Xit

Goodbye Twitter. RIP. You are now X Twitter. I’ll miss you. Honest injun.

Opposite is my final tweet after many years. Posted a couple of weeks ago. And as usual, apart from from one or two old friends, it didn’t attract much attention – at least not in the few hours before I worked out how to delete my account. (You ‘deactivate’ it and it is wiped clean, so it says, a month later. Phutt…)

So if any of the 332 ‘followers’ I somehow built up over the years have found their way to this humble blog then welcome indeed. I will try to remember to ‘enable comments’ when I write these things so that we can chat about them  Sometimes. Perhaps. If you want to.

At the moment I’m penning these thorts about what remainers are going to call their tweets from now on. Surely not Xs, or Exes. No No No. Spare us that. And with so many users currently asking ‘YTF’, I can imagine Musk deciding next year, just for fun, to call it Y. Another huge sign to annoy nighttime ‘Frisco. That’ll show ’em. And then the next year (or, who knows, sooner?) Z. Then back to A. Wow. Who’d not be a gadzillionaire.

But that is the problem, well one of them anyway, with letting one person gain supreme control of a basic channel of worldwide communication. It’s not a very good idea. Even if the person has the wisdom of Solomon and the humility of a lesser saint.

It’s really hard to see that Elon Musk qualifies on either count. He did get a lot right with his Tesla cars — or at least some brilliant, anonymous employees did. As described in earlier posts I and my wife are to be numbered among his legions of enthusiastic customers who throng the contemporary road.

But not all that Elon touches turns to gold. I would certainly put Twitter into the latter category. More like the base metal of which the cheapest jewellery is made. Or even like lead. Which may turn out to be the best analogy.

As I said in that final tweet, Twitter was not just fun but genuinely useful. It really was a good way of getting up-to-the-minute insights into contemporary events. And keeping in touch with interesting and/or like-minded people. Organisations of every kind had grown to use it as an information portal and if I wanted to send a message to, for example, BBC Radio 3 Breakfast — as I once actually did — it was by far the quickest and easiest way to do it. On that occasion I heard Petroc Trelawny, no less, read out my golden words a few minutes later. And I never had any problem avoiding the sort of trivia that Stephen Fry was once notorious for posting daily, and I almost never encountered hate speech or obvious disinformation (OK OK I know I could have been taken in too.)

But not everyone was so lucky; if I had been in a different echo chamber I know I could as easily have become immersed in bad things. That is why it was so good that Twitter did set up some ways of policing the worst abuses — by banning Donald Trump’s incessant stream of incendiary lies for example — and why it was so bad that Musk’s XTwitter has largely dismantled them. In the name of free speech, for heaven’s sake.

At the moment I am managing fine without the little blue bird in my life, it may even have something to do with me feeling motivated to write something here. But in the world at large it will surely leave a gap. Just yesterday I noticed the BBC suggesting ‘Twitter’ as the source of information for something or other. I really can’t imagine them suggesting something called ‘X’. And if I’m not wrong that’s bound to leave a gap.

I have had a look at Mastodon, which is very far from filling it at the moment, and I don’t want to sign up for Instagram so can’t try Facebook/Meta’s new baby, whatever it’s called. So until things sort themselves out, and perhaps for ever, I will stick to using Facebook a bit for local matters, email, text, telephone and the post for communication, and otherwise my sites, including this blog.

But surely this underlines the importance of independent media, such as the BBC and the Guardian, which are relatively immune from the inevitable logic of unbridled capitalism, which will otherwise drive everything into the hands of a tiny number of immensely wealthy individuals and make essential services such as Twitter subject to the whims and mental balance of those all-too-human human beings.

...and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.