By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 11, 2023
As the summer of 2023 marches forward grimly, a pair of widely beloved institutions have taken definitive turns for the worse.
In the college-sports industry, Pac-12 Conference commissioner George Kliavkoff fumbled TV broadcast-rights talks, opening the door this summer for six league members to bolt for the Big 10 and Big 12. It remains unclear whether the remaining four teams — Cal, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington State — will form some kind of alliance with the Mountain West Conference or go their own ways. Whatever the case, even if the Pac-X somehow survives beyond July 31, 2024, it will be radically altered from the alliance of regionally and nationally respected universities that anchored West Coast college sports for more than a century.
A few days before the Pac-12 imploded, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced that the microblogging social network he purchased in October 2022 would be called X going forward. In a matter of days, the service’s famous, friendly chirping blue bird logo was replaced by a stark black-and-white letter. Messages on the service, once known as tweets, now appear to be called Xeets. Sharing another person’s tweets on your own timeline, formerly dubbed retweeting, now goes by the far more generic term reposting.
None of these developments are improvements.
In the case of the app formerly known as Twitter, or TAFKAT, the sudden rebrand is of a piece with Musk’s stewardship of the popular text- and image-sharing platform. Musk has fired thousands of employees and made sudden changes to the platform’s policies and code. With few if any exceptions, Musk’s moves that have imperiled Twitter’s functionality and appeal. Musk has also restored the accounts of right-wing extremists, cracked down on the accounts of mainstream reporters and generally turned a blind eye to an increase in hate speech on the platform.
Musk’s noxious behavior extends to failing to pay rent on multiple leases, hastily erecting a new X sign at his rebranded platform’s headquarters (which had to be taken down just as hastily because it didn’t comply with San Francisco building regulations) and generally boosting extremist conservative messages. However, Musk, a self-described free-speech champion, has often failed to live up to his own billing when doing so might conflict with his favored political views, require him to stand up to would-be government censors or link to content on other websites.
The result, predictably, has been to drive away advertisers and users who aren’t open to the growing right-wing presence on the app formerly known as Twitter. At least three prominent media organizations have left the service, and I suspect more will likely follow. I personally have cut back on my usage, both as a reader and a poster. It’s hard to imagine finding the service’s cipher-like new name and angular black-and-white logo anything other than off-putting.
A fully viable replacement for the service has yet to take center stage. Threads, an offering from Meta, the corporate parent of Instagram and Facebook, briefly flourished but appears to have dropped off in popularity fairly quickly. One issue is that even if a fully functional platform emerges, it will lack the novelty of Twitter, which was part of the first wave of new social media platforms to emerge around the dawn of the smartphone era. Another problem, at least for me, is that any new service’s user base will probably lack the diversity and vibrancy that made Twitter fun.
Musk will benefit if a full-fledged “Twitter killer” fails to emerge. Still, it’s hard to see what path X can take to reach profitability or to reclaim its prominence as an essential social-media platform that once served newshounds, comedy-lovers and scientific and academic communities equally well.
Of course, it’s been clear since before Musk took over Twitter that his ownership would likely not benefit the platform or its mainstream users. The service’s health has occasionally toggled from “seems fine” to “quite dire” and back again, but the overall arc of decline is clear.
The situation was different for the Pac-12. The conference instantly entered crisis mode on June 30, 2022, when its two Southern California institutions, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, announced that they would jump to the Big 10. Over the subsequent 13 months and one week, many fans of the remaining conference schools thought that the league could be saved if Kliavkoff obtained a solid TV-broadcast contract and if the presidents and chancellors maintained their commitment to a union that had served its members well over the decades.
Yes, observers knew that the league was in peril, and it was definitely a bad sign that whispers that an agreement would be reached sometime in the next few weeks kept surfacing as the months ticked by. There was no new contract in November or December or March or April or even in July. Still, San Diego State appeared to be a great fit as a potential new league member, one that would at least partially make up for the loss of USC and UCLA, and Southern Methodist University also appeared to offer some value as a possible 12th conference institution.
When it occurred, the century-old conference’s dissolution — now official in all but name — happened quite suddenly. Apparently, Kliavkoff delayed presenting a deal to his university chancellors and presidents because he wanted a solid second offer, and one never materialized. By the time he brought the terms of a streaming-only Apple TV+ pact to Pac-12 CEOs last week, Colorado had already left and Oregon and Arizona were giving serious consideration to defecting.
And yet even on the morning of Friday, Aug. 11, the day the league lost five members, many insiders and observers alike thought that the conference was on the verge of signing a deal with Apple that would pay each member institution at least $25 million per annum with escalating payouts and built-in incentives for meeting new streaming subscription targets. When Oregon chose to pursue a better payday, that signaled to a five-member bloc — Washington, which joined its rival in the Big 10, and Arizona State and Utah, who followed Arizona and Colorado to the Big 12 — that the jig was up. Within hours, a century of tradition was reduced to a pile of rubble.
As with Twitter, there appears to be no way to fix what is broken with the Pac-12 — or at least not one that preserves the essence of the Pac-12, Pac-10 or even Pac-8 that fans knew over the decades. The Arizona universities will preserve their in-state rivalry as new Big 12 enlistees, and the Los Angeles schools will automatically play one another as fellow Big 10 members. But other long-contested clashes, such as between Stanford and USC or Washington and Washington State, will now occur less frequently, and perhaps not at all. The remaining Pac-4 members face a real threat of being consigned to athletic irrelevance, especially but not only when it comes to their football teams. Tradition and history have been thrown overboard for the sake of television money.
Perhaps the today’s ashes will lead a better future, just as forest fires can clear the way for fresh growth. But right now, in August 2023, we have a long way to go before we’ll be able to point to positive developments in short-form social media or West Coast college sports.
MEMwrites 
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