I thought of Maxwell’s Demon when I reconsidered the “Star Wars” Le Creuset thing, and how obvious it was that no one involved was even particularly angry. It’s in episodes like this that Twitter manages to break the discursive law that, until recently, prevented random Australians from yelling at you when you tried to go to bed. In the real world, you can go 30 years without ever encountering the sensibilities of the “Star Wars” cookware community. But Twitter, if you tell it just right, can shoot them all through a small door at you, creating a massive heat without anyone intending to do much for it. This is perhaps Twitter’s central paradox: it can produce huge results without any meaningful input.
Coincidentally, I only know Maxwell’s Demon because it appears in Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49,” a 1966 novella about a clandestine communications network used by a bewildering group of people (anarcho-syndicalists, techies, assorted perverts, and lunatics) that seems especially popular in San Francisco. Instead of mailboxes, it operates through a system of containers disguised to look like garbage cans; the only one the protagonist finds is somewhere south of Market, just a stone’s throw from where Twitter would be born. It’s a book I read 20 years ago. Had I come upon it more recently, I doubt the mention of Maxwell would have stuck in my mind, thanks to normal aging or some irreversible damage I did to my brain by staring at Twitter.
But I’m glad I remembered, because what I read when I pulled my copy out of the closet was the best way of thinking about Twitter I’ve come across. In the novella, an East Bay inventor named John Nefastis has designed a box complete with two pistons attached to a crankshaft and a flywheel, which he claims contains the molecule-sorting demon. It can be used to provide unlimited free energy, but it only works if someone is sitting outside watching it. There was, Nefastis believed, a certain type of person, a “sensitive one,” able to communicate with the demon within as it collected its data on the billions of particles in the box—positions, vectors, levels of arousal. The sensitive could process all that information and tell the demon which piston to fire. Together, the demon and the sensitive would move the molecules back and forth, creating a perpetual motion machine. The box was a closed system, separated from the outside world, but still able to work on everything it was connected to.
Pynchon’s protagonist tries, but fails, to operate the Nefastis machine. But when I open Twitter, I see a lot of people who can talk to that demon; who can intuitively process the viewpoints and attitudes of unimaginable numbers of others; who know exactly what to tell the demon to get things moving; who are happy, or close enough, sit with the box for hours, watching the pumping pistons. Activists, politicians, journalists, comedians, snack brands and Stephen King – they’ve all had their turn. Union organizers, venture capitalists, graduate students and amateur historians – they could spin the flywheel. No one even has to do anything to make it move. But none of us have the power to stop it either. And at some point – before we really knew what we were doing – we hooked those pistons all over the place.
And while it seems unlikely that Twitter itself will go away, the powerful mechanism it has become over the years is – the mechanism that made an often unprofitable company so valuable in the first place; the one that allowed a collectively conjured illusion to transform the real world – seems to sputter and beep, and all the noise makes it difficult to communicate with the demon within. The platform could continue to operate in one form or another even as the mechanism slowly rusts or eventually comes to a stop. If that happened, the world would feel exactly the same – and utterly transformed. And I, and others, and maybe you too, would be struggling with what we’ve been doing all along, really: staring into a box, hoping to see it move.
Prop stylist: Ariana Salvato.
Willie Staley is a story editor for the magazine. He has written about the effort to count the nation’s billionaires, the TV show “The Sopranos,” writer and director Mike Judge, and professional skateboarder Tyshawn Jones. Jamie Chung is a photographer who has worked on nearly a dozen covers for the magazine. This year he won awards from American Photography and the Society of Publication Designers. Pablo Delcan is a designer and art director from Spain now based in Callicoon, NY. His work combines traditional and modern techniques with media such as illustration, print design and animation.
