When Twitter was young, its flat egalitarianism amazed people. You could hobnob with the powerful and famous on a level playing field. Nobody’s account got special treatment. Today, it has achieved some kind of uneasy equilibrium popularity, and people (particularly the notable and popular) are relatively more interested in Twitter abuse. Folks are calling for shared blocklists, filtering feeds by account verification, etc. So you see a cycle where structures of status and privilege will naturally emerge anew. Some things in the world naturally get flat over time, like a mountain range. Other things seem to naturally get less flat over time, like a society. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and something there is that does.

The pessimistic account of this is that the structures of status and privilege will continually inevitably reassert themselves and we’ll be right back to an inefficient and unjust status quo ante. The optimistic account is that the old structures had grown corrupt and brittle, and the new structures of status and privilege will be more just. A fatalist-relativist account is perhaps that the structures of the time are a sort of fashion.