Today Is Brought To You By "Schadenfreude" and "Karma"
You'd think someone with $44 Billion wouldn't be so &*^%$#@ stupid
Well, we wondered what sort of changes Elon Musk would bring to Twitter, didn’t we? Some of us wondered how long it would take Musk to run the social media platform into a ditch. What I don’t imagine anyone counted on was that the man behind Tesla (though he didn’t invent the electric car model) was dead-set on forcing Twitter into said ditch straightaway.
And remember when those blue checks actually meant that an account was verified, so you knew that Milo Q. Buttplug was real and not a parody account? Well, those days are SO…um, September, 2022?
George W Bush “misses killing Iraqis”, and Tony Blair agrees. OJ Simpson says he did it. And Elon Musk is offering “free nightly dinners” and family vacations to anyone whose name happens to be that of his ex Grimes.
At least, that’s what these famous people appear to be saying on Twitter – and it must all be true, because they have a blue checkmark next to their names.
In reality, though, these parody accounts are simply taking advantage of Musk’s Twitter Blue service. For $8 a month, users are granted the blue check that once indicated an account genuinely belonged to a public figure. The result, for internet jokesters, is an account that purports to belong to a celebrity and looks very real. As the fake Bush puts it: $8 is “a small price to pay to make this app completely unusable”.
Ah, yes, those heady days when you knew that someone with a blue check by their name (most of them were journalists) were who they purported to be. Now? Well, good luck with that, Cowboy. It’s more than likely someone with a rapier wit and the willingness to use it without remorse or mercy.
It’s the freakin’ Wild West out there, y’all- and all because Elon Musk is willing to hand out those blue check marks to anyone who agrees to fork over $8.00 a month. Not a lot of money to be allowed the freedom to commit random world-wide chaos, is it??
And that turned out so well that Twitter had to back of fon that program until they could figure out something better. Stay tuned on that front, eh?
[I]t means we can watch as Pope Francis drunk-tweets about partying in France and LeBron James demands a trade, while Nintendo fires off a picture of Mario giving us all the middle finger. In an unexpected benefit of Musk’s takeover, even very dead people are finally able to access Twitter, with Martin Luther replying to the fake pope’s offer for $8 indulgences: “I’ve got 95 theses but … this shit ain’t it chief,” the 16th-century theologian posted, in tweets screen-shotted by the user @JoshuaPHill.
We’ve also gotten far more information than we ever wanted about the sex lives of politicians including Ted Cruz, who enjoys feasting on human flesh. Rudy Giuliani has offered his enlightened musings one after another, including reflecting on the time George Soros pushed him and he was “stuck on my back like a turtle for several minutes”. Among other comments, many unprintable, the former mayor challenged Alan Dershowitz to a brawl, offered intimate accounts of his bowel movements (“I’d like to announce I shidded”), and demanded his followers “talk to me like a man with a mortgage[.]”
The author of the article, Matthew Cantor, says with tongue firmly implanted in cheek, “Sometimes it’s tough to tell the difference between real and fake accounts.”
Really? Whodathunkit? I kinda thought that was the point of it all.
Some of the comedy is funny. Some is borderline dangerous. And some of it lives in that grey area somewhere between the two.
It’s so hard to tell what’s real anymore, and that’s because Elon Musk has been far more concerned with monetizing Twitter (and laying off employees) than he has been with maintaining the security and integrity of the platform.
Then again, when you overpay to the tune of $44 billion (yeah, who said Elon Musk was smart, anyway??), you’re going to need a lot of Benjamins to cover all that red ink Twitter’s suddenly awash in, no?
(And don’t even get me started on debating whether a social media platform should be a public utility or a rich playboy’s personal ego trip….)
As I’ve mentioned only about a thousand and one times, I was banned from Twitter back in early April for the stupidest f*****g reason imaginable, but as it turns out, I was probably one of the lucky ones. I don’t have to wade into the cesspool that is Twitter and wonder if that thing floating in front of me is a Lincoln Log or a festering turd.
Elon Musk has only been the owner of Twitter for a couple of weeks now, but that’s been plenty of time for him to almost completely f**k it up beyond salvation. And it’s been a BEAUTIFUL thing to behold. Musk is already talking about the possibility that Twitter may go bankrupt.
Ah, but Karma is a cruel and fickle bitch. And schadenfreude ain’t bad, either.
Some are taking action to protect themselves. According to someone claiming to be the former New York Times reporter Ben Smith, NPR is telling staff not to quit Twitter for fear that someone else could take over their handle and impersonate them.
If you’re not sure whether an account is verified because it belongs to a noteworthy figure or because its owner has $8 a month, you can open the profile and click on the checkmark itself – which could be useful if Twitter becomes the “free-for-all hellscape” Musk has worked so tirelessly to avoid.
IF Twitter becomes the “free-for-all hellscape?” Have y’all have looked at Twitter lately? You probably know that this ship has already sailed. And with Musk having already canned a hefty chunk of Twitter’s staff, he doesn’t have the manpower to do much at this point except perhaps keep the ship from sinking.
KEEP BAILING, DAMNIT!!!
It’s long been known that Twitter’s infrastructure has been held together with Band-Aids, Silly Putty, and duct tape, technologically speaking. Laying off large numbers of Twitter’s employees isn’t going to make keeping the Good Ship Lollipop afloat any easier.
How will this all end? There’s no way to know at this early juncture, but my mind keeps returning to the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, when everything looked good until it wasn’t and 35 people died.
Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone will end up dead if Twitter crashes, but Right-wing trolls the world over will be at a loss for what to do. They’ll have no large, far-reaching platform to vent their spleens and torment losers, cucks, and Libs.
Oh, the humanity.
Then again, perhaps a Twitter-less world won’t be such a bad thing. We seemed to manage just fine before it came online in 2008. I think we’d all find a way to get along without it. Somehow. Maybe we can all start drinking heavily and talking to one another again.
So, if you can’t have fun at Elon Musk’s expense, you have no claim to a sense of humor. Besides, it’s not as if Musk didn’t bring this on himself. He could have come into Twitter, looked around, spent a few days getting the lay of the land, and then perhaps begun figuring out what changes he should reasonably make.
Instead, he came in guns blazing, deciding that he knew what he would do to fix problems he didn’t even know existed. Instead of cutting jobs with a surgical knife to minimize disruption to overall operations, Musk waded in with a shillelagh. He began swinging wildly, cutting jobs hither and yon with little thought given to the company’s day-to-day functionality.
And it’s not as if Twitter was a highly functional machine before Elon Musk came along. The platform’s architecture has been held together by wishes and prayers for years. How long can it hold up like that, especially with a staff that’s been cut to the bone and perhaps beyond?
The new “Twitter Blue” has been, as predicted by virtually everyone, an utter clusterf**k. It’s spawned so many corporate parody accounts that Eli Lilly saw its stock tank because of what turned out to be the mother of all parody tweets. Not only did Eli Lilly’s stock plummet, costing the company and its shareholders billions, it took the stocks of other insulin makes with it.
Yeah, I’d feel awful for them if they weren’t already guilty of price-gouging on a drug that was meant to be free in the first place.
I have a soft spot for the fake Glenn Greenwald account, though the idea of Tucker Carlson nudes leave me cold.
This is all humorous in the abstract, but there are some very serious real-world consequences that Elon Musk is singularly responsible for. I’d be very surprised if Eli Lilly and other companies don’t try to hold Musk legally liable for damages suffered. And they should.
Ladies and gentleman, start your lawyers!!
As if all that wasn’t enough, after the layoffs Musk has decided to turn Twitter headquarters into a high-tech sweatshop- long hours, high pressure, even higher expectations. Sounds like a GREAT place to work, doesn’t it.
Memo to Elon Musk: If you kill half the crew on a ship and throw them overboard, you can expect the remaining crew to pick up the slack by rowing twice as fast. Eventually you’re going to burn them out. Then they’ll mutiny, kill you, and throw your sorry ass overboard.
Of course, you may discover this too late, but just in time to see your $44 billion going up in smoke. Because when all is said and done, you don’t know a thing about running a business. You’re a disruptor, and all you really know how to do is burn things down.
Twitter was a perfectly serviceable platform before you dumped your $44 billion into the till and took over. By time you’re done it may not be worth the price of a four-shot large mocha latte at a coffee shop in Union Square.
And you’ll have only your arrogant self to blame.
"You'd think someone with $44 Billion wouldn't be so &*^%$#@ stupid"
Actually, since it is patently impossible for anyone to actually earn a billion dollars, I take it for granted that they are all that fucking stupid. Indeed, because they actually DO believe they've earned that kind of money.
The one company that Muskie directly manages is Tesla, and it too is a dumpster fire of a place to work.
Someone went through a litany of insults of Musk that got posted on FB. The only one I remember is the one I leave you with: "Space Karen."