So, Why Were All The Ex FBI Agents At Twitter?

Every indication I've seen from the whole Twitter saga is that the company was some sort of hybrid between a boondoggle and a bubble. Its product isn't something easily explainable; it started with a 140 character limit that was raised to 280, which simply privileged the inarticulate and turned the whole exercise into something between a video game and Scrabble. It wasn't useful as a communications tool, because it left little room for any capable rhetoric and none at all for exposition or argument.

So we have the question, "Why was Twitter filled with retired FBI guys?" The piece tries to answser,

Twitter, as a company whose product is social influence more than software or stuff, has less money to throw around, but they have something that is perhaps even more valuable to the Elite™: it is a chokepoint through which most information flows, and hence is a place where The Narrative™ is fleshed out.

Their protection money, so to speak, was handing over at least partial control to the powers-that-be of the information flow.

That’s why, over the past few years, Twitter has become a home-away-from-home for FBI retirees.

. . . Twitter had little money to give, but they could offer sinecures for clients of the powerful, and the ability to control the flow of information. And that is what they did.

Tiny slices of language at 140 or 280 characters per post are information? I can get more information from a skin cream commercial. Our cat conveys more information by mewing and tilting his head. Twitter is not much more than a certain kind of noise. We might get a little farther if we allow that the retired FBI guys were in sinecures, "a position requiring little or no work", but that's just another way of saying they weren't doing anything, and that conflicts with the assertion that they were controlling the information flow.

So the retired FBI agents were pretending to control something that a certain class of consumers chose to call "information". In the most critical case at hand, they sought to limit a certain level of superficial noise over Hunter Biden's laptop. Now, I simply don't understand how you can explain "Hunter Biden's laptop" in 280 characters. At best, you can post a link to a story that gives an outline of the case in maybe 2000 words. Twitter is thought to have controlled the case by banning the New York Post, but how did that stop Hunter Biden from becoming a meme? I, or indeed anyone, can post the photo at right, and a huge segment of the population will not only recognize it as the First Cokehead, but will chuckle yet once more at the whole narrative. How did all those retired FBI agents stop a single thing?

I think the answer is that Twitter did little to control the Hunter laptop story, and the biggest beneficiary of Twitter banning the New York Post was the Post itself, as its own headlines reflect. They used to sell books by saying they were banned in Boston, after all.

I think the main issue with Twitter is that it was somehow able to convince a lot of people, certainly much of David Brooks's New American Upper Class, who could flatter themselves with blue checkmarks, that influential people hung out there. And a bunch of Inspector Clouseau wannabes from the FBI convinced people at Twitter that they needed to be put in do-nothng jobs that allegedly "controlled information" from people who convinced themselves and their peers that they had important things to say. In 240 characters.

And Elon Musk decided he was gonna fix this, and a lot of influencers didn't want him to. And in the process, a whole bubble is bursting. So far, we've been mostly getting information about Elon Musk's actual business judgment. But how did Twitter manage to convince anyone that it mattered in the first place?