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Thank God for Elon Musk!
Elon has been shaking things up lately.
Especially for Twitter users.
Many people had gotten used to thinking of Twitter as a sort of public space, a digital town square where every reasonable person could find their own soapbox, and perhaps even a few people to stop and listen to them once in a while.
And this sort of fuzzy thinking was possible because the service was operating behind an institutional facade, a murky corporate veil that served to shield the average user from the details of how or why Twitter worked the way it did.
But then Musk came along.
And by purchasing Twitter in its entirety — lock, stock and barrel, as they say — and then making (and often quickly unmaking) a whole string of idiosyncratic decisions about how to run it — Elon has revealed Twitter for what it is now, and indeed always has been: a fragile and largely ungoverned digital communications service serving up its users for whatever purpose suits its overlord, and following few if any rules other than the ones it makes up for itself.
And at the same time this purchase has revealed our American society for what it has been for some time now: a billionaire factory, designed expressly for the purpose of funneling boatloads of bucks to relatively few individuals, making them rich enough to do…
