The death of Twitter has dragged on too long. Please, Elon, put us out of our misery
That’s it, time to pull the plug. Enough is enough. We’ve been more than patient with Elon Musk, weathering the constant cringe posts and the crypto memes, the randomly generated child names and the Mars colony dystopianism – and that’s before you even get into the basic culture-destroying billionaire stuff.
But I draw the line at the pathetic attempts to keep Twitter, an app that should probably just disappear, alive.
In a few short weeks the billionaire has made an already bad app even more torturous, not in its user experience but in the fresh agony of having to be kept abreast of the most intimate details of one of the biggest dipshits around.
Something must be done, even if I’m not confident about our chances.Elon has the kind of material wealth usually reserved for comic book villains or guys who own genies. If challenged, he probably has a satellite that could turn me into a ham sandwich, or a button that puts every Tesla on the road into assassin mode.
I’m willing to fight, and if I end up as nothing but gunk in an electric car’s tyre treads to make it happen, then so be it.
The death of Twitter has dragged on too long. Two weeks on from the platform reportedly flirting with collapse, thanks to some all-time mismanagement following Elon’s ascension to chief executive, we’re sleeping through an uneasy peace. Mass employee layoffs and walk-outs, knuckleheaded attempts at raising a “hardcore” movement of company loyalists, an increasingly conspicuous misunderstanding of the work coders do. But for the average user nothing’s actually changed. It seems unlikely now if anything ever will.
If you were on Twitter in recent weeks, you might have found it hard
not to be drawn into the mania of its impending “collapse”.
There were reports that Twitter’s public servers could be down within the day. A grim panic set in. Many users hurriedly shared contact details and alternative platforms “in case this all disappears”. Others had gushing stories of genuine friendships and connections they never would have made otherwise. It was like if everybody on board the Titanic had a PayPal account and a podcast nobody listened to.
But then, nothing happened. We all said goodbye at the restaurant only to find we were walking in the same direction, unsure of what to say now that we have said it all.
How do you come back from this? How can we return from the fiery end to the dull, interminable middle, made even worse now because we now have to hang out with a guy with hair plugs and millions of freshly invigorated fans who all give off the curious vibe of “virgin dad”.
The wise will have used this opportunity to assess how healthy their relationship with Twitter is. Every habitual Twitter user has come close to biting their tongue clean off at least once after receiving a Twitter anniversary notification reminding them just how many years it’s been since they began their descent, but many of us haven’t enjoyed such a pure shock to the system as this near-miss gave us.
Most of us will just beat on, of course, backs against the current, borne ceaselessly into the cringe. And distressingly, if the last two weeks are anything to go by, the cringe will probably survive as long as we do.
Our only hope is that Elon truly kills off the website, really puts a stake through its heart, either through acute incompetence or immediate malice. Let the great beast bleed out quickly or nuke it out of existence, annihilate it between two colliding freight trains, I don’t care. He’s free to pick through the remains if he wants and package up what still works – a platform for the Chinese government to post insane amounts of pornography.
He’s the only one who can do it, and unless he accepts the truth he’ll never win. He can have his goons shoot us from cannons, but he will never kill the lameness inside of himself. That will continue long after this, all of us, are gone.
Jack Vening is a writer living in Melbourne. He is currently completing his first book of stories, and sends out Small Town Grievances, a community newsletter about a nameless town with an owl problem, every few months