SSome wars cannot be won. It may be hard to accept this fact when you are still on the battlefield, but if you somehow manage to step out even for a moment, the truth will become clear. You’ve lost, your side has lost, the villains have won and, if anything, you should have run away a long time ago.
My own sad realization about Twitter, now known as X, came shortly after the US elections in 2024. I had spent most of that year lying to myself, ignoring the increasing amount of abuse I was receiving and the fact that no one read my linked pieces anymore, but that week I realized I had to stop. I had to leave X forever.
Most of the British political spectrum chose to remain there, both in November and the following year. Everyone had their own reasons: some felt their reach would be reduced without it, others wanted to be on all possible platforms available. Some said they liked the intensity of the debate, others did not believe other forums could ever be so thrilling or omnipresent.
Of course, most of those justifications were nonsense. Man is a creature of habit and ego. If there is an app that you have been using every day for years, it will be hard for you to give it up, especially if it provides you with both adrenaline and dopamine. If you have a lot of followers on that app, and it makes you feel important, it will be hard for you to leave voluntarily.
I am saying this not to criticize, but to validate my behavior. There were months when I lied to myself and said pitifully: “We’re not stuck here with Elon Musk – he’s stuck here with us!” When I knew it I was just shaking my legs. Being in Washington DC when Donald Trump won the election was such a shock to the system that I had no choice but to do something drastic. If I had not been in the dense forest on that fateful night, would I have been able to stop? Perhaps. it’s hard to say.
However, I gave up then, and since then I have watched, with ever slack jaw, as Musk continues to pour poison into the well, and people I know, love, and respect continue to happily drink from it. When Musk publicly endorsed far-right activist Tommy Robinson, some of them quit, but many did not. Some of them realized they had to leave when they saw neo-Nazis using and abusing the newly monetized blue-tick system, but many of them stayed.
Recently, we Bluesky users have seen a few arrivals to our little oasis, after Grok, X’s own AI assistant, was used to create a fantasy of sexually abusing women and children. Still, many of them saw thousands upon thousands of men requesting photos of kids in tiny bikinis covered in “doughnut glaze,” and they didn’t budge.
Some of them argued that people must stay and fight, and that they cannot retreat into their comfort zones – but they were wrong. You may or may not choose to use BlueSky instead of X: as with everywhere, it’s an app with pros and cons. Instead you can go on Instagram, or follow the threads faithfully, or start writing your thoughts on smooth rocks and then throw them on various windows in your neighborhood. It doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that Government ministers cannot make policy announcements in a place where AI-generated, near-nude pictures of young girls are displayed. Journalists cannot share their work in a space that systematically promotes white supremacy. The minds of regular people may be slowly but surely getting distorted by MAGA propaganda.
We all like to think that we have power and agency, and that if we try hard enough we might manage to turn the situation around – but X is dead a long time ago. The only winning move now is to walk away from the chessboard, and make peace with it forever.
-
Do you have any opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email for consideration for publication in our Letters section, please click here.
