This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).

Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.

One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.