The Retweeting Class

Philosopher Timothy Morton has a move which I like: they talk about retweeting ideas to describe the ways in which we uncritically reproduce pre-existing position. What I like about it is that it is not about lack of originality or reusing existing ideas. It's of course fine to reuse ideas and there's nothing wrong in being unoriginal so long as we've made the effort to consider the matter. What retweeting ideas conveys is the unthinking ease — it's a one-click mental process — with which we just repeat something we've heard without really taking its structure, motivating origin, perspective, or consequences on board.

We all do it to some degree of course, but some people do it almost exclusively. For reasons that I will get to, it is the backbone of their epistemology and this has interesting consequences that I detail below. One thing that's notable is that the people who favour a worldview built exclusively of retweeted ideas is that they congregate. They prefer one another's company to the company of those (from any political side) with a stronger tendency to interrogate their own assumptions. We can think of them, essentially, as the Retweeting Class.

We all go about trying to achieve a variety of aims, and the way in which we do so is through activities. An activity can be said to be "coherent" when it is "well designed for the achievement of its aim, even though it cannot be expected to be successful in each and every instance."¹ Nothing Earth-shattering here — if you aim to meet someone in the northern part of town and you get on the northbound bus, that's a coherent activity. If you get on the southbound bus, let alone if you do nothing other than start baking a kiwi cobbler or belting out Céline Dion karaoke, then those are not activities coherent with the achievement of your aims. I know that this is basic stuff, but bear with me because there's an epistemology to it: we can see that "the empirical truth of a statement consists in the positive role it can play in facilitating operationally coherent activities" and something is real when "it can be employed in coherent activities that rely on its existence and its basic properties."¹ To stick to my metaphor, you would consider a bus map to be true if by following its directions you got to where you wanted to go. If what you're holding is the bus map to another city, then you're going to consider it wrong.

Most of us are trying to accomplish something concrete of one sort or another. If we fail not once but consistently, at some point we'll want to revisit our assumptions. If none of the readymade ideas seem to work, we'll go looking for novel ones, either by imagining them or by looking farther afield. Again, this is all rather evident even though getting it right matters, but it does lead to the question: how do people in the Retweeting Class just keep parroting unexamined ideas without ever being shaken awake by a reality check?

And the answer is: because none of them are interested in accomplishing anything of substance, their aims revolve entirely around being acceptable to one another. Their truth — which they are pursuing competently, even intelligently, as agents — is not about change but about propriety. Ideas, for them, are evaluated based on whether they are proper or not and people in that group succeed based on their ability to reheat one harmless, socially-acceptable idea after another. To reiterate: it's not that they're wrong, it's that the truth that emerges from their purpose is largely detached from any consequence that would be considered meaningful to the rest of us.

This is why those people (who I might think of as Ark B people) are just so weird. They exist in a simulacrum, trading vacuous signals of propriety with one another, unencumbered by meaning. You see them in action, they are politicians and pundits and thought leadership postulators. They have this in common that they admire and dispute each other's statements but they never, not once engage with a thought beyond considering its social acceptability. Pointing out incoherence is like talking through them: they don't see how to behave and usually simply don't answer. Their politics vary somewhat but all have in common that they never challenge any form of power since, by definition, all they do is retweet what the existing structures have already digested. Neither asperity nor friction has any access to their worldview.

This manifests like nowhere else on social media. They hate being blocked (or even just not amplified), let alone blocklists. Blocking someone implies to them people that they've somehow made improper statements, and that's simply insulting. They'll say it's because you're some kind of woke fundamentalist who can't survive outside of your bubble, but deep down they'll resent that you wouldn't recognise their excellence at retweeting established platitudes.

I feel that this might also explain something that's been bothering me. I've been puzzled at why people who mostly purport to respectable would insist that they must stay on a platform on a platform operated by an avowed Nazi and that has generated and published CSAM of victims of the tragic Crans-Montana fire. Even accounting for political differences, that's, to put things politely, not respectable. Surely, when twenty children die in a fire, nudifying their pictures and putting them on social media is on the wrong side of a moral red line for most of humankind? How can one explain this level of abject moral failure at such scale?

I believe that it's because, for these people, taking into account their epistemology, Nazism and CSAM aren't problems to be solved but rather just fodder to have reheated socially-acceptable takes about. That X is a trash fire is actually better for them since 1) the scandal puts X at the centre of the discourse universe and 2) it gives them occasion to trot out indignant yet unthreatening statements about values and caring for democracy, no matter how idiotic it may be to do that within that very space. CSAM is great, it's a vibrant topic to "won't anyone think of the children" about.

This relates directly to the evergreen claim that Bluesky is some sort of leftist bubble. I don't believe that that's correct. Ted Underwood captured my thinking very well when he said: "Everyone thinks about the left vs. right axis, but there is also, orthogonal to that, a go-with-the-crowd vs. stubborn prickly diva axis. The Bluesky / X sorting operated much more powerfully on the second of those two dimensions."

Conversations are made by those who show up. Bluesky's leaning isn't defined along the left-right axis indeed — it's the microblogging platform of choice for stubborn prickly divas like yours truly. The conservatives who are not crowd-followers can actually be found on Bluesky too. It may feel more left-coded because, population-wise, conservatives are structurally more likely to be followers so that sorting the Retweeting Class to X and the Stubborn Prickly Divas to Bluesky does create a left lean. But it's not caused by a left lean.

Overally, it's an effect of what different people use social media for. If you're primarily using it to discover and discuss new ideas (of any political orientation), you're not going to stay on X (Nazism and CSAM aside). On the contrary, if your comfort zone is replaying old takes, then you'll still be on X and find some excuse to explain away that you have no moral spine whatsoever — it's fine, the others like you are doing the same. In fact, if you look, there's still plenty of left-leaning people on X — they're just not the ones who've ever had an examined thought in their lives.

It's interesting to note that these are also the people most replaceable by LLMs, which at least some of them probably know. In effect, the Retweeting Class is the surface phenotype of cultural evolution — something that's very similar to an artefact that captures the statistical structure of a culture.

I may be overindexing, and I know this has been debated before, but I feel that this also explains some common behaviour relating to nuance and seriousness. Much of my professional life has been plagued by people who cannot tell the difference between "soft-spoken" and "nuanced." If someone steps on your toe, the soft-spoken response is "ow, please be careful" and the nuanced response is "ow, please be careful". If, however, someone is stabbing you in the face, the soft-spoken response remains "ow, please be careful" but the nuanced response is "stop stabbing me in the fucking face." For retweeters, the latter clearly cannot be serious and nuanced because it's obviously a disruptive statement that inimical to social propriety. If you start saying such things out loud, how are you even supposed to act if you meet that face-stabber at a dinner party?

Under this view, someone doing serious work — which is to say is performing seriousness — must have the full textural range of a kazoo and all the intellectual fire of a supermarket aftershave fragrance called Back To Back Meetings. This creates a feedback loop whereby the expectation is that sound research must sound bland, and colourful writing cannot possibly be serious. From this expectation you get a stream of entirely useless think tank publications to feed the retweeting machine with. That's the opposite of a world worth wanting. It's organised around inaction: the suburban lawn sign of the mind. All research is activism. Activism bound by the democratic rules that simultaneously make every position open to challenge and afford some degree of protection to established views from gratuitous attacks, but activism all the same. Chang again: "The core of realism as I see it is an activist ideal of inquiry, a commitment to seek more and better knowledge about realities, along with a commitment to improve our epistemic practices to that end." Then: "The 'activist' label accentuates a normative outlook, focused on an imperative of progress."¹

This commitment to seek more and better — which comes with a cost — is what seriousness is. But precisely because it is hard and costly on a personal level, and because we do it in a spirit of embodied, determined, relentless hope, then we must do it with furious joy.

Why does this matter? In part I just want to park a name for the phenomenon. That way, when I see something like the Make Europe Great Again people, a movement (if you can call it that) so tragically sad that their entire idea of European, uh, greatness is predicated on mimicking the gimmicks — gimmimicking? — of an American authoritarian movement, then instead of being baffled that anyone would choose to behave that way in public I can simply think "oh, they're just retweeting the hat." It doesn't make them any less pathetic, but it does make them coherently pathetic.

But it also matters because many of these people are in power (or have access to power) and understanding how they work (or rather why they fail to) is useful.

These are the same people, for the same reasons, who drive the catastrophic strategies to keep retweeting far right talking points in the hope of winning that electorate back. That's how they think! It's a boneheaded strategy and anyone with even the most superficial understanding of opinion dynamics knows just how spectacularly dumb a strategy it is: the more you activate your opponent's frames, the more you repeat their talking points, the more they win! But they only understand how to retweet things to exist in the opinion sphere, and so they constantly return to self-defeat like mindless robots.

It's also having an impact on geopolitics. As Nicolas Hénin and I recently explained in Le Monde (English translation), France is currently conducting some kind of information operation on X called French Response, the idea of which is basically to respond to propaganda by engaging with it in a spirited fashion. Europe is currently engaged in a hybrid conflict on two fronts; information ops matter. The idea is that it's possible to beat Elon Musk on X. (Read that again.) Such a strategy comes from the belief that X is some form of potentially fair "public square" and that engaging there is unaffected by the way in which recommendations shape the space in a very specific direction — and then that you can win at a retweeting war. The reality, of course, is that 1) Elon Musk decides what is and isn't seen, and can simply snap French Response out of relevance at any time and 2) all that this does is make the theatre in which these actions unfold — X — more relevant and therefore more useful to support Musk and other MAGA-aligned (as well as Russian) operations against European interests. If strategy is the art of creating power, this is a pro-MAGA strategy and French Response will be remembered as the Maginot Line of hybrid conflicts.

It matters because it's losing us a war.

Ultimately, the most powerful propaganda is not one that targets an entire population but rather one that aims for the Retweeting Class — as X has. They simultaneously have the greatest amplification factor, access to levers of power, and are largely impervious to critical thinking. What's more, when times become complex, when even they struggle to remain in the Retweeting Simulacrum without noticing that they have no connection to reality, these are the people who bring fascism to power. This is where the morbid symptoms appear, these are the people most afflicted with the pathology of command and control simply because complexity cannot be retweeted and only a strongman can promise a return to the safety of cookie cutters.

For the rest of us, we can know that there's no point in trying to convince the Retweeting Class. They don't react to the same epistemology that drives those who want to use their short time on Earth for something of substance. But, equally, they do not drive cultural evolution, only dampen it. The best way for us is to change the world, with joy, with the sword of compassion in one hand and the fury of hope in the other. And when we win and keep winning, when the new world has been born, then they'll have changed a little bit too: they'll be retweeting us.