Status Anxiety as a Service⁠↗

We are now in late-stage performative Twitter, where nearly every tweet is hungry as hell for favorites and retweets, and everyone is a trained pundit or comedian. It’s hot takes and cool proverbs all the way down.

Twitter creates the instantaneous illusion of social equality between influencers and normal people, but then it periodically reminds you that it’s an illusion.

That means that for most people, becoming a big account is simply out of reach; they need something else to keep them coming back to the app. For many, that thing is status anxiety. Twitter isn’t just Status as a Service — it’s Status Anxiety as a Service. StAaaS, if you will.

Thus, Twitter will continue to be the place where Americans go to scream at strangers — where status is conferred not just by little snippets of viral pseudo-wisdom, but by the ability to ridicule and attack those snippets. We should probably think long and hard about whether it’s a good idea to have our public discourse dominated and directed by a platform with that basic dynamic.