Musk is on the brink of ruining the procrastinator’s dream

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I love the opportunities it presents – for finding stuff out in real time; for connecting with like-minded (and not so like-minded) people; and for the many silly jokes and videos that regularly make me lol. I hate it for being the bearer of ill will, and worse, from those who have realised the power of social media to distort public discourse. But at least I’m conscious of how the bad actors operate – not everyone is (or wants to be), which is an even bigger problem.

I was not, to use the modern lingo, an early adopter of social media. In a long-ago previous job, in a report for an external audience, I described Twitter as a “micro-blogging website”. A fair description I felt at the time, but my colleagues guffawed and never let me forget my apparent dimwittedness. When I finally set up an account some years later, they awaited my micro-blog with bated breath.

They may, in the event, have ended up following the wrong person, as my preferred handle – @willgore – had already been taken when I joined. Over the subsequent years, that Will (also a journalist, among other things) and I (@willjgore, and barely a journalist) became acquainted virtually, passing on messages intended for the other. I recommend you follow him: he may be the best Will Gore on Twitter.

Once I got to grips with it, however, I was hooked. I first realised the power of the platform when I took part in a debate about some planning issues in the Chilterns and found myself described in the event promotion as a “local journalist, writer and Dire Straits aficionado”. The latter part of my brief bio seemed to stem purely from some late-night, moderately drunken tweets about the glories of the Brothers in Arms album, which the organisers had evidently spotted in a digital trawl. I couldn’t work out whether I was a fraud, or the victim of mistaken identity. Though to be honest, I probably knew more about Dire Straits than I did about north Hertfordshire planning regulations.

Elon Musk’s recent buyout of Twitter has brought with it everything from the most rabid of fanboy cheerleading to predictions of the company’s collapse (including from Musk himself, paradoxically). As with so much else, the extreme views can be left to cancel each other out – probably on Twitter itself. But the change in leadership has certainly created a lot of reasoned debate.

As for the questions I have, well, when Musk took the helm, I was just four followers off the 3,000 mark. Now I’m down to 2,991, after a few mysterious people – including @HotChikx69, a non-tweeting, scantily-clad economics grad from Arizona – decided to go elsewhere for their dad jokes and cat pics. So, first things first Elon, what have you done with my bots?

Quite a lot of the people I follow have decamped to rival platform Mastadon, in protest at Musk’s plans to charge for blue ticks and at his general worldview. Their departure may be understandable but it is a shame nonetheless. I could go too I suppose, but I didn’t get on Twitter until 2013, so it seems a bit early to be joining them just yet. Maybe in 2025. And anyway, it all seems a bit convoluted, and I don’t really have the time because I’m too busy reading threads on Twitter about Russian withdrawals in Ukraine, and the daftest dismissals in village cricket.

And this perhaps gets to the nub of my two-faced relationship with Twitter, that most infamous of the micro-blogging websites. I may ultimately have come to despise its hold over me; yet I secretly fear the free time I would have were it not there.

Without Twitter’s weird pets, long threads and instant takes, I would have no excuse but to do the many things that would – on the face of it – be more productive uses of my energy. There are the garden tasks to get done before winter, and a tax return to complete, and exercise that would do more to fight the flab than the screen scrolling that provides a workout only for my right thumb. There are myriad books I’ve started to write but failed to finish – and while I bitterly blame my lack of spare hours, I know where many of them have gone.

In short, Twitter for the procrastinator holds out endless promise. Or at least it did. Since Musk took over, and the platform has been plunged into uncertainty, a possibility has emerged of a world without Twitter – or perhaps Twitter as we knew it. Should that come to pass, think of all the things I will have no reason not to get on with.