Disciple Syndrome: Why We Worship Brands And How To Stop It

We need to abandon the idea of role models altogether and find new routes to personal development. The notion that here in the 2020s, you could put a savvy entrepreneur in front of a large group of naive hopefuls, and NOT end up with one billionaire and a queue outside a food-bank, is, frankly, ridiculous.

If social media has accomplished any useful Darwinian purpose, it's been to educate us in our own stupidity. One of the most sobering things social media has taught us, is that we no longer need people to be the offspring of a deity or to perform miracles in order to garner our worship. All we need them to do is:

a) Have a soapbox.
b) Agree with us.

Once they've met these two conditions, we will blindly applaud and submit to every self-serving action they take, however much we suffer in the process. A brief, demonstrational interlude...

No Choice For Twitter: It's Paywalls or Bust

In mid 2016, when OnlyFans set up as a simple, paywalled Twitter clone and invited its handful of initial entertainers to "earn money doing what you do already", it was really saying: "come and monetise what Twitter is too stupid to realise has value". Six and a half years later, Twitter still hasn't joined those dots...

If you haven't been riveted to Twitter this week, you've been missing the greatest real-life soap opera in Internet history. Barely has there been time to digest one plot climax, before the next one dropped onto the timelines in a pyre of flames. And at the centre of the story, one Elon Musk - the new owner whose leadership has been so breathtakingly abominable that there's now a conspiracy theory claiming he deliberately set out to destroy the company.

We have to remind ourselves that this is probably the first time in Musk's life when the people upon whom he relies for survival have been in a position to flick him the vees. His core mistake, it seems, has been a failure to realise that the millions of people who provide his site's real product - the entertainment - are not on his payroll and don't care a jot about his needs or desires. The obvious solution is to put them on the payroll. Make them care. Make Twitter mean something to them. Make it into their job.

Musk's Twitter Crisis Deepens, But There's Still Hope

If Twitter began a smooth but rapid evolution towards customisable paywalling, with drastic improvements to the search interface, it could absolutely batter Google as an ecosystem.

When Elon Musk declared, on 28th October, that "Comedy is now legal on Twitter", he evidently meant the "now" very literally indeed. Less than a week later his moderation nervecentre would embark on a run of suspensions, banning verified Twitter users for what can only be described as "assaults on a billionaire's ego".

Over the past few days, a parody trend has seen blue-tickers with large-to-huge fanbases changing their screen names to Elon Musk, replacing their profile pictures with Musk portraits, and then (mostly) posting satirical Tweets that mocked the new boss, his private life and his calamitous platform purchase. Here's an example from the now suspended comic artist Jeph Jacques...

The Benny Test: The Value of Twitter Laid Bare

As Elon persists with his mission to persuade Twitter that $96 per annum is a good deal, research suggests he's lucky to be getting $0...

How much is Twitter worth? I don't mean to its owners. I mean to us, the general public who feed it. Why do I ask? Well, because in the wake of Elon Musk's $8 saga, we're seeing committed subscribers calling for their hero to roll out a charge across the entire platform. That is, to directly monetise the unverified users, as well as the verified.

Can Twitter Survive Elon Musk?

Few people appear to have recognised that Musk's intention to "prioritise paying users in replies, mentions and search" would equate to a soft shadowban for everyone else.

Who would have imagined, this time last year, that the latest global crisis in autumn 2022 would be a bitter bleating match over who gets to have a ball-bearing-sized blue badge next to their name on an Internet forum? The row, to which I'm colloquially referring as blue-tickgate, has been sparked within the first week of Elon Musk's tenure as Twitter boss, after the multi-billionaire mogul Tweeted this...