People migrated so easily to social media, because they felt like natives, deeming the Internet as their personal space!
Elon Musk walked into the Twitter headquarters with a sink in his hands following his takeover of the social media platform last month. Pic/Twitter
Don’t know about you, but there are restaurants/bars I don’t go to anymore—knowing that the annoyingly chatty owner hangs out there all the time. So you’re forced to devote your night out towards her social life as well.
Technically, she owns the place, and you’re the guest. While you pay for your time there, you seek full freedom and anonymity in return. Which is also the reason I prefer crowds at bars, over the stuffiness of a house-party, anyway (in case you feel stuck!).
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What does the Internet feel like? The same as airy, socially borderless places that belong to no one in particular—everybody is both the consumer, and the creator. No one is specifically designated as higher, or lower.
Sure, there’s the Brahmanical thread/janau for the verification/blue tick on social media, but it offers no special returns/rewards online, let alone in the real world.
But, what has Twitter seemed like, ever since Elon Musk took ownership of the social media platform, only less than a fortnight before I write this?
It’s like living under Musk Sarkar—a personal project of the overbearing, omnipresent, baby-faced billionaire, making/remaking rules/regulations, on a whim, by the day, for hundreds of millions. Because now it’s the ‘mai-baap’ Musk House you’re in. So, he tells you about new, paid/free badges/ticks, info in bio, suspension rules, etc., that become operational, and defunct, almost simultaneously! The circus-like buzz around his godly presence has seen Twitter activity/user base temporarily shoot up, no doubt.
Also, as a boss, he comes across as the cowboy CEO, with a fresh appointment letter that ordains him to believe that all that happened in the company before him must be mindless work of minions/morons. God knows that never goes down well.
Of course, I’m not referring to the massive layoffs at his newly adopted firm. Who are Twitter’s main employees, actually? You and I, with profiles/handles on the platform, who put ourselves out for each other, all day, while Twitter, as with all user-generated sites, ultimately benefits—doing nothing at all.
Why do we work for them? I suppose we feel strongly individualistic, powerful and liberated to be able to post whatever the hell we please. Because? I wanna!
The first time I recall hearing pot-smoking Musk’s opinion about social media was with Joe Rogan, I think, in 2018. Forget what he said, what I understood of it was that subjectively censorship is a slippery slope. Once you enter it (as Twitter and others had), there is no reasonable retreat. That apart, there is enough already in individual nations’ privacy, defamation, hate speech laws to deal with offenders, I suppose?
Except that over time, so many on Twitter in particular, often under the cloak of anonymity, hiding further behind virtual mobs/‘armies’, began to defecate so much in public that many others, unable to bear the stench, actually left, or at least started participating less and less.
For Musk, this isn’t the problem, and therefore his solutions are about something else—”free speech absolutism”, and “opening up the algorithm”, or transparency at the backend.
What’s the future of Twitter then? The same as with other such sites, isn’t it? Rests on what the next generation prefers, as we go along: Orkut— Facebook— Instagram— TikTok— Snapchat— Discord…
Twitter, with the smallest universe, is considered the Town Hall, chiefly because heads of states, no less, conduct hourly, public business here, and politicians with their ‘paploos’ play 24x7 propaganda.
If the public switches off, these blokes can just troll each other for their own entertainment, forever. Twitter discourse also survives because it is forced upon lazy, legacy press. By its own official classification, Twitter is a news platform, not social media; cornering its own gigantic share of fake, if not faltu, news—a menace alright.
Musk’s prime concern over Twitter, in that regard though, is to figure out ways to equate ‘citizen’ journalists with professional, trained scribes reporting for a living; directly answerable to their readers/viewers/editors/owners amidst strong libel laws. Next time, as the need arises, try consulting a ‘citizen’ doctor, professor, lawyer, etc.
But a few words on Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), who turned Tony Stark into a true story: Don’t get me wrong, I admire him as much as his strongest cheerleader. To Indians, he’s also the entrepreneur who made real engineering (that includes manufacturing) uber cool.
More specifically, he’s the non-desi student, brilliantly blending science and commerce streams, towards an outcome for the humanities, possibly beyond earth. Compare him to say Mark Zuckerberg, lording over the planet, affecting global politics, because he originally came up with the idea of rating girls on a site!
Only that for Musk, also addicted to lowkey stand-up comedy and live streams of consciousness on his timeline, Twitter seems a $44 billion hobby.
What’s cool about his takeover is a sneak peek into the world’s wealthiest man taking the most important consumer-facing decisions on the fly! Like how it must be inside ministries of despots, and corporate boardrooms of similar czars.
Cooler still is to watch him casually play along: “We will keep doing dumb things over the month!” He couldn’t give a shit—least of all, take himself seriously, let alone his global position. It’s a pretty chilled, American trait. Musk is South African born; he can’t apply for the US president though.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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