In Twitter We Musk

If you’re on Twitter, you have probably witnessed the pandemonium. Employees fired. Employees quitting. Accounts deactivated. Fake accounts. Parody accounts. Spectators predicting doom. Senators threatening regulation. Declarations of the end of the world. Ahem, I mean the end of Twitter. All because the son of a wealthy apartheid era South African emerald mine magnate used his massive grifted fortune propped up with substantial loans to purchase a popular social media site with 436 million users for some weird experiment in chaos theory.

It’s been a few interesting weeks watching Twitter’s dumpster fire erupt in real time. I don’t know if it’s more appropriate to compare this disaster to Twitanic or Twittergeddon but either way, it’s fascinating. As I’ve read news articles, studied reactions of those I follow, and continued to tweet as if everything is fine, I’ve gathered a few pertinent observations. If Twitter is a microcosm of the real world, here are some lessons we could all learn from this theoretical demise of Twitter.

1. Irony is lost. There is something oddly surreal about the phrase #twitterisdead being a trending topic on Twitter. How can it be dead if we’re all using it to find out if it’s dead? It might be dying but it is not dead. At least not yet. Even Elon Musk recognized this contradiction and tweeted this photo as a response.  

courtesy of the manbaby Elon Musk

2. Humanity is gullible. We (generally speaking) will believe anything with a blue check mark next to it. We’ll believe anything spoken on our favorite news channel. We fall for conspiracy theories and propaganda bots like we’ve been brainwashed. Perhaps it’s confirmation bias - we believe the things that solidify the things we already wish were true.

3. Humanity is brilliant. While this point seems to contradict the latter, we must realize life is not a strict dichotomy. Humanity is so smart because it is also incredibly stupid. We see the weaknesses of ill-advised decisions and exploit them. Who else would pay $8 a month to create a billion dollar stock loss for an evil corporation? Only someone with high (even if devious) intelligence.

4. If the apocalypse was to begin tomorrow, it will be both terrifying and hilarious. Whether alien invasion or solar flare, polar shift or zombie hordes, humanity will be unprepared to survive. However, we will have jokes. We will battle the literal end of the world with memes and GIFs. There is no plan B. We can’t even come up with a suitable replacement for Twitter, how are we ever to survive global annihilation?

5. Wealth does not equal competence. Elon Musk is the richest person in the world yet becoming the CEO of Twitter might be his undoing. Being insanely rich hasn’t made him a good boss. Being able to swim in his money like Scrooge McDuck hasn’t made handling the twitterly reins any easier. Affluence is not the same thing as business acumen.

While we’re at it, perhaps allowing the richest people in the world control everything is a bad idea. The end of Twitter is nothing more than the obvious result of oligarchally influenced unfettered capitalism. But what do I know? I’m just a poor boy, nobody tweets me.