There’s a scene in the original movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, in which the time traveler tries to warn the Eloi not to listen to the call of the Morlocks that is summoning them to become food for the Morlocks. I have been trying to do the same thing, essentially, with regard to Xcrement – my neologism for what was once Twitter before Elon Musk rebranded it with his curiously fetishized “X.”

Maybe because it rhymes with opaque?

This is the first of many reasons why Xcrement is something best flushed. – because it’s a sure sign you’re involved with something that is probably not above-board when you aren’t allowed to understand how it works. No one really knows how X works. Only that there is an opaque algorithm that “boosts” the visibility of some but not others. It is something like hoping an arbitrary deity will hear your prayers and – perhaps – deign to favor you. It is favor that is ephemeral, too. One day, the things you post on Xcrement are ineffably transmitted via the algorithm; the next day, the algorithm frowns and you find you’re talking to the proverbial hand.

Xcrement is fundamentally all about money, not free speech. More precisely, it is set up to be a for-profit narcissism contest. Let’s see who can most effectively monetize self-promotion. Make a buck off the rubes by getting as many to “follow” as possible. This is to free speech what bleach in the eyes is to vision. It isn’t free, obviously. Like Musk himself, it is all about extracting money, not creating something of value – such as the free dissemination of information.

This goes beyond the vulgar monetization of communication, too. Xcrement is what Twitter was in that it is a vehicle for limiting communication in the literal sense. What you are reading right now cannot be posted on Xcrement because it is not truncated. Xcrement does not permit anyone to communicate in the way adults once did, because it is not possible to communicate as adults once did when you are limited to a couple of sentences at most. It is almost certainly true that Xcrement/Twitter was originally created in order to diminish adult conversation. Xcrement/Twitter would not allow the preamble to the Declaration of Independence to be posted because it is “too long” for the gnat-like attention span it was created to foster. What’s clearly wanted is a kind of running battle of quips and sound-bites, not thoughtful discussion. 

Xcrement is also full of bots, which ought to be warrant enough for humans to retire from the scene. Is there anything more ridiculous – more pathetic – than grow men and women engaging in sound-bite battles with bots? Keep in mind that Xcrement not only allows this, it encourages this. It does nothing to clear the muddied waters – as in, separate the bots from the humans – because it wants the humans wasting their lives “talking” to the bots. It is possible this is because – as some have claimed – Xcrement is using the bots to train the AI that Musk wants to replace the humans. That this could even be a possibility ought to be enough to get people to stay away from Xcrement.

But they don’t. They continue to play with it – apparently because they are like Charlie Brown and think that maybe this time, Lucy (Musk, the algorithm) will let me kick the football. I’ll be seen! I’ll become an influencer! I’ll make a lot of money! Do you see the common denominator?

Xcrement mirrors its owner’s pathological narcissism and infantilism. Musk – an aging, flabby-faced 50-something guy – still sees himself as a snarky teenager who is going to get lots of “bitches.” This is literally what he recently said, by the way.

That plus “party.”

Thanks, but no.

I’d rather have an intelligent discussion with real people – no matter how many characters it takes and without some opaque algorithm deciding whether it gets “boosted.”

. . .

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