Now I Am Become Musk, Destroyer of Platforms

Elon's naked colonialism and the erasure of everything

In an announcement of brain-strafing, Silicon Valley pitch-speak—insulting to the intelligence and experience of anyone who has been using the platform for more than a minute—the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, announced the death of Twitter and the (still) birth of X, its unformed replacement.

Whatever Twitter—X—becomes remains to be seen, and it will worth spending a moment or two grieving for what it was, and maybe I’ll do that in a later post.

For now, we are witnessing a totally precedented act of invasion by the sort of representative of power who, in another age, would have rolled up on the shores of a foreign land with a fleet of boats, declared it terra nullius, and proceeded to shoot the locals, while disembarking a crew of mutually supportive foot soldiers and intellectuals, all convinced of their own superiority over the people they were displacing, and setting about renaming everything in sight, including the land itself, as the blood spilled and flowed.

Musk is just an…