Elon Is Buying Twitter.
It was terrible before him. It will be terrible after him.
The world’s largest shit-flinging cage was just bought out by a man covered head-to-toe in said shit. Elon Musk got scammed if he paid $44 billion for Twitter; I can get it off the App Store for free. I hope he trusts his right-wing impulses and turns it into a Parler-style unusable wreck where right-wing idiots type out racisms and conspiracy mumbo jumbo to own the libs who have already flocked. The track record of these “free speech” social media alternatives is spectacularly bad, so if Twitter experiences a similar fate, the rest of society can finally be excised from this malignant brain tumor.
Predictably, this event was accompanied by the boilerplate Very Online histrionic meltdown, as if Twitter pre-Elon wasn’t a fetid cesspool of trash takes, centrist losers, and right-wing lunatics. This website is a bizarre mirrorworld that caters to flippancy, crudely disguised as a modern town square. Most of the discussions are cheap and shallow. For every thread that discusses The Issues with clarity or articulates a substantive point at length, there are tens of thousands of conversations consisting of standard echo chamber types doing half-baked trolling or endless accusations of coping and seething. It’s patently easier and more rewarding to behave like this online than it is to have a real discussion, and Twitter is a pure distillation of this frictionless interaction. Nobody can rummage through an onslaught of 280-character sharts and find themselves more educated and empathetic.
There are already hordes of stimulus ecstasy freaks who will try to uphold Twitter as an important public forum and threaten to leave the platform altogether. This really proves that Havana syndrome is the key metaphor to understanding contemporary America. Everyone is a neurotic wreck, unable to articulate what is wrong in their lives. They’re locked into structures like Twitter, addicted to something that provides them nothing but misery and insanity. But it’s a comfortable, reliable misery and insanity. They live in a fantasy world dominated by an evil malefactor that soils their experience through something like shadowbanning or suppression, when, really, they are irritated for not receiving what they want out of the experience of being online every day.
Most of these internal anxieties could be solved by logging off once in a while. It’s possible to not see, hear, or bother with nearly anything on Twitter. Sure, there’s the occasional Hollywood squabble that permeates into mainstream news, like the trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard—which, purely on principle, I refuse to give a shit about. The only valid reason to talk about celebrities is to accuse them of pedophilia.
