Although this was somewhat unexpected, something strayed across my screen this afternoon (on Tuesday) which reminded me of a former situation where the same logic applied. Apparently, the highly amusing Mr. Musk has decided, allegedly as an anti-bot move, to restrict the ability of members to vote to only those who have the blue check mark - in other words, his paying customers. Is this a good move?

My own response would be "yes", based upon the historical model of the early United States, which I was reading about a while back. Here, it seems, after the revolution, the only enfranchised people were those who were entitled to do so by virtue of owning substantial property (a term which, I assume, includes personal wealth); all others were excluded. Some people will surely scream immediately that this is "elitist" and "undemocratic", but as TFM [2] has been saying for some time now, our problem all around the world is precisely the mess that such pointless electoral inclusiveness has caused - bringing into the "democratic" process people with no skin in the game, who leap at the opportunity to entitle themselves to the wealth of others by legal means - all the selfish, lazy and jealous members of society who want a better life but either have no idea how or are simply too indolent; as I remarked previously, these people are always "dependent" and represent something of an "albatross" around the neck of wider society. Clearly, the Founding Fathers understood how these people had been managed and manipulated in Europe, and wanted to try to prevent it in the fledgeling United States.

As TFM might say, "Democracy", as we understand the term nowadays, is an obvious cancer upon society. It has evolved into a system by which interested parties can achieve power by forming a disparate electoral coalition from minority groups, fanning their grievances and pandering to them for temporal power, so to speak, under the pretence of representing them. It makes no practical sense to include in the process people who make no material contribution, but only take financial benefits; the ultimate result must be impoverishment for all, so I am completely with TFM on this, although my own experience in both the UK (where banks refuse to lend to help people set up businesses, for example) and more latterly in South Korea (where, as elsewhere in East Asia, a substantial financial deposit has to be demonstrated even before business capital is discussed) has been far from businesslike. The pandering politicians, who benefit from the entitled voting of an increasing number of hangers-on, will even bring immigrants in by any means with a view to enfranchising them and consolidating their electoral base. We are seeing this in both North American and Europe right now.

Getting back to Elon, of course, the logic of what he has done is obvious: most "users" of Twitter are really "abusers", in the sense that they can engage, for free, in what used to be called a "flame war" in almost real time due to the company's powerful network of servers; however, most of these people are precisely the kind of entitled narcissists mentioned above - who expect a quality service to be provided at no cost to themselves (because they want to acknowledge no responsibilities), take an entitled Left-wing viewpoint and clearly do not value the concept of "freedom of speech", because responsible people firstly avoid making unsubstantiated claims and wild accusations, and secondly because the precise value of "freedom of speech" is that the truth can be told, something that irresponsible and delusional members of society shun like Kryptonite. Twitter is a business, and a big one at that, with a great level of social exposure, and some signs that members are responsible in their behaviour needs to be displayed; the less responsible members, who complained so bitterly and vociferously when the monthly fee was introduced, are precisely those whose behaviour is so socially undesirable. As they bring no financial benefit to the company, perhaps Elon is right to introduce a higher-entitlement paid tier, to reduce the influence of those whose presence is so undesirable.

We should also recognise, perhaps, that Twitter is far from alone in this experience: the other obvious exemplar is Tik Tok, a free video platform inhabited by a wide spectrum of unhinged individuals, from whose dubious output a number of YouTube commentators have built their own little ecosystems pointing out the toxic eccentricity and delusion. [3] One has to ask oneself why such people are tolerated there when there are other free outlets for the kind of instantaneous video content, which is most often uploaded directly from the individual's cell phone, and the answer, I think, is that "someone" wants a constant stream of unhinged individuals as a form of normalising propaganda - to condition a certain segment of the viewing population into accepting this behaviour as "normal", with a narcissistic snowball effect in that the viewers then try to become "influencers", taking those they have seen as examples, and generating more of the same; I assume that there is also a substantial revenue stream which results from this. Psychologically, however, it is obviously unhealthy and the "influence" is woefully negative. My point, however, is that these "influencers" are able to do it all for free, appear to display little responsibility and do not appear to be constrained by the network.

I was surprised to read about this at El Reg [1], but it made sense after the purchase of the company; Elon clearly has a lot of cruft to clear out. Similarly over at Google, including a raft of basically useless staff who, themselves, have been making videos about how they have almost constant meetings and never seem to actually do anything, but who like the lifestyle and all the free stuff that the company was providing. [4] How will they manage now that they actually have to find a real job and work?

Personally, I had been with Twitter for about ten years when Elon bought the company, but the state of the thing made me not want to go there often - until he came along, and suddenly everything became highly amusing, so I wish him well. I am sure that we will continue to learn a lot about what it was up to through his intermittent revelations as time progresses. If you want people to act responsibly and take something seriously, paid exclusivity rather than free inclusivity is highly effective.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/28/twitter_verified/

[2] Turd Flinging Monkey

[3] See, for example, Taylor the Fiend at https://www.mgtow.tv/@Taylor_The_Fiend

[4] See Matt Walsh's take here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfB4S7QHH3w