Most theories of wholesome doggo culture use the Adam and Eve model: the millennial professionals of the world were acting basically normally until Jack Dorsey slithered in with his evil new app. They make an account, and all of a sudden, they’re fallen souls, spouting awful phrases like ‘you win the internet today’ and ‘so… I did a thing.’ It was an emergency. Seeing fully-grown adults talking about ‘adulting’ would cause anyone to theorise, and the Adam and Eve model was the leading one: these baby-speakers were essentially normal until social media corrupted them.

 

Well, how’s that theory going? I don’t need to rehash the main events of the Musk acquisition, but Twitter’s transformation into Xitter makes the public sphere in its wholesome doggo days look like the peak of maturity. And it’s not just Xitter: last week, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta apologised for a “content malfunction.” An unknown number of people scrolling the hallowed feed of Instagram Reels had their feeds flooded by extremely violent videos for a day or two—shootings, cartel footage, industrial accidents. But what merited an apology on Instagram is just a regular day on Xitter. Musk’s takeover created a grand new wave of unavoidable slop accounts. There are AI “history” accounts that post random cartoons. There are AI boomer-scam accounts. And the AI gore accounts are, of course, omnipresent. I can’t tell if the Greek statue accounts are AI or human, which seems like a bad sign. Somewhere in the mix, the hecking wholesome doggos winning the internet today left our world forever. Miss them now?

 

The theme here is infantilisation, which was present in both Twitter and Xitter but had its nature changed, purposefully and destructively. Wholesome doggo culture was the first—essentially acting like a child: using baby-speak and sounding dumb or inane on purpose, best expressed by the words ‘doggo’ and ‘hecking.’ The culture is absolute, enforced positivity. But doggo culture is, at its core, a fully-grown adult’s idea of what children speak like: it is inauthentic. Xitter slop culture is the second type of infantilisation, and it is a child’s, specifically a younger teenager’s, idea of what adult life is like. The accounts one actually follows are sometimes ignored by the algorithm, and feeds are filled with violence and pornbots, with the more sophisticated AI slop accounts aspiring to a certain level of ‘seriousness,’ sometimes with a straight face, and sometimes as a gleeful, ironic perversion of mainstream news. But don’t stare into the void too long. The accounts of Musk and many of his tech hangers-on seem to have mimicked the AI slop accounts they themselves helped propagate.

 

At this point, it should be clear that adults pretending to be children (‘doggo’) are much less harmful than adults-as-children-pretending-to-be-adults (Xitter slop). The latter condition may even be irreversible. Redditors became childlike adults, but Xitter people are becoming actual children. Millennial professionals could baby-post during the night and then go back to their gruelling email jobs the next morning, but Xitter infantilisation takes over one’s life with complete, effortless lifestyle of politics, crypto speculation, and gory entertainment along with a chance to get rich quick by catching Musk’s eye. The infantilisation is slow but steady: eventually AI slop for boomers becomes indistinguishable from AI slop for children, and the slop’s influence will creep towards the ages in the middle.

 

This infantilisation can be, and is, weaponised against democratic societies. I’ll believe that the Great Instagram Reels Gore Flood of last Thursday was an accident for now, but Musk will have no such cover. The most pernicious thing about these Xitter accounts is that the algorithm inserts this sort of content into people’s supposedly ‘personalised’ feeds. On a site like Reddit, you can retreat to a specially moderated subforum to get your fake ‘Am I the Asshole’ stories in peace. But Xitter moderation has always been universal and so much more subject to manipulation by higher authorities.

 

This is dangerous for a democratic society in two ways: most obviously, seeing extreme political views and violence will make one more inclined to support them—but even this straightforward Muskite propaganda blitz is likely less harmful than the second way. A democracy relies on knowing what others think and adjusting your own public-facing opinion—in correct amounts, it’s not sheeple behaviour, it’s necessary for a stable society. Flooding the public square with violence and slop while suppressing links to longer-form publications like magazines and Substack actively makes the public dumber. As people misuse their prosocial instincts to adjust to others’ opinions, everyone gets dragged down the stupid hole. Most people have an image of modern propaganda as some devious oligarch wiring gobs of money to ‘populist’ political parties, but this is out of date. All you need to do is infantilise people through slop, often apolitical, to make them stupid—as opposed to ‘misinformed’—and violent. Then, when you say the people can’t handle self-government, you’ll be correct.

 

A democracy cannot be made of children. Musk Xitter’s decentralised propaganda machine changes social norms through weaponised deregulation: it pokes people towards their basest instincts and makes them permanent slop consumers. New Xitter does not promote ‘free speech’: it has a specific algorithm that promotes non-human creators and atavistic instincts, and then leaves us to tear ourselves apart. How many more “content malfunctions” can civilisation survive? We still don’t know the consequences of handing this weapon to a select group of people.

 

Well, that just happened! Millennial culture was swept away by a simple acquisition—this, so much this. When Twitter as we knew it was gone, the adult-babies could not survive leaving their cloistered world for a Spartan exposure on Xitter. But its legacy lives on in the new, far more harmful form of Xitter infantilisation. If an internet culture is to survive, it needs to learn not to put all its trust into easily changeable social media sites. What was once confined to baby-speak soon became DOGE and “I am become meme.” The doggos did not win the internet today. Will tomorrow be more hecking wholesome?∎

 

Words by Myles Lowenberg. Image by Cindy Shelley via Wikimedia Commons.