While there is still no date set for the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage-fight proposed by the Tesla founder last month, the two tech giants took their first round on the mat with Meta’s introduction this week of Threads, which Zuck intends to compete directly with Twitter. As supervillain corporate combat goes, this is the Iran-Iraq War: I don’t much care who wins, but I am rooting for casualties.

I just hope the casualties won’t be us. 

Meta and Twitter both are bad firms offering bad products that are genuinely bad for society: bad for the relatively elderly users of Facebook and the middle-aged pundit-and-politician crowd on Twitter, bad for the younger-skewing users of other Meta products such as Instagram, bad for the journalists and media outlets that rely on social media to deliver clickbait revenues. 

Social media didn’t make us depraved and alienated any more than heroin dealers sneakily inserted opioid receptors into our brains — but, like drug dealers, they make their money helping us to be the worst versions of ourselves. The incentive for these two struggling firms is the same as the incentive for a struggling drug cartel: make the product more profitable by making it more addictive. 

Get ready for whatever the digital equivalent of fentanyl is. 

Elon Musk, who is given to grandiosity, is brilliant and gifted at many things. But running a social-media company does not seem to be one of them. As Twitter’s owner, he’s behaved a lot like a Twitter user: impulsive, erratic, performative — making a fool of himself for the likes. Twitter has, unsurprisingly, lost about two-thirds of its value under his leadership, as Fortune runs the numbers. (Twitter also threatened to sue Meta mere hours after Thread’s debut).

Mark Zuckerberg may be more focused, but he also saw his company fall from a market value of more than $1.2 trillion to less than $250 billion over the course of mere 14 months in 2021-22, and the firm today is worth about $100 billion less than it was in the summer of 2020. The Facebook founder needs a win. If Musk is the flawed tragic hero of Silicon Valley, then meeting his nemesis in the form of a nebbishy Ivy League grinder such as Zuck is a fitting comeuppance. 

Musk is a reminder that people who are really good at one thing are not necessarily good at other similar things — those who look to businessmen for political leadership, in order to “run the government like a business,” should give some thought to how often it turns out that they fail. Watching Elon Musk run Twitter isn’t like watching Michael Jordan play for the Bulls — it i s like watching Michael Jordan play for the White Sox. 

Threads can clearly be branded as Meta’s version of Twitter. But, in an important sense, all of Meta’s big products already are versions of Twitter — across the Meta constellation, the business model is the same: Social media makes the trivial seem important by making it both immediate and effortless for strangers to pay attention to a post for 10 or 12 seconds. The firms then quantify the popularity of a post or an account and make that measurement public in order to monetize the resulting social anxiety. 

Human beings, like chimpanzees, are intensely social animals with a strong sense of hierarchy. After the satisfaction of our basic physical needs, human beings are driven by status competition. Twitter and Meta simply use digital tools to quantify and exploit our hereditary uneasiness about our place within the social order of the troop—which is why their business is, in a nearly literal sense, monkey business. 

As I chronicled in “The Smallest Minority,” the “mob politics” mentality has had a degrading effect on our politics, journalism, and civil discourse — an effect that reaches far beyond social media itself. Political speeches and major-media op-eds are written with Twitter and Facebook in mind. Presidential campaigns are organized around social media — look at Ron DeSantis’ decision to launch his campaign on Twitter. There is a reason for that: A shallow and stupid stunt or an own-the-bad-guys moment that goes viral can drive rage-fueled engagement in a way that more sober approaches and measured criticism do not. 

That digital engagement fuels the small-dollar donations that are the lifeblood of modern politics, the clicks that are the lifeblood of low-end journalism, and the subscriptions that are the lifeblood of prestige journalism. There is a reason New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions tripled under the presidency of Donald Trump. 

The faster Twitter dies, the better. The trouble is that Meta has already shown itself entirely capable of creating something even worse — and also has shown that it is not very scrupulous about privacy or the abuse of users’ data. As of this writing, Meta doesn’t even plan to offer Threads in the European Union, where Zuck already has tangled, expensively and unpleasantly, with EU regulators. They won’t get Threads in Brussels, but they’ll get it in Cleveland—good and hard, too. 

Twitter and Facebook do not create anything of real and lasting value. Their absence would, indeed, leave a large void in our daily lives, one that could be filled with books, newspapers, magazines, unmediated family time, and real conversations with real people, face-to-face. That wouldn’t be so bad. 

If it happened that Twitter and Facebook managed to kill each other off, it would be a pair of public-service homicides. 

Kevin D. Williamson is a national correspondent for The Dispatch.