I thought of Maxwell’s Demon when I thought about the “Star Wars” Le Creuset thing, and how clear it was that nobody involved in it was even particularly angry. In episodes like this one, Twitter manages to break the discursive law that until recently prevented random Australians from yelling at you when you’re trying to get to bed. In the real world, over 30 years can go by without ever encountering the sensibilities of the Star Wars cookware community. But if you get it right, Twitter can shoot every single one of them at you through a small door, creating extreme heat without anyone trying to do anything about it. This is perhaps Twitter’s central paradox: It can produce tremendous results without meaningful input.
I only know of Maxwell’s Demon because he appears in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, a 1966 novella that focuses on a secret communications network used by a bewildering cast of people (anarcho-syndicalists, techies, various… perverts and weirdos) and seems to be particularly popular in San Francisco. Instead of mailboxes, it works through a system of containers that look like trash cans; The only one the protagonist finds is somewhere south of Market, just a few blocks from the birthplace of Twitter. It’s a book I read 20 years ago. If it had only recently occurred to me, the mention of Maxwell probably wouldn’t have stuck in my mind, either due to normal aging or irreversible damage I’ve done to my brain by staring at Twitter.
But I’m glad I remembered it, because what I read when I pulled my copy off the shelf was the best way to think about Twitter I’ve come across. In the novelization, an East Bay inventor named John Nefastis has designed a box, complete with two pistons attached to a crankshaft and flywheel, which he claims contains the molecule-sorting demon. It can be used to provide unlimited free energy, but it won’t work unless someone sits outside and looks at it. Nefastis believed there was a certain type of person, a “Sensitive” who was able to communicate with the demon within as it collected its data on the billions of particles in the box – locations, vectors, arousal levels . The sensitive could process all this 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, separate from the outside world, but it could still work on anything it was connected to.
Pynchon’s protagonist tries and fails to operate the Nefastis machine. But when I open Twitter I see many people who can talk to this demon; who can intuitively process the positions and attitudes of unimaginably many others; who know exactly what to tell the demon to set things in motion; who are lucky or close enough to spend hours sitting with the box and watching the pistons pump. Activists, politicians, journalists, comedians, snack food brands and Stephen King all had their turn at the box. Union organizers, venture capitalists, graduate students and amateur historians—they could spin the flywheel. Nobody even has to do much of anything to move it. But none of us have the power to stop it. And at some point – back before we really knew what we were doing – we plugged these pistons all over the place.
And while it seems unlikely that Twitter itself will disappear, the powerful mechanism it has become over the years is – the one that made an often unprofitable business so valuable in the first place; the one that enabled a collectively conjured illusion to alter the real world – seems to stutter and squeak, and all the noise makes it hard to communicate with the demon inside him. The platform could continue to operate in some form even if the mechanism slowly rusts or eventually stalls. When that happens, the world would feel the same—and completely different. And I and others, and maybe you too, would have to deal with what we’ve actually been doing all along: staring into a box and hoping it moves.
Prop Stylist: Ariana Salvato.
Willy Staley is a story editor for the magazine. He has written about efforts to count the country’s billionaires, the TV show The Sopranos, writer-director Mike Judge, and professional skateboarder Tyshawn Jones. Jamie Chung is a photographer who has worked on nearly a dozen covers for the magazine. He won awards from American Photography and the Society of Publication Designers this year. Pablo Delcan is a Designer and Art Director from Spain now residing in Callicoon, NY. His work blends traditional and modern techniques across mediums such as illustration, print design and animation.
