The Trolls and Tolls of Burning Bridges
As a general matter of prudence (and income preservation), I make it a point to never discuss my employer here. As a general matter of decency, I try to avoid previous employers as well, at least in a manner that is overly critical.
Sigh. I’m only human. As a former Tweep of nearly five years, who was on that roller coaster from the pre-IPO highs to post-IPO lows, and put in the hard work to pull the company out of that gutter: Oof. Big oof.
It’s tempting to hinge the current state of Twitter on Elon Musk because making it about him is exactly why he purchased the platform, and has since spent an inordinate amount of his highly market-priced time fixating on it. Elon is merely the latest symptom in what is a greater disease to the health of Twitter that is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey’s pseudo-shamanistic intellectualization, lack of vision, and part-time brand of leadership stifled any potential for innovation while coddling his teams into loving him and his company to an extent that was far beyond normal or healthy, leaving them (right or wrong) all the more betrayed when he finally mustered the vigor to do something: Gleefully throwing them under the bus. His singular solution to his near decade-long lame-duck tenure was to blame those he left in place, and outsource what he should have personally accomplished to perhaps the dumbest and most reckless option on the planet.
Enter Elon: A man who’s fame and reputation is seemingly outpacing his abilities and, on the back of his expired meme-fueled bluster, has put himself in what is possibly the most public way to have your whole ass exposed to the world. Of the many terrifying and interesting aspects coming out of this weeks-long exposé in ass-exposing, the alleged revelations around platform censorship had all the legitimacy and impact of the similarly motivated “Kraken” (aside from the ongoing theme of “absolutely screwing wage workers at the behest of very rich people”) whereas witnessing someone speed running an education in the digital marketing world has set the stage for the only actually productive and revealing conversation to be had.
From the very divorced man energy of his bedside table featuring a replica pistol from Deus Ex (without, it would seem, the level of self-awareness required to understand that he is literally the villain of the series) to his universally derided Elden Ring build, Elon has always existing within the orbit of the gaming world. Despite what is by all appearances a fairly healthy level of engagement with the medium, he seemingly managed to miss one of the bigger throw-downs in the business of gaming entirely.
Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, is one of the few folks in tech who had the gumption to go head-to-head with Apple on the basis of the tolls Apple imposes for applications on their platform. Those that were paying attention know it hasn’t quite gone the way that Sweeney would like, and yet this very public debate with very high stakes was not really in the consideration space of a man who spent $44B on a platform whose success is almost entirely decided by the likes of Apple and Google, despite his first instinct being pretty much perfectly aligned with Sweeney.
Were I to be generous, I’d admit that a shockingly small number of folks have a good handle on the business of gaming, and app platform policies might be a bit esoteric for the general population. That said, we’re not really lacking instructive examples of this problem in tech as recent as this past year, which also resulted in wealth erosion for a billionaire (any of this feeling close to home, Elon? No? OK.).
Much in the same way that I’ll argue that the state of Twitter is not due to its current and very visible figurehead, the same can be said for the plight of Meta: It’s not Zuck and his ambitions for the metaverse which has pushed the company into a nose-dive, it is Apple. More specifically, a change that rocked the more generalized digital marketing world managed to knee-cap their biggest source of revenue, and resurfaced a very legitimate fear that had been at the forefront of company strategy since my own tenure at (then) Facebook nearly a decade ago: Those that own the bridges for the consumer experience will ultimately own the totality of the consumer experience.
The seemingly unreasonable levels of investment, specifically into hardware divisions in lieu of fortifying and extracting what potential blood remains in the stone of their advertising model, is the basic rationale for all of the decisions at Meta as of late. While metaverse ambitions have been the source of much ridicule, the metaverse isn’t the entire point for Meta: It’s both having a stake in this potential future consumer experience and having a hand in who controls the walls, gates, and bridges around it. This is a continuation of a long history of leaning on hardware development to break free of these perilous relationships: The infamous “Facebook Phone” was built as a defense against then-overt hostilities from Google, years before it was revealed that Apple would be their actual hangman. Elon’s immediate reaction to potentially launch a phone of his own is deeply ironic in this way, yet not entirely misguided.
In short, the brief history of digital content has been shaped by the ongoing push-and-pull between creators and platforms. Before taking on Apple, Sweeney’s most visible pushback against platform fees yielded one of the few legitimate competitors to ubiquitous PC gaming platform Steam after he decided that the tolls imposed on creators by Valve (the developers of Steam) were too high. Twitch finds itself unable to pin down the right balance with their creators, which may eventually reach existential levels of crisis. I’ve long argued that understanding the future of technology is best done with two eyes on gaming, and much of the precedent for gatekeeping digital content can be found in gaming precisely because the earliest innovations in the distribution of digital content also came from the gaming world. Even the very App Store policies in contention were largely created in reference to the mobile gaming world, which represented the majority of App Store revenue until fairly recently.
The compelling arguments for blockchain-based gaming or metaverse experiences are squarely pointed at these problems, though few as of yet have managed to get around the unshakable allure of quick financial gains to make good on this promise. The result, as I’ve argued beyond these pages, is a metaverse that is shaping up to be much more like Web2.0 than Web3.0. I can indulge in a minor rant on Twitter not only because of its adjacency to looming issues within gaming, but the fact that it speaks to a broader problem in change management within technological evolution: The assumption that those who built the systems that existed before did so without good reason. The gap left by lacking the context in which decisions were made is often filled with naive arrogance.
Sometimes, a little context goes a long way. When I speak or write about gaming I tend to do so within a historical framework, and it is why I believe that any meaningful conversation about the metaverse (if not most future-ranging technologies) must begin within gaming, as it represents a very human way that we orient ourselves towards technology. Platforms are given license to extract tolls from creators because they are solving a need for consumers (convenience, etc.), something which cannot be undone simply by the application of trolling or “hardcore engineering.” Per usual, the best methods for breaking a technological problem are humanistic solutions.