Inflation and rising interest rates sure seem like they can explain so much of the puzzle... especially timing.

But Twitter is an especially interesting piece of that puzzle. It seems to be immolating itself in a deliberate enshitification, closely mirroring every other mega site - yet I doubt it can be related to debt in any way.

I don’t think we can just shrug and chalk it up to a poor decision by eccentric Elon, either. There are only a handful of mega sites. Some (Meta) have had bots between users for a long time. Some (TikTok) were born that way. The rest, including Twitter, seem hellbent on racing to get bots between us as fast as they can.

I think this undermines the debt-urgency argument. I suspect it, instead, highlights a recent growth spurt in the market value for mega sites with bots between users. We’re getting bots everywhere, not because time’s up and bots were the best idea they had, but because bots are exploding in value. We might even look back and shake our heads because Elon so clearly underpaid for Twitter.