A line in the sand

I haven’t blogged for over a year. This is predominantly due to the fact that my wife very nearly died in September 2023 and her life-saving surgery revealed stage 4 bowel cancer. She was given between 6-18 months to live.

Thanks to the incredible treatment she has received at the Royal Marsden we have just celebrated a Christmas we did not think we would see together…. And we hope for more of them.

That explains the lack of introspection.

I decided over the Christmas period that I would leave Twitter. It had become too toxic. I drafted a farewell note to Elon Musk but on reflection decided not to publish it as what would be the point? I merely withdrew.

But with the events of today I changed my mind, posted and deleted the app.

It won’t make a difference but in not voicing my opposition, I had tacitly accepted the march of totalitarianism. 

I reproduce it here as I want to show that I spoke up, without driving any additional traffic to the mess that Twitter has become.

Dear @elonmusk, as you are someone who pretends to care about free speech, I want to call bullshit to your face before I leave. Twitter was a genuine marketplace of ideas, it is now  a toxic bin fire of hatred and division.

I don’t know what harm was done to you to make you this solipsistic, needy and vicious. It was clearly significant and I am sorry you suffered. But no amount of personal pain can justify the harm you are doing on a global scale.

You profess to champion free speech… which is a cornerstone of the enlightenment and essential to the scientific method. The free exchange of ideas drives progress. Yet your actions reveal the lie. You have actively sought to bury truth under a mountain of falsehoods. 

You have transformed Twitter into a monetised megaphone for morons. You use it to amplify lies, stifle debate, and to enrich yourself. Your support of Donald Trump is a transaction. You have bought power cheap and fancy yourself as a tech-bro disrupter of governments.

But there is a line between disruption and vandalism. In your active support of racists, liars, dangerous fantasists and proto-fascists, you have crossed it by some distance. Tommy Robinson isn’t a hero of the oppressed, he is a grubby little racist. 

In claiming that Ukraine started the war, Trump today revealed himself to be an active Russian agent. He has been parroting the doublespeak lines of Russian media for some time as do his acolytes in this country, Tice and Farage. 

You are not the plucky outsider challenging the status quo in the interests of all. You are a global bully fomenting violence and striking out in all directions to make the world around you match the pain inside you.

I said above I cannot imagine the pain you have suffered. It is a shame you neither see nor care for the pain your own actions cause. I shall leave you to rot in your own fetid mess. I’m off to BlueSky.