TL;DR: We examine Twitter’s shipwreck to illustrate the notion of a wicked problem

I’m planning a long and sad blog post called “The Four Wicked Problems of the Israeli Polis”. However I realized that quite a few of my readers likely are not familiar with what people call a wicked problem, so I decided first to present a couple of interesting yet tractable cases.

What makes a problem wicked? Instead of repeating Wikipedia, let me refer you to the brilliant performance of “Gee, Officer Krupke”, here at the BBC Proms, and originally from Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story musical.

You can find the lyrics here; they are a dialogue of several young gang members with specialists (law enforcement, judicial, therapeutic, social-work) tasked with solving society’s conflict with those young men.

What happens is:

  • Each different take on the situation brings about a different narrative. The specialists contradict each other and fail to converge to a single actionable policy.
  • The endgame is unclear. Should the young men be “soda jerkers”, because that’s the best society has in store for them? How can their stigma be removed while not condoning their misdeeds?
  • The final weight of the system’s failure is borne by the patrolling Officer Krupke who has very few tools to handle it beyond being a forceful brute, and perpetuating a pretty rotten state of affairs on the ground.

All of the above are the hallmarks of a wicked problem. I’d like to present a case why the question of Twitter is also one.

  • The underlying engine of Twitter’s income is digital advertising, however a lot of players think that the value of this market is going to decline soon - due to a number of reasons:
    • intrinsic decline of the advertisement market leaders - Google and Facebook - due to advertisement being long-term toxic to their platforms.
    • growing awareness of advertisement fraud and various reporting issues that undercut digital ad company valuation.
  • There’s a well established pattern of politicians extorting social media companies to siphon out resources, most typically - the ability to spread vile political propaganda with impunity. This both places a direct tax on all social media companies, and indirectly devalues the entire online industry, perhaps to the point of becoming an existential threat.
  • Twitter is not expected to grow to new markets.
  • Twitter’s operations incrementally grew to be extremely expensive - requiring hundreds of thousands of servers and thousands of engineers - just to remain a losing player in the advertising game. Had a pivot to a different model been attempted at Twitter’s pre-acquisition scale, Twitter would have run out of cash much earlier than the move could have succeeded.

The above represents a tangle of different forces and pressures: economical, political, social, entrepreneurial and operational. At the point of Twitter’s acquisition in 2022, the sum of forces was pulling the company down, and fast. Accordingly, I tend to interpret Musk’s strategy as an attempt to cut the Gordian knot and repurpose the freed pieces of rope.

In less allegorical terms, Musk is trying to salvage the one thing still going for Twitter - its US user base of its fundamental app experience - and try to reinvent it as a different, inevitably much smaller, company, that might be able to survive and in our new austere age.

It’ll take a few years to see if Musk’s winning for himself. However, the unfortunate reality for a lot of Twitter employees is that they have lost already, and they need to fight for a new source of daily bread as disparate individuals. And that for me is what’s sad about wicked problems: when you consider burning the village because that’s the only way of saving it, perhaps this serves some greater good, but there’s nothing in it for the people about to lose their homes.