Elon Musk's Cynical, Self-Serving Twitter Blue Grift — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

I briefly blocked Elon Musk on Twitter so that I would no longer be subjected to his juvenile trolling and painful attempts at comedy. Musk, unfortunately, has replaced Donald Trump as Twitter’s main character, which means that you unfortunately have to pay attention to him and his endless demands for attention and validation if you’re going to be on Twitter.

For me Twitter is a necessary evil. This site has been struggling commercially and financially since its inception so I unfortunately do not have the luxury of being able to give up a fairly major form of promotion like Twitter.

So I remain on Twitter despite my intense dislike for its new owner and the culture he has created since taking over.

Part of that culture involves introducing Twitter Blue, a service that affords users an opportunity to purchase blue checkmarks for a monthly fee.

Before Musk took something that already sucked and was intensely problematic and destructive and made it much worse, you needed to actually accomplish something to be considered worthy of that mark of distinction.

The blue checkmark was a meritocracy. You couldn’t buy it. You had to earn it.

Because the Twitter feeds of people with blue checks were, by definition, people of note and Juggalos of distinction like myself, they were also people who felt that Musk was a narcissistic piece of shit with a creepy cult of personality. They consequently tend to respond to Musk’s increasingly idiotic tweets with irritation, aggravation and anger.

People who earned the blue check were liable to tell Musk and his sycophantic troll army to go fuck themselves so the Tesla “visionary” decided that he would empower his worshippers. And Musk would do so in a way that made Twitter more confusing and mercenary while also feeding his enormous ego.

Musk didn’t give blue checks to his cultists. Instead he made them pay for the privilege. For a modest monthly fee, seemingly anyone could get a blue check that looked exactly like the ones that Tom Hanks, President Biden and Salman Rushdie have.

Don’t you want the same status as Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift? The only way to determine whether or not BidenDrinksPee42069 earned his blue checkmark through contributions to society through the arts, politics or academia or whether he paid a billionaire eight dollars a month is by clicking on the blue check itself.

Users who subscribe to Twitter Blue are by definition Musk supporters. They’re supporting Twitter’s bottom line and survival with their money but on a less literal level they’re also supporting his vision for the site in a very real way.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the reply guys who answer every inane Elon Musk meme, joke or observation by effusively praising the South African for his wit, bravery and genius tend to have blue checkmarks and about forty-seven followers.

I make a point of clicking on those blue checkmarks in order to discover their provenance and about ninety-five percent of the time they have those shiny cyber-badges because they subscribe to Twitter Blue, not because they’ve made substantive contributions to society.

Twitter Blue creates the illusion that idiots who can’t stop praising Musk no matter how idiotically and obnoxiously he behaves are a collection of impressive achievers when they’re just fans of him and his awful new conception of Twitter as a safe space for the worst people in the world to spread hate.

Making blue checkmarks of distinction indistinguishable from those people can just buy might make Musk feel more popular and validated but they’re just one of many, many things making the site WAY worse.

Will it become bad enough someday to get me to finally leave? I honestly don’t know, but I sure would love to live in a world where I’m not reliant upon the Elon Musks of the world for anything.

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