The idle elite

I’m sometimes linked to Twitter (sorry, I mean X) threads. It’s usually updates on the war in Ukraine, because Twitter is still the default medium if you want to see Russian tanks merrily tossing their turrets. That’s fine, I guess, if a little weird—why post on a medium where the proprietor is an unhinged plutocrat who is clearly aligned against you?—but every now and then I click on a link to the birdsite and it looks like some people are still on there discussing tech of all topics?

At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site. Since the takeover almost a year ago they’ve fired everyone who cared, they’ve invited back 4chan, kiwifarms, and sundry other threat actors, they’ve started revenue sharing with the rape peddlers and insurrectionists, they’ve given priority lanes to every paying NFT and AI grifter, and even outright blamed the jews for their bad finances. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list!

So if you’ve actually stuck around for all that you have proven, conclusively and publicly, that you think your personal gain trumps public good. You’ve asked yourself “is this the last straw for me?” every time you’ve been stepped on and the answer was always “no, I enjoy the memes more than my clean conscience.” At this point I don’t particularly care where anyone goes: I’m on Mastodon with the other nerds but you can hang out with the popular kids over on BlueSky or with the influencers on Threads if you want, but I just can’t fathom anyone staying and debasing themselves on X-Twitter. Especially tech folks, because the links and discussions are already better on Mastodon and have been for a long time.

Maybe you feel like you have a megaphone. That it’s hard to walk away from a big number, even if you know the place sucks and the people listening now are mostly desperate blue-tick assholes. That’s a choice you can make, I guess! But if you have a follower count in the thousands and have ever complained that rich people aren’t pulling their weight, or that elites acting in their self-interest is bad for society at large, you should probably take a long hard look in the mirror tonight.