence have now been removed by Twitter.
Regardless of the issues of reigning in the culture wars that have spilled over into actual violence, the platform was exploited and this exploitation is neither a sophisticated hack or a algorithmic ‘bot’, but by simply aligning oneself as cult like fixture, which within the scales of politics, academia and journalism. Figure heads on either side of politics, once they Tweet a message or news item, it is received directly as a personal message into your feed. Very much like Glass said, “It makes you feel like your right with that person,” and that “person” could very well be the President of America or some fringe activist, either way, the Twitter phenomenon has evoked a culture war that has become unparalleled within history.
But, Twitter, as the hashtag Culture Wars continue on, is not a egalitarian socialist inspired platform to spread equality that some right wing pundits would have you believe, it is business and a very successful one. At the end of 2019 it had over 150 million daily active users, spanning every country in the world, even astronauts from International Space Station are able to muster up a Tweet from time to time, with an captivated audience at any giving moment within a second of a short message being delivered (and associated hashtags), is instantly seen in tens of thousands of personal feeds which doesn’t include the so called ‘re-tweets’. Twitter relies heavily on advertising, with its licensing agreements also as a money spinner, but it’s ad campaigns through the so called “promoted” posts. is where the bulk of the company financial gains are made, with its overall revenue, ending June 2020 year-on-year was at $3.5 billion pocketing a generating $1.3 billion of income for a years worth of ‘Tweets’. This newfound cultism of personality with its profits in tow, more so, as mentioned, has been solely derived from celebrity and political cues, offering rapid fire information, that has been cherry picked for its designated audience. As a platform of activism, which, when a Culture War is defined on social media, is only projected as a trend seeking hashtag by both the Liberalism and Conservative value systems as they bicker it out online.
Authored: A.Glass February 02 2021
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