Twitter Made Me.

Twitter made me, and it can break me because those are the rules of capitalism and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%. I am concerned that Elon Musk took Twitter into his possession with the entitlement of a medieval lord towards a castle and its occupants fallen to him in battle. No quarter was given to Twitter employees because, in the first week of ownership, Musk sacked 50% of its workforce, and gutted the technical teams involved with removing racists from the site. Elon Musk owning Twitter makes content producers like me feel the new squire of this social media town square will run it like a Gauleiter. He needs to make money fast because Musk paid far too much for the object of his desire, and it is bleeding capital. The terror is that either in panic or rage, he will transform Twitter into the equivalent of a Cern Supercollider for fascism and racism accelerating the end of truth in the news media, politics and everyday life.

But what are we to do? What am I to do because there is nowhere to run? The internet is controlled by Billionaire behemoths who never had democracy, society or simple common decency's best interest at heart.

Our address has been dystopia for so long that we pretend that a board of directors and a guy named Jack are the embodiment of the "good old days" and ignore that they sold Twitter to Musk with the same moral blindness as a father who turns their kid into a child bride for a price.

Yes, I know, and I’ve heard all the bullshit arguments about duty to stockholders being an immutable law like gravity. But there are greater duties that include democracy, the general economy and human life. If the Twitter board wanted to, loopholes could have been found to wriggle up from under the buyout. The problem is you need a functioning moral compass that overrides innate greed which is an impossibility for the 1% because they have sycophants on payroll to tell them they are always doing the right thing.

Musk is a disrupter, a chaos maker like Trump, and that is an attribute that creates fear in people who just want things to stay the same or not get worse. All billionaires are fascists- some wear it more on their sleeve than others. You can't be that rich and not be corrupted or not feel you are more important to "civilisation" than the teeming masses below. Musk is just a billionaire saying the quiet parts out loud & that is scary.

I don’t know what happens to Twitter under Musk. I am not optimistic that things will turn out alright for Twitter. But I am not optimistic that things will turn out OK for society or me. It's our curse to live in a time where endless possibility is matched by infinite stupidity, infinite greed and infinite narcissism. Neoliberalism did this to us, and now Covid, and the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis make us feel like the credits are about to roll over civilisation like it were a movie streaming late at night when we are alone.

Capitalism can't fix this because billionaires won't allow it. If I had wealth, I’d probably flee social media and live the rest of my days living off the grid in a cabin in the woods. I’d read from physical books with spines that cracked when newly opened. I’d listen to record albums of Bach, Thelonious Monk and PJ Harvey powered by solar panels. But I am not rich and don't have the luxury to say "Up Yours, Musk." Nor am I going to wear a sandwich board and ring a bell to try to make my message heard. Social media is how I must define myself and attempt to preserve what I toiled on with my dad, Harry’s Last Stand. It is too important to me because it has value and significance outside of the role that I played in making my dad the World's Oldest Rebel. Those five books, along with my memoir, the essays, the speeches, the podcasts, the trips to refugee camps, and the over 200k tweets must be preserved. They are part of a working class cannon of literature that dared to be counted and shape political policy-making society for everyone, not just the well-off.

Whatever Musk does to Twitter, I can’t leave the platform. It is better to have the light of my tweets extinguished by him rather than surrender to the despair of him owning Twitter. I owe it to the people who followed my dad and the ones that remained and follow me to continue the voyage, the struggle against tyranny and fascism. I am not going to live to see the end of the autocracy of the 1%. But I want to- at least believe I died trying to fight it, if only through words and some actions that keep me on the right side of human compassion.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash