I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public infrastructure.
Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is depended upon by many.
As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.)
Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.
I see this argument all the time and it has never made any sense to me. Do you honestly consider Twitter to have the same level of utility, ubiquity, and necessity as things like running water, electricity, sewage, roads, etc?
Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity:
The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2]
If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility.
My main issue with Twitter is it grew out of the weird environment that is San Francisco and has all the baggage of people who live within that. That wouldn't be a problem if the service was a normal startup, but it's a platform for influencing public opinion that delves into journalism and politics. For that reason, I wouldn't want it to be considered a public service, never mind one that serves the world.
Hell, I would be actively happy. I really don't like the impact Twitter has had on journalism and on outrage culture. It's too short to be intellectual and seems to encourage the "2 minutes of hate."
I have to second that. Twitter really does provide negative societal value, given that it's almost perfectly designed to drive outrage storms and incoherent, ingroup-pleasing snark in place of journalism. If Twitter suddenly vanished tomorrow, the quality of public debate in the United States would skyrocket.
As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.)
Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.