Let this sink in: It looks as if Elon Musk has made a royal f**k-up of this Twitter takeover. It’s no longer just an issue of freedom of speech versus so-called liberal fascism. There are countless arguments going either way anyway.

It’s the damn inconsistency of everything. A businessperson such as Musk, familiar with the basic principles of successful marketing, including self-marketing, should have known better. 

The process had mixed messages from the word ‘go’. And now, so much damage has been done to the Twitter brand that it seriously looks as if the breach of trust with a large part of the public has become irreparable.

Can this mess be resolved? No one knows. The situation might look a bit better in a few days’ time.

Or it might look much worse.

From a personal perspective, as a participant on Twitter for many years, I feel badly let down. I cannot bring myself — not yet — to close my account. I stand to lose the loyalty and companionship of the base of the 59,000 followers I have built up over a long period (even though, admittedly, some of them may be bots).

But I have stopped tweeting. 

Some call this “quiet quitting”. That’s the new buzzword, and it applies.

Point is, I just don’t feel at home there anymore. The bird that used to fly freely has now been caged, and that’s simply too terrible to even think of. I did not plan this fiasco, and I had no part in it. 

I didn’t want Twitter to end. I always loved the slight edge of anarchy the platform gave me, the hint of madness and eccentricity, the bizarre mixture of opinions and ideas.

I was even a bit disappointed, a few years ago, when they raised the 140-character ceiling to 280. (It was the sheer brevity of the old Twitter that challenged my creativity.) But still I carried on, regularly updating my posts, checking the trending topics first thing every morning. 

(Image: Supplied)

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Whatever the length of the posts, Twitter remained cutting edge, out there on the fringes, weird and wonderful. Twitter was always the first place where one could find out what was really happening. It usually got the goods a few hours before the regular media picked up on anything.

In short, I liked Twitter because it was a totally wacky place to hang out. 

There is a difference between wacky, though, and the mindless insanity of what’s happening there right now.

Musk’s blatant cadre deployment, his mistreatment of people, his weird notion that you can become an influencer by paying for it — or that anyone can become an influencer by paying for it… All this shit goes right against the unwritten constitution of everything Twitter used to stand for in my mind. 

It’s no longer a place of free exchange. You either pay with money or you pay with your soul. Besides, the fact that Musk has opened the floodgates of free-for-all racism is more than just merely offensive, it’s downright monotonous. 

Musk has turned a playful, colourful place into a drab dictatorship. As a tweeter, I used to feel as if I were in touch with the whole world. Now, I’m beholden to one man. It’s a solo gig. And I don’t like the set list.

So, as I said before, I’m quietly quitting. If you are reading this column, imagine me whispering, not speaking out loud. This column is not written by a fanatic shouting from the rooftops. It’s a personal message to you, dear reader. 

And that, of course, is one reason I’m still leaving my Twitter profile intact — at least for the time being: it’s because I want to give my followers a whispered message as well. I want to provide them with a clue where to find me, should my account disappear. I’m not providing the exact link, that would be too easy. But they can find me on Tumblr if they do a bit of digging. 

Yes, TUMBLR. You heard me correctly. For about a year or two now, I have had a little thingy going on there. Believe it or not, Tumblr still very much exists, and, for what it’s worth, they seem to have relaxed their ban on nudity (nudge nudge, wink wink). 

One last thought on Twitter. Shortly after I joined the family of the little blue bird, I started writing a novel. I tweeted it on Twitter, sentence by sentence, tweet by tweet, until it was complete. It’s a rather wacky story of the future of social media as I saw it, the joys and the pitfalls, the dangers and the collective delusions.

It’s a huge topic to tackle, and I’m not sure if I pulled it off, because obviously it’s not a very long story. I mean, publishing an opus like Ulysses one sentence at a time would have taken half a lifetime.

After completing it, I forgot all about that little text. I never bothered to send the manuscript to a publisher. Maybe I should do so now. Why the hell not? If it happens to become a bestseller, I might even end up fabulously rich. Wouldn’t that be epic?

But this I promise, and you better let this sink in, Elon Musk: Whatever happens, I won’t share a f**king cent of my royalties with you. DM