I’m not fond of Twitter as a communicative form — I still believe that the question “what if we put everyone on the same IRC channel?” was one that we didn’t need to run an experiment to answer. But I am enjoying having multiple reincarnations of Twitter, from the individual yurts of the Fediverse to the highrise tower of Bluesky’s Shared Heap, even unto the crowded souqs of Farcaster and the dotted Nostr seasteads on the far horizon. The Internet is a metamedium and it should not have a strong flavor, but every little created medium on it should serve a different palate.
And then there’s the original, the Ur, the Babylon of short-form shitposting, the Neo-Assyrian neorx CEO kingdom of X. What a strange place that is now! I respect my friends who, long long before I did, saw the seed of MAGA Musk in Elon. I think modeling people, and systems, is important, even if, particularly if, you find yourself opposed to them. And not recognising, not being able to predict Elon’s implied trajectory, was a failure I took to heart, if only because a huge chunk of my job for the last decade has been, if not predicting, then at least how to swiftly recognise an impending trope before it happens.
So, talking of recognition: the #resistance of BlueSky and X underground both spent this week poring over the thoughts, X spaces, and Fortnite livestreams of one “Adrian Dittmann“, an X personality who acts and sounds uncannily like Elon Musk, if Elon Musk had a pseudonymous Finsta-ish account for when he was too Elon for main. And given Elon’s main, that’s a pretty spicy alter.
So is he Elon? Well, stranger things have happened, but I really don’t think so. I feel like I’m spoilering about a week or so of social media entertainment for you here by not trying to lead you down the rat-hole of evidence in favor for Dittman-Elon, but this Spectator piece, apparently based on research conducted by crimew and frends , lays out the counter-argument — in that they kinda doxxed the real Dittmann. It’s not as the lawyers say, dispositive, but I think it holds water better than the pro-Dittmann!Elon arguments. (I’m using the fanfic bang notation here, where Dittmann!Elon is an official variant of the canonical Elon).
Anyway, at the risk of looking like an idiot again regarding Musk, let me assume for now that Dittmann does not equal Musk, and explain to you why so many of the people that I think were right in predicting Musk’s Ascent to MAGAdom, might be less good at finding the truth behind this story.
The key point is that what drew people into believe Musk == Dittmann is that Dittman consistently acts like Musk badly unsuccessfully covering-up his identity as the world’s richest man. He’s evasive about his real identity, he makes errors that Musk might make (like saying “I” when he seems to mean Musk), he says things that map to what Musk appears to think, but much more bluntly. When pressed on whether he is Musk, he rarely denies it, and changes the subject or ends the conversation.
These all seem like slam-dunk arguments for Dittmann!Musk — unless you’re also maintaining in your head the counterfactual. These are all behaviours that Dittmann!Adrian also has a good reason to pursue as well. He gets more views, more participants, more followers from being mysteriously Musk-like.
We can model Dittmann!Adrian’s behaviour as a conscious decision: he is acting at all times like he is almost certainly Musk, because that translates into money and fame for him. Or we can model it unconsciously — the closer he behaves in a Musk-like way, the more those things happens, so he just naturally gravitates to them.
That raises the question though: why is he so bad at pretending to be Musk? Could Dittmann!Adrian do a better job of masquerading as Musk — to do a better job at pretending to be him? Like, rather than being an idiot Musk who always gives things away to canny Fortnite livestreamers, could Dittmann manufacture something that more convincingly indicates he’s Musk (while being a lie)? Well, maybe, but that’s a dangerous game. If he really was trying to seriously pass himself off as Musk, Musk would have a good reason to squash him like a bug.
In the universe where Dittmann!Adrian exists, and Adrian isn’t Musk, Dittmann mostly benefits from living in a grey zone, constantly playing coy about whether he is a wave or a particle, to keep you wanting to observe him. I mean, I’m doing it now, feeding the Dittmann fever here! Dittmann’s status mostly depends on the ambiguity of his identity. (Honestly, there’s probably a fine post-ambiguity career for him as a “I Was Elon’s Double” tell-all: but that’s got risks of its own.)
On the other other hand, a lot of people still think that Dittmann is Musk — both Musk-lovers and Musk-haters. Even now, I feel shaky saying that I think we live in the Dittmann!Adrian universe. I know lots of people are going to disagree, and ask me for more evidence.
All I can say is that we — I — often come to believe things to be true because a wide subsection of people believe them. That group doesn’t have to be particularly monolithic. They may believe them from different angles. Elon-haters love the Dittmann!Elon story because he comes across as a dumbass misogynist troll. Elon-lovers love it because — well, for the same reasons, but with a positive valence. The cost/benefit of a journalist writing an article that keeps the question going, rather than actually doing a bunch of work to definitively answer it, leans strongly toward just keeping the story bubbling.
I continue to believe that sharing our various beliefs — even flawed or wrong beliefs — into a public space helps us get closer to the truth. Or at least, we don’t have any better methods that don’t include this initial pooling capability. But one of the failure modes of the modern Internet occurs when a large number of people have incentives that align — but align to point away from the truth, even as the evidence mounts up, in the backwaters and interstices.
It’s significant to me that the only people who did the digging against the Dittmann!Elon thesis seem to be a group of extremely queer internet detectives, and the only people who seemed inclined to publish it was a conservative media outlet whose incentives don’t quite align with the rest of the Musk-watching media.
Dittman!Adrian and Dittman!Musk aren’t playing their game directly toward either of those two groups, so they’re both in a good position, and with good incentives, to look in a different direction, think in a different way, and then publicise a different view. This is what diversity should be, and why co-operation (whether trustful or not) between diverse agents is so vital in seeking the truth. Whatever that is.