What Was Twitter, Anyway?

I thought about Maxwell’s Demon as I reconsidered the “Star Wars”-Le Creuset thing, and how clear it was that no one involved had even been especially angry. It’s in episodes like this that Twitter manages to violate the discursive law that, until quite recently, prevented random Australians from yelling at you when you’re trying to go to bed. In the real world, you can go 30-some years without ever encountering the sensitivities of the “Star Wars” cookware community. But Twitter can, if you tell it just the right thing, shoot every last one of them at you through a little door, creating a pocket of extreme heat without anyone having meant to do much at all. This is perhaps the central paradox of Twitter: It can produce enormous outcomes without meaningful inputs.

I happen to know about Maxwell’s Demon only because it makes an appearance in Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49,” a 1966 novella centered on a clandestine communications network that is used by a baffling array of people (anarcho-syndicalists, tech geeks, assorted perverts and cranks) and seems particularly popular in San Francisco. Instead of mailboxes, it operates through a system of containers disguised to look like trash cans; the only one of these the protagonist finds is somewhere South of Market, just blocks from where Twitter would be born. It’s a book I read 20 years ago. If I’d come to it more recently, I doubt the mention of Maxwell would have stuck in my mind, thanks to either normal aging or some 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 down off the shelf was the best way of thinking about Twitter I’ve encountered. In the novella, an East Bay inventor named John Nefastis has designed a box, complete with two pistons attached to a crankshaft and a flywheel, that he claims contains the molecule-sorting demon. It can be used to provide unlimited free energy, but it doesn’t work unless there is someone sitting outside, looking at it. There was, Nefastis believed, a certain type of person, a “sensitive,” capable of communicating with the demon within as it gathered its data on the billions of particles inside the box — positions, vectors, levels of excitement. The sensitive could process all that information, telling the demon which piston to fire. Together, the demon and the sensitive would move the molecules to and fro, creating a perpetual-motion machine. The box was a closed system, separate from the outside world, but it could nevertheless do 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 a lot of people who can talk to that demon; who can process, intuitively, the positions and attitudes of unimaginable numbers of others; who know just what to tell the demon to make things move; who are happy, or close enough, spending hours sitting with the box, watching the pistons pump. Activists, politicians, journalists, comedians, snack-food brands and Stephen King — all have taken their turn at the box. Union organizers, venture capitalists, grad students and amateur historians — they could make the flywheel turn. No one even has to do much of anything to make it move. But none of us have the power to stop it, either. And at some point — back before we really knew what we were doing — we hooked those pistons up all over the place.

And though it seems unlikely that Twitter itself will disappear, the powerful mechanism it became over the years — the one that made an often unprofitable company so valuable in the first place; the one that allowed a collectively conjured illusion to transform the real world — seems to be sputtering and squealing, and all the noise is making it hard to communicate with the demon within. The platform could continue to operate in some form, even as the mechanism slowly rusts or eventually grinds to a halt. If that happens, the world would feel exactly the same — and utterly transformed. And I, and others, and maybe you, too, would have to contend with what we’d really been doing the whole time: staring into a box, hoping to see it move.

Prop stylist: Ariana Salvato.

Willy Staley is a story editor for the magazine. He has written about the effort to count the country’s billionaires, the TV show “The Sopranos,” the writer and director Mike Judge and the professional skateboarder Tyshawn Jones. Jamie Chung is a photographer who has worked on nearly a dozen covers for the magazine. He won awards this year from American Photography and the Society of Publication Designers. Pablo Delcan is a designer and art director from Spain who is now based in Callicoon, N.Y. His work blends traditional and modern techniques across mediums like illustration, print design and animation.