It’s Me. Hi. I’m the Pope(s), It’s Me

Would the Real Pope (Verified) Please Stand Up?

“Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning. How could one not wish for that with all one's heart? How could one not lend one's feeble resources to bringing it about?”

-       Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

I have a confession to make. Yesterday morning, I fathered several Popes.

I’m talking about this tweet, which perhaps you’ve seen. It featured this screenshot:

For the record, I didn’t set up any “Twitter Blue” accounts or pay Elon Musk a cent to do this; I just used a Reply Chain Generator. The whole thing took about ten minutes, most of which I spent reliving memories of Jesuit High School and trying to get the avatar images right. As of this morning, it’s gotten more than two million “impressions,” whatever that means, and has been included in roundups of the chaos caused by “fake verified accounts” in the Guardian, Gizmodo, The Washington Post, and a bunch of other places

I’ll keep this brief, since meta-discourse about Twitter can get tedious and self-important real fast. That tendency should be unsurprising, given that the entire platform is basically a giant machine for tapping the human capacities for narcissism, paranoia, projection, projective identification, loneliness, and insecurity. And so, quickly, and just for the record:

Why Did I Do This?

It was a joke about what the landscape of pay-to-play verified accounts might look like. It was, in other words, a joke about hoaxes that, ironically enough, became a hoax in its own right.

(Twitter Reply Guy Voice) And You’re Surprised By That?

Weirdly, yes. To be honest, I thought the joke’s status as a joke was pretty obvious. To be clear, I didn’t think anybody would recall my putting the premise out there a few days ago, or even that they might connect it to a proof-of-concept tweet I had posted the night before. Hell, I don’t even remember most of the things I post even minutes after I hit the Tweet button, and the expectation that someone else could or should would be silly. Part of the fun of this kind of posting is tossing something half-baked, half-assed, and entirely meaningless into the endless torrent of chatter and then getting a chuckle if you chance to see it float to the surface downstream. Like playing Pooh Sticks over a whitewater cataract, or shitting in the River Lethe. This proved to be a bit more than that.

Does This Have Any Meaning?

No, but also Yes.

No, insofar as, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s long-suffering Titus Andronicus, it’s negligible when a fool adds a bucket of water to the sea, or tosses kindling atop bright-burning Troy. And actual hoaxers, rather than the unintentional kind (IE, me), are already doing far funnier, more provocative, and hopefully more damaging stuff with $8 Twitter Blue burner accounts (fuck you, Eli Lilly).

But also: Yes, insofar as it probably should raise some red flags when a large contingent of people, including some legacy-verified journalists, apparently think a dubious screenshot means that a squad of newly-verified pranksters became such effective fishers of men they catfished His Holiness himself (a quick check of the actual @pontifex account would correct this error). But what really strikes me in this moment are the generally accelerated feelings of confusion, sadness, rage, and nihilism on a website that was already all about toggling between those affects as fast as possible. If they’re not walking away or rubbernecking, people are still trying to navigate a strange landscape where the map is a funhouse mirror of the territory and you can now pay $8 to change landmarks on the fly. It sucks, and it’s clearly something we don’t have the capacity to do well.

Sure, Twitter was a broken, messy, flawed, and sorry excuse for a public square that was never even really a public square in the first place. But this very fact underscores the queasy, undecidable odor of desperation and bewilderment that suffuses everything that’s going on there right now. Just because something was shitty to begin with doesn’t mean it can’t get still shittier. And contra the old saw, tragedy doesn’t linearly give way to farce; instead, the two states can rapidly cycle back and forth, piling bathos atop pathos and pathos atop bathos such that you can never really be sure which is which and what comes next.

And in fact, if there’s any lesson of these decades after history was supposed to end yet stubbornly refused to die, institutions and ideologies can still stumble along, zombie-like, regressing and progressing with a special kind of stupid, eldritch horror. They can’t go on, but will go on, remaining objects of disproportionate expectation and disappointment from exhausted and harried people who can’t imagine – or don’t want to imagine – alternatives, and furnishing opportunities for monetization by apex predator assholes who will hollow out anything and sell what’s left for parts and a few moments of cheap glee. That those ultra-successful predators can themselves be zombie-like, titanically maladroit, fundamentally miserable, and hollow parodies of themselves follows neatly.

Anyway, that’s my confession. For my penance I’m writing something longer, about Jeff Bezos, the Koch Brothers, their fixation on how and where The Little People shit, and, yes, everybody’s favorite techgrifter edgelord thinkovator memeguru bullshit failposter.

Coming soon: Anal Sadism Goes to Mars. Prepare to get Freudpilled.