What a wild time it’s been on Twitter. My love, my life. My absolute favorite app. The place where, for the last decade, I have followed breaking news, watched an entire swath of the population explain unprompted why they don’t wash their legs, and learned that depression causes memory loss. A place that might, by all accounts, come crumbling down around us at any moment because the world’s richest man fired all the people who make the thing work.
Many blame Elon Musk for Twitter’s current state of chaos. Not me. (rip to ur grandma but im built different)
No, I know who’s really at fault: Liz Gateley and Adam Divello, who created MTV’s “Laguna Beach” and spinoff “The Hills.” Two shows that so fundamentally changed our pop culture and relationship to celebrity that they set off a chain of events that led to this inevitable conclusion: The richest man in the world buying a crucial part of its communications infrastructure for being mean and dangerous to him.
Let me explain.
“Laguna” did not invent the concept of coming into someone’s house to film mess and call it television. That honor belongs to “An American Family”, a 1973 series that turned seven months with the Louds (Bill and Pat Loud and their five children, two dogs, multiple cars, and swimming pool) into 12 hourlong episodes. The series was notable in two ways. One, for casting eldest son Lance, the first openly gay person on American television. Two, for showing the breakdown of the Louds’ marriage, culminating with a scene where Pat, who thought Bill was cheating on her — he was — asked him for a divorce. Like I said…mess.
No, “Laguna Beach” was different because of what it made its cast — and by extension, what it made us.
While the Louds did get recognized after their show aired, they were more subjects than stars. The series wrapped and for a long time, that was it. The first time American viewers returned to the Louds was for a 10-year retrospective special. Nor was there internet or social media for fans to keep up with the family on.
In contrast, the “Laguna” extended universe followed LC and Kristin and Audrina and Whitney for years. Over dozens of seasons and hundreds of episodes, people grew to identify with these women the way they identified with Carrie or Samantha or Joan or Maya.
At the same time, social media was becoming ubiquitous. As TV was making stars of people who were filming their lives, social media gave them the means to monetize everything they were doing off-camera too. By the time “The Hills” aired its now-legendary 2010 finale — which showed a purported breakup only to zoom out and reveal that the whole thing was being shot on a Hollywood lot — the reality-star-to-celebrity pipeline was firmly in place.
Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise and E!’s “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” refined the business of being an influencer, providing a path to fame for anyone white, wealthy, or connected enough to be cast on television. Social media removed some of these barriers to celebrity — you no longer need your own broadcast show, just a dedicated audience — but reinforced others. While genuine talent has broken out on every single platform, time and time again we’ve seen algorithms favor the white and affluent who merely copy others’ work, hindering growth for anyone who isn’t. For every Quinta Brunson, we suffer dozens of Addison Raes.
In a world like this, it’s easy to buy your way to the top. If you can parlay video tours of your parents’ 12-bedroom mansion into home-good sponsorships — and if you flip that into content you can run ads on, bring in more advertisers, create a product line — then you have literally created something out of nothing. Such is the desire to hustle one’s way into this kind of fame that it’s common for influencers to rent private jets by the hour to shoot content. Luxury is no longer a life goal — it’s the price of celebrity.
Twitter, for all its faults, has never succumbed to the forces of the influencer market. It’s a platform where hard currency has no currency. Yes, it’s also full of weird nerds who unite to defend a guy who literally wouldn’t care if they died in front of him, but the Twitter elite aren’t multimillionaires or society girls. They’re randoms from all corners of the universe united by one thing and one thing only — their ability to post. It’s the one place where the poorest in the world can call the richest people stupid to their face. Where we’ve gotten to see, in breathtaking detail, how thin-skinned and desperate for adoration these masters of the universe really are.
And it’s also an organizing ground. A crucial piece of the world’s communications infrastructure. Twitter connects people unable to command attention alone but who are unstoppable together. It launched the careers of countless writers, comedians, musicians, artists, thinkers. Creators of all kinds.
It shows us every day that brilliance has very little to do with money, education, or prestige. Everything to do with a sharp mind, a quick wit, and an interesting perspective. In short, all the things money can’t buy.
Of course, that’s exactly why Elon bought it. In a society where almost everything is for sale, it infuriates a man like him to know that our affection is not. That the influence this platform wields is beyond even his grasp. Despite all his sweaty, gasping attempts to be cool, Elon knows that we’re laughing with him, not at him. Knows that the road to his ruin was in no small part started by enough people tweeting about how incompetent, and mediocre, and ordinary he is. How ordinary all men like him are.
Yes, our laughter burns him up inside. And also — the journalists and scholars and thinkers who connected the dots for us every day on this app, pose a greater threat to Musk and his ilk than almost any other group of people in the world. We know it. They know it. And so here we are.
Who knows whether Twitter survives this? Given that it’s rumored to have only 238 employees left, my hopes are not exactly high. I desperately hope it will. For all the Nazis, and foreign psyops, and reply guys, Twitter remains my favorite online space, the only place to be if you are a person who loves words and being mean with equal zeal. I will be shitposting there until the bitter end at @lesliezye because I’m not giving up that easily, and neither should you. And if it all comes crashing down, know this: We have only LC to blame.
Such an insightful and beautiful analysis….
Piercing analysis! And witty. Plenty of beautiful insights on pop culture and social media, and even into an idealistic wonderland.
Good post. I learn something totally new and challenging on blogs I stumbleupon on a daily basis. Its always useful to read content from other authors and practice something from their websites.