This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

 The reason that we cannot have nice things is very simple: We are not nice. When I say that "we" are not nice, I mean it in an aggregate way. The way I talk to a classroom full of kids even when I know there is that one kid with wide eyes who is as shocked as anyone could be by the behavior going on around him. In the model I am about to discuss, these are the folks who are posting videos of their kittens doing curious things, or passing along the picture of the giraffe hugging an ostrich. The classroom I am talking about is Twitter, that sandbox that turns out to be full of surprises left by those cute kittens. And giraffes and ostriches. 

It doesn't take long on Twitter to find something that might rub you the wrong way. The very nature of the quick-hit two hundred forty character blast of emotionally charged rhetoric is designed that way. If you're not offended at some point, you must be doing something wrong. 

Like the chuckleheads who jumped on the whiff of a made up story about the attack on Paul Pelosi. The one that suggested that there was "more than meets the eye" about the assault. The ones who are looking to stir up controversy in places where it is wholly unwarranted. Twitter is the place where twits go to tweet because they have an axe to grind and access to a keyboard. It is the nature of the little blue bird beast. Once something like that makes it into the pool, it doesn't take long for the aforementioned idjits to swarm like a school of mildly sentient sharks, passing along a lie the way Joseph Goebbels instructed. Such is the nature of the Twitterverse. 

This is when the grownups tend to come into the room, bellowing "What's going on here?" as those with bad intent scurry to the dark corners. Apologies and deletions are made. Wild talk about how some people are going to lose their privileges, but not much gets done. And for a while, behavior improves. By a while, I mean until the grownups leave. 

The trouble about this particular example is that the "grownup" in question just so happens to be the guy who owns the shop. Elon Musk was the user in question who promoted the lie about the attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House. Then, when those who remained to look on the mess that he had stirred up, he deleted his post. Users were already leaving the platform before Mister Musk paid forty-four billion dollars for it. 

Seems like this is no place for cute kittens or humans with scruples.