Elon Musk Dance Contest

My students predicted the shitshow at Twitter.

Unplugged from Twitter and everything else. At Christmas, I spent 13 days at my off the grid cabin in Argentina, with my son and a lot of horses.

I’m on Twitter strike.

For years, I have asked myself, why are you pouring effort into Twitter? I have posted 10,200 times since I joined in 2009. Every year felt like less and less value for more and more grief.

The Elon arrived. When I was teaching in Portugal this spring, my most popular class by far was “Elon versus the Board.” I promised my students that we would gameplay the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. At that point it was just an idea, and a very good case study of how the information age works.

Elon had proposed buying Twitter for $44 billion dollars. I challenged my students: I will play Elon if you will play the board of Twitter, and interview me for the job. I prepared to defend Musk, they prepared to interrogate him.

This class was not a bunch of pushovers. These were graduate students from the ERASMUS program—a free exchange among European universities. That meant they were on average older than my other classes, with excellent English, and an appealing mixture of nationalities. I had students from France, Germany, Lithuania, Turkey, Denmark, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Holland, Slovakia, and Ukraine.

I was required to teach in English. With my other classes, made up of Portuguese undergraduates, I would sometimes break into Portuguese for clarity, like when reading a page from a manuscript, or quoting an author. With the ERASMUS students that wasn’t necessary; some of them spoke English better than I do and the rest were just fine.

I gave an opening statement about Leadership.

They replied with pesky questions.

How will you pay for it?

How will you decide who is banned?

How will you protect privacy?

Women? Minorities? The weak and vulnerable?

As Musk, I realized I needed to raise the stakes in the room. There were a lot of things going against me—I don’t have $44 billion dollars at all, I have no credible plan for profitability, and my doctrine of “free speech at all costs” seems like a shitshow waiting to happen.

So I decided to distract them with my blinding brilliance—on the dance floor. Whenever a Tesla factory opens, Musk shows up for the ribbon cutting ceremonies of and starts feeling the vibe. I studied the Shanghai, Berlin, and San Francisco factory openings for moves. In once of his more successful efforts, Musk appeared to dance with the drone that was filming him. But mostly it was bad. And some of it is downright awful. (Pro tip: sometimes he goes down low, sometimes he wiggles, but he never goes up high).

Needless to say, my performance was a huge hit. (“I learned it on YouTube!” I told my students). Whenever their questions got too probing (How do you plan to avoid bankruptcy?), I just launched into another Elon Musk dance tutorial.

As to the substance, the board of skeptical students was brutal. There was no way to pay for it. No route to profit. No plan to govern the vomit of hatred that Twitter seems to unleash. It would violate every European Union law on privacy and data security.

As they predicted, the real Twitter under Elon has been flooded with creeps, racists, haters, misogynists, liars, grifters and neo-Nazi incells. When I saw who was joining Twitter under Elon, I stopped. I have not posted since the day Twitter achieved a 500% increase in use of the “N” word. I stopped right there.

Understand, I haven’t given up completely on Twitter. I sometimes passively read things there, when people send me a link. But I have just gone on strike. I don’t post anything. Ten thousand tweets later, I give up.

I intend to share my insights, sarcastic or otherwise, right here. This is worth my time—interacting with you, instead of the anonymous masses of ignorable and ignorant.

I remember some of the good things about Twitter: the way a desperate person on the far side of the world could cry out we are being massacred, foreign journalist please come, as happened to me during the Arab Spring. I liked the way people everywhere could share stuff, and enjoyed uploading my interrogation of the information sphere in sarcastic Tweets.

There were good things about Twitter. But not good enough. The algorithm inherently promotes the most despicable and radical content, killing us with “engagement.”

For years, I told myself, Patrick, why are you doing this for Twitter?

Now I do it for you. I’ll see you in this space, sooner and more often.