Volume 15, Issue 3
Caddie Alford & Jonathan Carter
While many commentaries on Twitter’s decline under Elon Musk focus on his authoritarian management style, we argue that the platform’s worsening is also a byproduct of Musk’s commitment to a reactionary free speech ideology. Musk claims that his approach to speech is neutral, yet after drastic technical changes, X is now widely perceived as a right-wing platform. To make sense of this shift, we introduce “adoxastic enshittification,” which combines Cory Doctorow’s notion of “enshittification,” or the decline in user experience due to market forces, with “adoxastic affordances,” or our term for platform design choices that center disreputable opinions. Analyzing corporate statements, tech reporting, and platform affordances, we synthesize and name the “free speech” paradigms that have shaped Twitter/X’s moderation practices. With that overview, we demonstrate that X initiates adoxastic enshittification of free speech to bolster reactionary rhetorical ecologies. We conclude by offering the concept of isegoria (equal democratic participation) as a counterpoint to the enshittifiying mobilizations of parrhesia (liberty to speak freely). We argue that embracing both of these competing notions of free speech provides a foundation for more robust ideologies of free democratic discourse to prevent adoxastic enshittification’s spread across platforms.
Ashlee Reed
In 2021 Mark Zuckerberg publicly announced the Metaverse. He relied on an hour-long video, “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together,” as his primary pitch deck. Zuckerberg, the main speaker throughout this video, used the constitutive power of frontier and immersion metaphors to invite audiences to join his virtual enterprise. Zuckerberg compared the Metaverse to an infinite frontier but simultaneously ignores the violent dangers historically associated with new frontiers. Similarly, Zuckerberg used immersion metaphors to market the Metaverse’s realness but ignored the inherent vulnerability of being fully immersed in an alternate reality. Mapping language complements Zuckerberg’s appeal to frontier language and adds cartographic, expansionist elements to his depiction of the Metaverse. Ultimately, as Zuckerberg invited audiences to become explorers and worldbuilders in the virtual frontier, he further argued that virtual worlds are as compelling as physical reality.