On successor states and websites

This month, like everyone online, I have been watching with a mixture of chagrin and schaudenfruede as platform capitalism digs itself into ever more complex and narrow burrows. By this I mean it’s really funny how a bunch of very rich dudes are breaking stuff online and making worse versions of existing products in response to said breakage. Obviously it is quite amusing to be shown how stupid rich people are, and I very much enjoy it. However, it is also useful for my purposes as a medieval historian in that it serves as a really excellent way of explaining to people what happened in the early medieval period.

I know I have told you all this roughly a million times by now, but we define the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe as happening with the deposition of the Western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476. I, like most medieval historians, don’t really subscribe to the theory of the “fall” of Rome. There’s a number of reasons for this, from the fact that Eastern Rome very much was still a thing, and would be for another thousand years or so over in Constantinople, for one thing. For another, people didn’t really see it as necessarily a “fall” at the time and that’s just something that we impose with the benefit of hindsight.

However, we can all agree that there was at one point a structure called Rome and in the fifth century it had been ticking along quite nicely for quite some time. This isn’t to say that there weren’t different stages to that. There was that cute lil’ time when they did a republic for rich guys, remember? That was neat. And then something something very powerful men took over and you have Emperors. OK cool, it’s not like there was a real equitable democracy going on or something, so fine I guess. This isn’t also to say that it was a particularly nice place. Yes it was absolutely kept afloat on the back of enslavement and required ongoing warfare to conquer new lands and enslave new peoples, and also grab whatever resources it could. There was religious superstition that kept things like human dissection from happening thus thwarting medical progress. There was rather a lot of feeding Christians to the lions or sending them down the mines until everyone became Christians. But there was also bread and circuses and some pretty cool buildings in the imperial core if not necessarily everywhere else. Um amphorae came from Tunisia! Things of this nature! So yeah, you know, Rome.

Imagine for the purposes of this little experiment that Rome in this case is everyone’s least favourite website – Twitter. Twitter has been through more than a few iterations in its lifetime. It was born as a theoretical micro-blogging site, and became eventually the place where people who write stuff hang out. It didn’t have the numbers of Facebook, but basically anyone who wrote for a living was over there, mostly because there is something wrong with us. This included a lot of journalists, who did a good line in convincing everyone that it was OK to hang out on there as you could take the national temperature or something – like an on-going vox pop. As a result of this, it then began to pick up a lot of people who had something to promote. This was, of course, more writers, but also people who had podcasts, or wanted to be personal trainers, or influencers, things of this nature. It also included politicians for the same theoretical vox pop reasons. So there everyone was, hanging out in a particular environment.

Now there were problems of course. Rather too many nazis were around the joint (in that there were any at all). Dudes would just show you their junk sometimes. People got in fights with each other because someone would tweet that they liked pizza and then someone would demand to know why they hated pasta. Stuff like that. It was however, a workable and recognisable whole, much as Rome was.

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Speaking of Rome, and to extend this metaphor further – by by the time it sorta petered out, so to speak, there were some issues. See a lot of people from Germanic tribes often wanted to join Rome. Rome was like, nah friends, I am afraid that you are simply not in a toga and you have braided hair and are therefore exempt from joining the club. This led to rather a lot of fighting, largely because the Germanic people felt like since they had been doing stuff like serving in Roman armies and what have you, it was sorta churlish for Rome to play these kinds of games. Did you want Germanic people there or not? Meanwhile the Roman leaders were fighting with each other half the time, with Constantinople dipping in and out of the beef when it suited them. Anyway, eventually there was one Germanic attack too far and suddenly there wasn’t an Emperor anymore. There were, instead rather a lot of Germanic guys around who very much wanted to keep Rome running, but ideally with them at the head of it. Thanks.

Over at twitter this dance was happening but with weirdo right wingers. They were always mad because no one likes them because they are hateful, stupid, and have absolutely no rizz. Because they only know other weirdo right wingers IRL, however, they were convinced that there was some sort of nefarious plot to dunk on them online and they wanted to know when Twitter would acknowledge them, the biggest victims known to man. At the head of this was, of course, your man there Elon who is mad that he isn’t funny. He became convinced that there was an army of bots or something making fun of him and he demanded to know why twitter was letting people be mean to him. “You say that you want weirdo right wingers to be on this site and yet! You allow people to be very mildly mean to them!!!!! Even when they are the richest man on the planet! So much for free speech, etc.” Anyway, he accidentally got forced to buy twitter for too much money because he is quite stupid, and now here we are.

As I say, when western Rome ‘fell’ or whatever, the dudes who took over never intended it to stop functioning. They entire point of fighting with varying Emperors was because they wanted to be a part of Rome. They wanted its protection and also that sweet sweet tax revenue that it would bring in. As a result they did their best to copy the structures of the Romans before them. They hired Romans to work for them as secretaries and chancellors. They wrote to Constantinople demanding to be taken seriously. But the thing was that they didn’t quite understand what a huge structure “Rome” was and quite how many enslaved people you needed to keep those amphorae flowing up from North Africa. You need an army of tax collectors, and, well, a standing army. Meanwhile the rich guys on villas out in the countryside were a lot less likely to pay taxes at all when they couldn’t guarantee that road would be paved in exchange, or even that an army could come through and chase off whoever was threatening them. It was increasingly difficult, they felt, to tell whether a Germanic guy in your yard demanding taxes was from the government, or asking for protection money.

This is much like Elon Musk, as are dogs who chase cars and catch them, presumably. After being tricked into paying way more money for Twitter than it is worth he had to figure out some way to keep it ticking over and also to service all the debt that he took on to buy it. So because he is, and I cannot stress this enough, really quite stupid, he began to strip out all the load bearing members of staff who did stuff like not make the website DDOS itself. He also came up with an incredibly stupid system of allowing people to pay for verification. This means that while formerly if someone had a little blue check next to their name you could tell that maybe they were famous, or maybe they just wrote for Vice a couple times back in like 2012. Either way you knew that they were who they said they were. Anyway, people who aren’t so sad, so sad, so so so so so so sad, so sad, won’t pay for verification. So all he has managed to do is make having a blue tick mean that whoever has it is a loser, with the exception of the few incredibly famous people who were given back their ticks. And meanwhile, people just keep wandering off. Things keep breaking. There are suddenly significantly more bots trying to sell you t-shirts, or catfish you, and the nazi count is off the charts. It’s all just generally clunky and not particularly pleasant.

Meanwhile in the successor states the answer to all of this loss of centralised power was to make smaller, more localised kingdoms that could administrate at least the area that surrounded them, if not the entire western half of the Mediterranean littoral. There were varying degrees of success with this. The Visigoths in Spain actually set up quite a nice little well oiled (that’s a reference to olive oil, get it) and centralised taxation system. Then there were dudes like your man Clovis (466-511) there up in Frankia who were like, “Hell yeah I’m very Roman. Watch me theoretically cut this dude’s head off with an axe. I say theoretically because this story is possibly apocryphal and written by my haters.”[1] And then you have middle of the road guys like Theodoric (454-526) who were at least good at hiring Romans to do all the work for them and help them sound Roman.[2]

This, kids, is where we are now. There is a flourishing of Twitter successor states that have popped up over-night, all of which claim to be offering the same thing as original recipe twitter, and none of which can quite do it. You have your bluesky which is really quite fun and excellent for fiddling around on, but no one’s there so it’s not like you can advertise on it. There’s threads which is just like … I hope you like seeing posts from Pepsi and also giving Zuckerberg even more access to your personal details which he will sell to Cambridge Analytical in order to ruin several elections. And then there’s the husk of Twitter which is doing its best impression of the original, but becoming worse and worse daily, and is now apparently called X? I mean Elon is – and I am not even kidding – giving little feudal payouts to his most loyal reply guys who bought blue ticks right now. It’s incredible. He’s just straight up trying to do demesnes but online. Just amazing stuff.

This, I feel, is a useful object lesson. Because of the weird reification of the Roman Empire that we do in order to justify the violence of our own world, we are trained to look at the “fall” of Rome as something decisive, sudden, and violent, which completely changed the character of life for everyone involved. In reality the “fall” wasn’t because outside forces wanted to destroy Rome – they just wanted to control it. There was a slow and steady degradation of the services that the Empire could offer, and people began to respond to this with smaller and localised communities. There were pluses and minuses to this. Large-scale enslavement dropped off, though it would absolutely continue through the early medieval period. That’s a good thing. However so did access to consumer goods. That’s undeniable. If you lived in northern Italy you weren’t getting olive oil from Spain delivered in an amphora from Tunisia anymore.

We are living through a tiny little change in a form of communication, but it can help us understand how larger systems fail. It can also help us to understand how these failures effect regular people who are just trying to go about their daily life. It can also help us learn about how source survival fails at times like this. When people decide to “shake things up” and break a system, you can lose all of the information that they were storing very quickly. This goes for people who get annoyed and delete their twitter accounts just as much as if the whole thing just falls over one day and we lose the records of it. All it takes is one jerk and suddenly a thousand years from now they’ll say you were living through a Dark Age.

Of course, much like with any series of conflicts, the rich people at the top aren’t going to be the ones effected by this. They can keep being wealthy idiots wherever they want, surrounded by people who will tell them they are cool. It’s the regular people who made friends, or a living, by using Twitter that are going to be worse off. However, there’s an opportunity here to dream up something new that doesn’t rely on evil capitalists to keep it running. Here’s hoping I’ll see you there.

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[1] Gregory of Tours, The Conversion of Clovis, <https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/gregory-clovisconv.asp#n42>. Accessed 26 July, 2023, 42.
[2] See, for example, Cassiodorus, Institutions, trans. James W. and Barbara Halporn, Book I, https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/inst-trans.html. Accessed 26 July 2023.

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For more on the early middle ages see:
There’s no such thing as the Dark Ages, but OK
If you’re going to talk about the Dark Ages you had better be right

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My book, The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, is out now.

© Eleanor Janega, 2024