I don't have a life. Not just because I have very niche interests, but because I use any excuse I can find to not leave the house. The reason for this is that I hate social interaction, to the point where I hate all of my neighbors for the crime of living close enough for me to run the risk of running into them when I have to leave the house to run errands. I figure it's better both for me and the unfortunate souls who might meet me to just avoid people altogether.
I mention all of this because of something that happened the day before this post goes up. I'm talking about the time Elon Musk tried to eliminate Twitter's block feature. I've heard people say that the tweet has been deleted and many have pointed out that if he tries he'll be delisted from the various app stores in existence. I don't know if that matters, because we know that Elon Musk has learned firsthand that he can't get away with doing whatever he wants. Multiple times. So why doesn't he learn his lesson?
The short answer is that I don't think he wants to learn that lesson. The slightly longer answer is that I think he wants Twitter to be a place he can do whatever he wants without consequence, and he's been trained to believe at this point in his life that if he demands the world take the shape that he wants it to take, it'll eventually give in. He's a billionaire, after all, and has grown up surrounded by wealth and people who got where they are in life by never taking no for an answer. He's not used to being in a situation where if people don't like what you're doing, they can just leave, and from what I've heard he's not used to having to build his own brand or manage a space of people with different needs, wants, and expectations for what a social media platform ought to be.
A lot of people call him out for doing this, but as someone who runs her own website I have a slightly different take on this. My problem isn't that Elon Musk decided that he wanted a website made of only him and his most desperate fans, my problem is that he decided that he needed to buy Twitter in order to do that. With all of his money, he could have just built his own platform from the ground up, a la Donald Trump post Twitter ban, and then he wouldn't have to worry about fighting to change course on a pre-established website. He could still be a megalomaniacal asshole, but now he wouldn't have to worry about anyone getting hurt as a result of his actions. The damage would be contained, so to speak. Not only would it have been better for those of us driven off of Twitter without any other place to go, it would have been better for him, because he wouldn't have to worry about people who don't like him being likely to stumble on his tweets by accident.
This bothers me in particular because I'm one of those writers who likes to write from the perspective of powerful characters. If you want your story to have conflict, you need to write around their abilities. What this means to me is writing in a way that these character's worlds have built in failsafe's to keep them from destroying the world entirely while still allowing them to change the world to their will. In summary, I know that it's possible to create a world where a character is powerful but not so powerful as to be the major threat to everyone else.
In my eyes Elon Musk isn't a major threat because of his excessive wealth, he's a threat because he chooses to be. He could still be selfish, thoughtless, and stupid in such a way that his actions wouldn't hurt anyone. Hell, he could even accept a world of delusions, he's powerful enough that I doubt that anyone would care and with all of his money it would be an accurate reflection of reality. All he had to do was accept that with his power came the greater risk of causing suffering either directly or indirectly and planning his actions accordingly. But he's not doing that. If anything, he's doing the opposite, and I can't think of any reason for doing that other than that he's been trained to believe that power's only good if it makes the people below you miserable. Knowing that, why the hell do so many people look up to him? As a loser myself, we deserve better than Elon Musk.
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