X Isn't Gon' Give It To Ya
Twitter is dead with Xs on its eyes; it's even worse for journalism than the living site was...
Previously: Rolled
BBC News' Elon Musk scoop was a triumph... for Musk
Elon Musk has shot the bird that he had kept caged for the seemingly endless months since he acquired Twitter; it is the next stage of his concerted effort to turn a trash pile into one of those trash fires that burn deep underground, impervious to the attentions of any firefighter.
Twitter is going away to be replaced by the comically masculine-branded X, which Musk and his pet puppet CEO, Linda Yaccarino, claim will:
… be the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.ThorSayingIsItThough?.gif
This is the same company, which in its current incarnation as Twitter, says it will soon limit the number of DMs that people who don’t pay to be ‘verified’ can send. It previously limited the number of tweets that the ‘unverified’ could read in a single day. These are no clever people and Musk’s reputation as some new version of Edison or — yes — Tesla is based on hype, not reality.
Time and time again, Musk — an overgrown, meme-obsessed teenager with the means to make his bitterness into sad reality — has shown himself to have bad instincts yoked to hyperbolic visions; his ‘successes’ are those he happened to be around for and was then binned from (PayPal) or businesses that he took over and then pretended were his invention (Tesla, SpaceX).
Musk wants to be the King of Posters but the citizens of the kingdom he took over despise him, with the limited exception of the small gang of people who have purchased ‘blue ticks’ to burrow their way deeper into his large intestine.
For journalism, the vandalism of Twitter and its ultimate destruction is bad news. While lots of hacks have simply used Twitter as a place to mine for stories and to howl at as a source of the destruction of literary / democracy / the right of columnists to not be called melts and dickheads, it has also been useful for independents who are engaged in actual journalism.
Twitter was a place where independent journalists could find each other and collaborate as well as a source of… um… sources and a way to promote work outside of the cartel system of the traditional press.
X won’t do that because X will try to sell you constant crap while progressively working to make every feature that still currently works untenable and useable. Already, Musk’s Twitter goes out of its way to surface the kind of vapid shit that he likes while hiding the people you actually want to hear from.
X won’t be fun; X won’t be useful; and, despite the desperation of its overgrown boy king, X won’t be cool. X ain’t gonna give you anything beyond a headache and a growing sense that modern life is even more rubbish than we feared.
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Previously: Dark forces
Dan Wootton is leaning on conspiracy theory in his flailing defence of the indefensible. I have got hold of his begging letter.