I'm John Schwartz, writer for The Intercept. I'm filling in for Ryan Grimm this week.

This week, the only thing we're going to be talking about is Twitter.

Here is something that was written by a famous linguist named Edward Sopir in a book published

101 years ago in 1921. Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points

to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has

evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous

work of unconscious generations. I think that that is true about language, and I also

believe that that's true on a smaller scale about Twitter. Twitter is a giant work of art

created by hundreds of millions of people working together for free without realizing

what they've been doing. Like language, it has a neurobull subcultures that all have

developed their own weird petois that's incomprehensible to outsiders. And like with language,

anybody can participate in this form of art, and if enough other people like what you came

up with, it can spread across the world. And like anything involving human beings, it has

an extremely ugly side to it. But I personally believe that that has been outweighed by the

artistry of everyone involved. That is why it would be a tragedy for real if Twitter's new

owner Elon Musk destroys it. So I'm going to be talking to two people today, Mike Leonard,

a reporter at Bloomberg Law, who's been reporting about the basic financial realities of Twitter's

future, and then Ken Clippenstein, an investigative reporter at the intercept about the incredible

amount of happiness Twitter has brought to him and to me and millions of other people.

So let's get started with Mike Leonard. He's a reporter on the legal intelligence team at Bloomberg

Law where he covers anti-trust litigation and business disputes in Delaware's chance

record. Mike, welcome to Deconstructed. Thank you for having me.

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