There’s a temptation, if you are, or were, a Twitter user (and perhaps, even if you aren’t since we all must comment on everything, everywhere all the time now) to have an opinion about that platform and its current state.

For some, it’s a tale of paradise lost, of all yesterday’s parasocial parties, ruined by the jarring arrival of an off-putting, racist weirdo who, while lacking nearly all social skills, demands everyone’s attention. For others, there’s a deeper sense of impending loss; of online communities that were built against the odds and against the objections of a hostile world. And so, we have the agonies and ecstasies of Black Twitter and Philosophy Twitter and Literary Twitter and Trans Twitter and a universe of other groupings which came together (while also remaining open to other communities) as it all seems to be burning down.

Of course, I have my own Twitter story to tell which involves gaining some small degree of notice for my efforts dissecting the tech industry’s dangerous fantasies from a materialist, and indeed, Marxist perspective. For me, however, the larger concern, or really, observation, is that all of it – the good, the bad and the ugly of Twitter was built, like so many modern beliefs, upon a foundation of unreality.

What do I mean by unreality, what am I driving at? Here, we must take a detour to the past, borrowing a moment from Edward Gibbon´s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (1782):

“To resume, in a few words, the system of the Imperial government; as it was instituted by Augustus, and maintained by those princes who understood their own interest and that of the people, it may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.”

This fascinates me – the use of democratic forms to obscure tyranny; an “absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth.” When I think of the tech industry which, until very, very recently, was almost universally hailed as a sun kissed road to ‘The Future’, that vaguely defined territory, always just over the horizon, this potent phrase comes to mind.

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When Elon Musk took command of Twitter, arriving at the company’s San Francisco office carrying a sink in a typically poor attempt at humor, we recoiled in keyboard-conveyed horror, waiting for the bad times to come. We all know what happened next: the mass firings of key people in moderation, compliance, software and data center infrastructure, and also, anyone who knows what to do with a bathroom fixture. This sort of anti-worker action, common in most other sectors (though not always quite so haphazardly) came as a shock to those in, and observers of, that shiny Mordor, the tech sector’s Silicon Valley heartland (particularly those who forgot, or weren’t around for the dot com crash of 2000).

As Musk smashed his way through a complex system and tweeted like the synthesis of an angrily divorced uncle and a 14 year old manifesto writer, revealing in near real time his unsuitability for the role of CEO (or even to lead a bake sale) some of us thought: if only another, more competent and nicer person took the reigns; if only the terrible billionaire with his Saudi funders and sweaty style of presentation, could be replaced by that most hallowed of modern types, a professional, a good CEO who cared about Twitter as a ‘town square.’

Given the severe limitations of our barbarous era, a time in which we’re told that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it’s not surprising that our most commonly proposed solution to the problem of bad, even destructive management of a social media platform is its replacement by good management – still within the framework of privately owned companies – that is, a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem.

At the heart of the Musk problem (and the Dorsey problem before it, and the Google problem, and on and on) is the reality these platforms are not subject to democratic control and not answerable – except in a crude market feedback sense – to the needs of the people using them. We cry out for a better CEO, a better billionaire because the actual solution, that these platforms not be private at all but public utilities we control as citizens, not as consumers, has been purged from our minds as a possibility, let alone a goal (we’ll talk about Mastodon another time).

We have been trained, to borrow once again from Gibbon, to accept “absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth”. The ‘commonwealth’ disguise in this case, being the idea of a tech industry which, alone amongst capitalist sectors, somehow has our best interest at heart because… well, one isn’t sure; perhaps all the nice words about inclusion, expensive t-shirts, and California sunshine, shining down on the forgotten bones of the murdered indigenous population, oil rigs and hidden industrial waste.