My Official Position on Elon Musk
From the office of Nick Hilton (dictated but not read).
Like everyone working at the cutting-edge of technology, I have been pressed of late for my opinions on Elon Musk, the new owner of the hallowed halls of Twitter. For the past few weeks, we — the people who spend a depressing amount of time doom-scrolling online — have been captivated by the relentless drama of Musk’s Twitter acquisition. It has split people.
Some have threatened to decamp to Mastadon, others have taken their pithy 280 character observations back to the walls of public toilets (where they, arguably, belong). One thing is for sure: Twitter is in a state of flux. It is no longer a happy meeting house for journalists to congratulate one another, and while many drive-by visitors are enjoying watching the show (watching, that is, Musk trolling the world’s media, and reintroducing train-wrecks like Donald Trump and Kanye West to the platform), it is unclear how viable the situation is long term. If you want to get an audience for your performance art, by all means self-immolate in Disneyland — just don’t expect a great turnout for your sophomore attempt.
Advertisers have been turned off by the lack of content moderation, and the drive to get more paying subscribers (a drive, I should say, that literally every digital media company is pushing) seems to be sputtering. But hey, I’m still enjoying it — I’ve done, like, three (3) whole tweets today.
So, to my official position on Elon Musk:
I don’t have one. Or I do have one, which is to not have one.
My studied impartiality doesn’t extend as far as supporting the massive lay-offs at Twitter. Weeks before Thanksgiving (months before Christmas) and in the midst of the worst cost-of-living crisis in my lifetime, it SUCKS to be laid-off. All the same, these are talented, well-qualified workers, and were reasonably well paid (I think there are tougher lay-offs being made in industrial services and the gig economy). The scale of the lay-offs has been brutal, and the tone flippant; a bad combo.
But… did anyone expect differently?
It’s been whispered (shouted even) in tech circles for a long time that Twitter, and most Big Tech companies, are overstaffed. Overstaffed and underperforming — that’s part of the reason why the company was so desperate to push Musk’s bid through. And it was also quite clear that Musk wanted to correct both parts of that. Slash the workforce, increase the output. And he’s done the former while attempting the latter. If you didn’t want him to do that, well… you should’ve bought Twitter. If anyone is to blame here, it’s the selling party.
And more important than my moral judgment of how Mr Musk is handling his property, is my belief that it doesn’t really matter. If Twitter died tomorrow, it would be an inconvenience for a reasonable number of people, for a few months. And then we’d move on. The hysteria of some of the responses to the changing environment suggests, to me, an unhealthy relationship with the platform. If it goes bust, so what? And if it becomes a toxic cesspit of right-wing hate? Well, that corner of the internet already exists. If it colonises Twitter then it will just marginalise Twitter (much as the 4, 8, 16, 32 etc chans are already marginalised). The reality is that the success of Twitter is because it is a bland, normie, mainstream platform. If it ceases to be bland or normie, it will cease to be mainstream.
I am also ambivalent because I simply don’t think that Elon Musk is going to drive Twitter into the sea. He is simply too successful; the world adjusts to his expectations. Additionally, the funding package he put together to finance the deal is full of aggressively capitalistic firms who have zero interest in lending money to Mr Musk for a vanity project or so that he can refinance his debt. You know Hanlon’s razor — don’t ascribe to malice what could be explained by stupidity — well another razor could just as easily read: don’t expect stupidity to win when it’s up against avarice.
And so I take no position on Elon Musk. Or Twitter. Or the internet. I just sit here, dictating blogs to my dog and hoping that when the end of the world comes, it will be swift and painless.
But, in the mean time, please follow me on all of these social media platforms where I desperately crave approval: Twitter, where my blue tick means the world to me; Substack, where my paying subs are like family; TikTok, where I am an embarrassingly old man and scared of doing to-camera videos; and Instagram, where you can receive regular updates on my dog’s bowel movements.
