The Elon Problem
What happened to twitter, and why it’s (probably) terminal
Have you scrolled Twitter — sorry, I mean X — lately?
If you’re new to the platform, perhaps you don’t notice much of a change.
For people like me though, who have been around a while, the differences are stark.
It’s quiet. I used to liken twitter to a public high street or a party — bustling with people who you could strike up a conversation with on a whim. Now it gives me that strange, eerie feeling you get when you walk back from the shops at 10pm. Nobody’s around. Everything looks a little uncanny. The few strangers you meet, you eye with suspicion. “Are you a real follower,” you might think, “or are you a sex bot?”
Like a lot of people, I grew my twitter following during the Covid pandemic. With so many of us locked inside and on furlough from work, it seemed logical: we scrolled, we connected, we made friends, and we decided that, now we’ve got some time on our hands, maybe we should try writing a book.
There was a camaraderie, a sort of espirit de corps — a sense that we were all in this together, and we were ready to create change. The publishing industry was notoriously opaque, but we wanted to fix it. Shine some light. Twitter was the vehicle.
