An Elegy To Snark

Every social media platform prizes something different. With Instagram, it’s aesthetics. On TikTok, it’s theatre-kid energy. And with Twitter, it was information and wit, conveyed via the written word.

Jonathan Goldsbie is very good at Twitter. But Twitter is no longer Twitter.

Every platform gradually withers — but since Elon Musk purchased it, the site’s ongoing transformation into the very worst version of itself has been by design.

So what’s a person like Goldsbie to do, when confronted with the prospect of terminal, destructive decline? What happens when X spots a mark?

Host: Jesse Brown  Credits: Jonathan Goldsbie (News Editor), Tristan Capacchione (Audio Editor and Technical Producer), Bruce Thorson (Senior Producer), Annette Ejiofor (Managing Editor), Karyn Pugliese (Editor-in-Chief)

Further reading: 

Social media for the media social club: the slightly bizarre, happy story of #goldsbiephone — Toronto Life (2011)‘It sucks, because I made zero dollars from it’: how I coined Big Dick Energy — The Guardian (2018)The Tweets Hereafter — Short Cuts (2022)Insult as Injury — The New York Times (2009)Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone — The New York Times (2024)

Additional music by Audio Network

Sponsors: AG1, Oxio, Squarespace

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