David Roth, writing at Defector, has been thinking about Twitter.

Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes a place where important things happen, more often a place to watch less-important things happen alongside if not truly with other people, always a wall on which to write graffiti and a periscope that would show you a stranger being weird—it has never been what they said it was. The overheated register in which Silicon Valley types have tended to talk about Twitter as The Global Town Square, a horizonless agora in which all of humanity can meet to uh engage in free speech together or whatever, is how they always talk about whatever they are selling, right before they move on to selling something else. For better and worse, these people like Twitter—many people do—but they can’t say why, or call it what it is. And so it has to bring people together, for the future’s sake.

You can see the problem. It is a miraculous thing, or anyway an impressive one, to invent a platform on which anyone can speak to anyone/everyone else, about anything. But because these people don’t really value people or togetherness very highly, or have much to say, or consider the future as anything but a place where they will become richer, they don’t really know what to do with that. “Bringing people together” is a value-neutral thing, and a mass of humanity does not become a community—and is not prevented from becoming a mob—simply because they’re all in the same place. Silicon Valley types want whatever’s next because there might be money in it, but also they are fundamentally not very interested in inhabiting or maintaining the new realities they shape; it’s too much like work. Maintaining things is hard, and requires much more care than making things does.