How Twitter changed my life

And why I’m joining Substack...

Elon Musk is ruining Twitter.

That seems to be the near-universal belief among the platform’s users. If you skim through Twitter today, you’ll see even those previously enthused by Elon’s takeover moaning about the twit-in-chief. If you can navigate the new 600-tweet scrolling limit, of course.

However, while some dance around the bonfire, I’m not a particularly cheerful onlooker.

Yes, I dislike Elon Musk – his propensity for wild conspiracy theories, his arrogance and his dizzying wealth – but I was hoping that Twitter would survive his adolescent-billionaire instincts. 

I was hoping that he would get bored or distracted; that his bravado would face an antidote in the tedious bureaucracy of one of the world’s largest social media platforms. 

Alas, no. 

After buying Twitter for an inflated $44 billion, Elon has hacked lumps out of his own asset, reducing the company’s workforce by 80% and seemingly pushing its servers to the brink (hence the introduction of this new scrolling limit). 

His efforts to monetise the site have also been erratic and poorly executed – seemingly driven by his bitter, high school rage over the popularity of a few prominent liberals on the platform. 

Musk’s ‘own the libs’ business strategy has cost him nearly $30 billion, and his decision to sell the blue Twitter verification badge to anyone who can afford $8-a-month has turned the platform into a veritable sea of fake news and crypto clowns. 

For many / most people, the story is simply that a very rich man has decided to incinerate his favourite new toy.

Fair enough; I can see why that is funny. 

But the Musk-Twitter meltdown is personally sad (not just because I spend a fair amount of time on there), and I suspect plenty of other people will feel the same.

My family lineage runs through the north of England; through small towns and manual jobs. My family is not particularly political or literary. My life was filled with talk of football (a passion that remains, despite Liverpool’s more recent woes) and cars, not philosophers and politicians.

Twitter changed that. It allowed me to find people interested in politics – an interest of mine that emerged during sixth form – and to build a community with them.

I set up a free online publication before heading off to university that quickly gained dozens of writers, all of whom were recruited from Twitter.

Twitter allowed me to enter a vast virtual town hall – populated by journalists and political leaders and cultural idols – and to engage alongside them. It allowed me to break out of my intellectual straight jacket and interact with new ideas and people from radically different backgrounds.

I didn’t have an aristocratic uncle who could slide me surreptitiously into a work experience scheme, nor the social and business acumen taught around the dinner table at JP Morgan households.

Twitter is my professional and in some ways my personal network – the playing field on which I have been able to showcase my work, to an audience exponentially larger than anything provided by my upbringing. 

So, while Twitter is puerile and while scrolling through my feed does occasionally feel like a funeral procession of bad news, it is a democratising force. It allowed me to surmount my outsider status and break into an industry that has been historically dominated by the sons and daughters of privilege. 

And I fear for the kids who are born into similar circumstances, whose opportunities are shrivelling in the heat of Musk’s bonfire.