Blue Bird

 It grinds on me, a little bit, that I can no longer automatically post these blog posts on Twitter. I used to be able to shout out to the world from my comfortable little corner of Al Gore's Internet using the amplification supplied by that little blue bird.

I still call it Twitter, but journalists and the like are now prone to referring to it as "X, formerly known as Twitter." And the benign and not-so-oft putting verb "tweeted" has been replaced by "posted." The fun, it would seem, has gone along with the thrill. Just like my automatic posts. 

It's a business deal. Much like the way Tech-Daddy Google swooped in way back in 2003 to devour Blogger. I am certain there were Blogger folks who reacted in a similar way to Twitter zealots when their machine was engulfed by a giant. This was just before yours truly began scribbling on this outlet, so I didn't notice the way the furniture was arranged or the wiring was any different. 

Until Elongated Mush paid four billion dollars to spoil everyone's good time. He took away that little blue bird and replaced it with an unknown quantity from an algebra book. He let the Nazis back on. He started using it to promote his own scary world view. This little corner where people used to gather to complain about the red carpet fashions and the red hatted fascists has been converted to a place where I now regularly get ads for The Epoch Times sprinkled into my timeline. For those of you were unfamiliar, as I was when it first started to appear, The Epoch Times is a media conglomerate that likes its news the way we drive here in America: to the far right. They like the unvaccinated, QAnon, election denier angle on things. I don't claim to know a lot about computer algorithms, but it seems to me that the clicks I click on the artist formerly known as Twitter should be bringing me kinder, gentler left wing content rather than the January 6 apologists and fans of a certain former game show host. 

Alas, the new owner of this former bastion of free speech is currently busy twisting this once snarky place into a snarling vision of his own ugly imagination. A place where lies get amplified and anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes or business doing so gets banished. And of course there are cat videos. 

Why don't I just leave? Because I don't want to leave when there is a point to be made in the name of truly free speech. There are still those who fight the good fight, calling out the nastiness and hypocrisy. It's free, after all.

And sometimes there are cat videos.