I Was Going to Attempt a Threadbare Pun In This Title, But Fuck It... Threads Is Stupid

Are we this desperate to clown on Elon?

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The boggy summer density is all around, hazy and hot, and there is a pool swelling with activity, but it has a strange and queasy buoyancy. It is tempting to plunge in and wade in the fragrant chlorine water, a brief reprieve from thick and forbidding heat. Everyone mingling inside insists, “The water’s fine,” and a balmy wave splashes up from the perimeter and soaks my feet. This water feels lukewarm at best. A few loose Band-Aids float around like flotsam while an undiscernible brown object has sunk to the bottom—it is unclear whether this is a disintegrating Baby Ruth or an ill-timed grumpy. There’s a guy wearing a Pizza Hut bucket hat engaged in a polished, almost focus group-tested, conversation with another guy in a Taco Bell tank top, and it’s about the state of race relations in America. I hear When we get out of the pool, we will commence the meat smokin’ from a pasty nullity who looks like if someone tried to make an android out of Dave Portnoy. The point of contact between the heavy atmosphere and the actual substance of the pool collapses under the cacophony of orchestral cheers. I back away from the staggering hideousness, gasping and rattled.

It does not augur well when a culture’s idea of dunking on a billionaire is to abandon his social media platform and thirstily defect to its pale facsimile, especially when it is controlled by another billionaire whose own social media platforms have been a malignant metastatic force that has made the world infinitely dumber and uglier. Threads surpassed 100 million sign-ups in five days; it took Twitter five years to rack up similar numbers. It doesn’t help that Elon Musk has long been one of the thirstiest, corniest, most tiresome posters on Twitter, which is saying quite a bit, but it also makes him the worst possible person to own the site.

What has been most vexing about Musk’s erratic mismanagement of Twitter is that he has forsaken its appeal by attempting to bring an inherently messy site to heel. His desire to be epic has played out as a complete degradation of his savior-of-humanity brand for the public to gawk at his idle viciousness and proud petty cretinousness. He sought out a population of blowhard grand inquisitors and armchair genocidaires to engage in overwrought clapter at his manifestly dire troll-scented posts. As a result, Twitter is further devolving into a pay-to-play racket that elevates fascist-curious supplicants and inexplicably self-assured life-coach hustlers and other various hangers-on all talking over each other to promote their various business gambits and themselves.

In the strained and aggravated strangeness of this moment, the appeal of Threads is more ideological and aspirational than it is practical. Cheering on the continued concentration of social media ownership under Meta is jarring enough. But Facebook’s irredeemably borked newsfeed exists to fart out the dispiriting opinions of random high school classmates and turn your boomer relatives into lonesome and loathsome conspiratorial shut-ins. Meanwhile, Instagram is an unusable shipwreck with oppressive and faceless algorithms that will shove variously viral idiocies and redundant TikToks and gimmicky advertisements in your face just on pure anti-human principle. I have no reason to believe that Threads won’t descend down a similar trajectory of entropic enshittification. UX defects aside, Mark Zuckerberg has been criminally indifferent at best and actively complicit at worst in abetting electoral interference and a lavish misuse of personal data, as well as the spread of dangerous medical misinformation and genocidal rhetoric. The protracted and pyrotechnically cringy appraisal for Threads speaks to what feels like a more poignant imaginative deficit. This is the Xbox vs. PlayStation debate, but far dumber.

I’ve never understood the popularity of Twitter—it has long been a vacuous corporate dumping ground. It is also the singular gathering point for the terminally online and performative individuals who wish to communicate in shallow blurbs while embracing a stunted form of humor derived from the cultural remnants of something awful.⁠ The absolute oversaturation of current social media has sparked a surging nostalgia for the late-aughts/early-2010s halcyon days when Twitter was a quaint repository of quirky and banal observations. Or, as Big Tech circles the drain, there is also a yearning for the death of this iteration of social media so it can make way for something more refined and idealistic.

It is unclear what people even want in a Twitter successor. All these bargain bin competitors are essentially angling to isolate and appeal to a specific type of disillusioned Twitter obsessive. There are some who could be attracted to the decentralized, “federated” network of interconnected servers that Mastodon offers. Others may simply crave a less toxic place to post, a congenial environment full of niceties and sensitive souls, like what Bluesky promises. The keep up and talk with your friends crowd, I guess, might tolerate the bombardment of companies and celebrities hocking whatever it is they’re selling, because Threads appears to just be Brand Twitter. The circa-now Twitter is shedding these demographics—the relentlessly upbeat and self-righteous cheeseballs who want to post neo-Upworthy screeds in the vein of Jim Halpert’s “What kind of bear is best?” as well as the sterile advertisers who are similarly alienated from all the ascendant Nazi bile.

Twitter offered a shallow patina of proximity to power and influence, and its appeal was boosted by journalists and media figures who hyped it as a vital hub for conversation because tweeting constantly elevated their own professional careers. To the extent that Twitter was ever our “digital town square,” it mostly served as an idiocracy terrordome that degraded politics and entertainment into a totalizing, exhausting, and utterly bonkers culture war. I don’t know how anyone can invest so much time and meaning into a site full of snarky weirdos and recursive mile-high pile-ons and not come away a more anxious and irritable person for it.

Despite Elon’s jeering threats and his intensifying and frankly assaultive $8/month squeeze, Twitter will likely remain a load-bearing part of the media ecosystem for the foreseeable future. Even as a petty fail-tyrant and his brutish density soils what little dignity is left on this hellsite, Threads doesn’t seem like it will “kill” Twitter as much as it will reduce its user base to a narrower range of personalities and interests. The cheap knockoffs can never match Twitter’s full complement of possibilities without directly aping off it. Threads is a reaction, a broken-off shard; by definition, it will miss some element of Twitter. Zuck just hit Control-C Control-V Match Destination Formatting, and it inspired The Onion headline, “Elon Musk Sues Mark Zuckerberg For Being Better At Profiting Off Someone Else’s Idea.” There is no escaping Twitter because it is a vessel that cannot be shattered without releasing haunted spirits that will destroy the Republic. This psychic energy has to be channeled through some crystal, even if it is inhospitable and brutally indifferent to anyone who comes into contact with it.

Maybe there’s a part of all of us that’s addicted to our boredom and hankering for content slop, no matter how extractive, joyless, and dull the whole experience is. These deranged Twitter psychos just want to press their thumbs down into their enemy’s eye sockets and keep pushing and pushing until their eyeballs burst like grapes. As an inveterate shitposter, I am hardly above any of this, but Twitter gives me too much nausea and dread to ever go full hog on the online culture war kerfuffle. It’s unfortunate that social media is lorded over by amoral and shameless Dr. Manhattan-types, because maybe there is a parallel universe where these platforms are free from the tidal pull of the marketplace and they serve as genuinely useful mechanisms for community and connectivity. Instead, in this universe, I will wait for Keanu Reeves to create a social media app; and once you install it, he shows up at your front door, throws your phone in a lake, and then gives you a hug and a cup of tea.

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