The Madness of Twitter
We are living through the most Twittery moment of all time. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, whose users sometimes call it a “hellsite,” tweeters have been tweeting in panic mode, as if from an aircraft about to careen into a mountainside. Woe, Musk is ruining Twitter! The service will collapse! It’s sure to grind to a halt any day now! Where will we go next? Some are even calling the exfiltration to platforms such as Mastodon (a bewildering perplexity), Hive (a CIA front?), and Post (what even is this?) a search for “lifeboats.” The result is super embarrassing and even profoundly shameful.
Yes, look, okay, there are actual stakes here. Elon Musk, a prolific tweeter and also the richest man in the world this year, might be a major social-media platform. At the very least, he is upending it, wreaking havoc on the company that makes the tweet-tweeting software. He resurrected the (and of Kanye West, , and others). He fired half the staff, then called some of them back and demanded oaths of fealty from them, perhaps in violation of labor law. Musk’s role seems to oscillate between Stalin and Paul Blart, mall cop, severe reprisal giving way to cringey oafishness and back again.
