Kanye. Musk. Trump. Krugman. Rowling. Cleese.

Everyone gets worse when they make Twitter their main outlet for expressing thoughts

Jaron Lanier explains a theory of “Twitter poisoning.” The theory goes further than I would go, as it suggests that Twitter is the cause of people’s decline. I’m not sure of that, but I have noticed the pattern in many great writers and thinkers. This is the theory:

I encountered Donald Trump a few times in the pre-social media era, and he struck me as someone who was in on his own joke. He no longer does. Elon Musk used to be a serious person more concerned with engineering and building businesses than with petty name-calling. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to amplify a preposterous, sordid story about Paul Pelosi. Kanye West was once a thoughtful artist. Now known as Ye, he radiates antisemitism on top of his earlier slavery denialism.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot. (“Other social media” sometimes coming into play after ejection from Twitter.) When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

…I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.

Rather than say that Twitter is the cause, a counterfactual that we should consider is that creative people simply get burned out. Paul Krugman was on fire during the period from 1991 to about 2011, twenty years during which he ran ahead of the conventional wisdom on many topics. I read his essays in 1994, suggesting Japan’s malaise might become global, and the Asian Tigers were in for a bad fall, and I thought Krugman was completely nuts. But in the end, he was correct about everything. In fact, one study suggested that of all the pundits who write on political topics, he was the most accurate of all pundits during this era. But in recent years, he’s gone quiet. His essays in the New York Times are no longer bold revelations of where the world will be in 10 years. When he has an odd thought to share, he no longer develops it into a theory that explains our world, instead he just sort of spits it out on Twitter. I find his Twitter feed disappointing: most of the time he is simply repeating the conventional wisdom. It’s been a long time since he ambushed me with a completely new and unexpected set of thoughts, as he did in those 1994 essays.

JK Rowling is an even sadder case. She wrote the most popular children’s stories of all time. An entire generation grew up reading Harry Potter. But now she devotes substantial energy to attacking the rights of trans-people. Why would a sane person do this? She could have retired with her reputation as a beloved writer who had given the world some delightful books. She could have accepted the adoration of a generation that grew up with her. Instead, she’s gone out of her way to earn the dislike of exactly that generation who previously loved her, a generation that also happens to be far more serious about trans rights than any previous generation.

Jaron Lanier writes that when he met Trump in former years, Trump seemed to be in on the joke about Trump. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can say with confidence, if there was ever any man that lived who was in on the joke, it was John Cleese, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus fame. Although Cleese often played angry, abusive, authoritarian characters, there was never the slightest reason to believe that Cleese was angry, abusive, or authoritarian. In the Life Of Brian, as a Roman soldier, Cleese played up his role as a cruel, abusive enforcer of the whims of imperial Rome, but no one who watched the movie walked away from it thinking “I wonder why Cleese is in favor of Roman imperial rule?”

It seems that Cleese can still recognize a good joke, as he still retweets funny things on his Twitter feed. But it has been a long time since I remember he himself writing something original and funny on Twitter.

And now, at age 82, Cleese has joined forces with the far-right to go to war against “cancel culture” as if that is the great danger of the moment (rather than, say, the power oligarchs have to undermine Western democracy).

Asked how his show with GB News came about, Cleese told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I was approached and I didn’t know who they were … And then I met one or two of the [GB News] people concerned and had dinner with them, and I liked them very much. And what they said was: ‘People say it’s the rightwing channel – it’s a free speech channel.’”

The 82-year-old said he would not be offered such a show by the BBC: “The BBC have not come to me and said: ‘Would you like to have some one-hour shows?’ And if they did, I would say: ‘Not on your nelly!’ Because I wouldn’t get five minutes into the first show before I’d been cancelled or censored.”

Whatever might come from this show, what is certain is that millions of fans who venerate Cleese’s earlier work are going to be deeply disappointed with his new alliance with the far-right. And when he says “People say it’s the rightwing channel…” he seems to be implying that it is not a rightwing channel. But it is. So why is he working with them? Has he joined the rightwing?

But this is the new fashion: to spend a life building a reputation, then soak that reputation in gasoline and strike a match. Kanye. Musk. Trump. Rowling. Cleese.

(Krugman has done nothing to embarrass himself, I would simply say his thinking is not as innovative as it once was.)

Is Twitter to blame? I don’t know. I’ve noted before that almost all creative people suffer periods of burnout. We have certain stereotypes of burnout, which verge on depression: we have all had the friend who used to go out, but now they stay home, they sleep too much, they eat too much, they don’t get enough exercise.

Creative people get burned out. They want to write their next great book, but they no longer seem able to focus in the sustained way necessary to produce a book. Instead they post random thoughts on Twitter. Or they want to create a provocative album, but they find it easier to post provocative rants on Twitter.

Is Twitter to blame? I’d guess that Twitter is a bit like alcohol. When one’s life is going well, one might have a drink or two socially, but one doesn’t need alcohol. But when one is feeling burned out, then it becomes dangerously easy to start having a few too many drinks, and too often.