take my blue check, already.

I don't even want the damn thing.

it’s socially shameful to pay for Twitter, but I’m not even going to explore that. It’s just the social convention.

There’s a certain type of user on Twitter who has always been exhausting. Or, actually, there are several types of Twitter users who have always been exhausting, but the one I’m thinking of is the reply guy. For years, every time you clicked on a RealDonaldTrump tweet you could scroll down and see the reply guys posting but-actually-mister-president-sir content in real-time.

But of course, Trump was booted from Twitter for using it to, you know, incite a riot as a desperate attempt to remain in power. And so the reply guy languished. He killed time by workshopping his material in the mentions of lesser accounts like HouseJudiciaryGOP or DonaldTrumpJunior. But then Elon Musk came along and the reply guy was rejuvenated. He flooded into the mentions of the richest man on the planet. And when Elon announced he would charge for blue-check verification, the reply guy invariably well-actually-sired about how stupid the idea was and Elon invariably replied that criticizing him will, in the future, cost eight dollars — it’s just lazy writing all around.

Anyway, I have been thinking recently about the reply guy because I’ve been racking my brain, trying to figure out who the hell is actually going to pay eight dollars for Twitter verification when Elon takes it away. The legacy verified accounts — those of us who have been verified on the site for years — almost certainly won’t. Of the 420,000 legacy verified accounts, less than 6,500 of us have subscribed to Twitter blue, according to Mashable.

So who will? Brands, I suppose will — or they would have if Elon hadn’t decided that brand verification will cost one-thousand-dollars. Your crabby old neighbor who thinks the COVID-19 vaccine is a government scheme to microchip the population. That guy, he might shell out eight dollars (half of the Twitter blue subscribers have less than 1,000 followers). And, I suspect the reply guy will. Because the reply guy needs Elon just as Elon needs the reply guy. For the reply guy, Twitter is worth eight dollars.¹

But for the rest of us, it’s not.

I should add that there’s also a certain pro-Trump/pro-Elon brand of reply guy. This guy just, idk. He just sucks. He's like the Farva of Twitter. For this guy, Twitter is definitely worth eight dollars. This guy would pay a hundred dollars-a-month for Twitter. Why? I don’t know. Why does a grown man call himself Catturd on the internet? I don’t know.

The pro-Elon reply guy loves pseudo-clever memes. And I’ve now come across one of his favorite memes several times. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen it too — because the pro-Elon reply guy’s memes are now all over your timeline (as they’re the ones paying for Twitter, these knockoff checkmarks are being amplified).

The meme has a simple premise — the message is that it’s pathetic to complain about paying eight dollars for Twitter when we pay ten dollars for Spotify or a hundred dollars-a-month at Starbucks.

25,000 people liked this shit.

But if the underlying argument of the meme is that we’re making a comically incorrect cost-benefit analysis, it’s dead-wrong. And it’s absurdly wrong. Spotify is worth ten-dollars-a-month. I don’t know if you know about Spotify but it’s this app where you can listen to any song that ever existed. And all you have to do is pay them ten-dollars-a-month and be eyes-wide-shut about the fact that they’re screwing over artists and paying Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ten dollars a month for Netflix, is a big ehhhh. It's becoming a tougher and tougher call (I already wrote about that). But they have Seinfeld on Netflix. And Derry Girls. That's worth ten dollars a month, for now. Paying a hundred dollars a month for Starbucks might be a bit excessive but they sell coffee at Starbucks. I mean. coffee.²

Twitter is just not worth it. That’s why all the legacy verifieds are biting their thumbs at Elon; because it’s just not worth eight dollars a month. The site is basically unusable at this point, my timeline is crowded with cringey always-online right-wingers. You can’t even go there for breaking news anymore because every news cycle is hijacked and deliberately misinterpreted by the knockoff verifieds. And I’m supposed to pay for that? It’s not even worth eight dollars a month to troll Elon. Twitter was a party that was over. And then Elon came in like some loser at the end, grabbed the aux cord and put on like, the Canadian national anthem or something.³

And Elon has been saying for a while that he’s going to take away the checkmarks from the legacy verified accounts. He said it February, he said it again in March and he’ll be saying it again in April. I guess his intention with this drumbeating is to convince us to pay the eight dollars? He doesn’t think we can hold out — he thinks we need Twitter — that to us, Twitter is worth eight-dollars-a-month and we’re bluffing. But that’s a profound misreading of the situation. ⁴

So how does this all end? Not with a bang, I don’t suspect. I feel sure that Elon is going to go through with his idea to remove legacy verified accounts. I suspect a few thousand of us will scab and shell out eight-dollars a month. But most of the legacy verified crowd has already begun to drift away from the platform — no, it will end with a whimper, like a party that’s over. I used to spend hours every day checking Twitter, now I’m on it for maybe ten minutes a day.⁵

They say Twitter is like a hive, that it breeds a hive mentality. And that’s how we’ll leave it. Like bees slowly, almost unintentionally, abandoning a hive. It might occasionally look like it’s staggering along but one has only to observe the hive to realize that there is no longer any life in it. And already, Twitter feels a little like that. It will continue to feel like that until it is only a shell. Until it’s only a party with a dirty floor and Elon standing in the corner alone, holding the aux cord.

1. There’s this wonderful scene toward the end of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Saramago where Jesus is on a boat with God and the devil shows up and he gets all pissed off as he realizes that the devil and God need each other because their only purpose is their relationship. And I think Elon and the reply guy have a similar sort of thing going on.

2. I really pride myself on my ability to understand different ideologies than my own. It’s kind of a vital skill for a writer — to be able to detach yourself and look at the situation from above. I can understand for example, why people would like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Ben Shapiro or even Hegel. But I cannot, for the life of me, understand why you might look at Twitter and say yeah, this is worth eight dollars a month. I just don’t understand that analysis. It baffles me. And furthermore, it bothers me that it baffles me; I am frustrated that I don’t understand it.

3. Elon’s glaring flaw — and all-consuming flaw — is that he’s got this personal thing where he needs to be liked. He must have just been a total loser the whole time he was growing up and he was going around saying someday, all you people will like me, you’ll have to. I mean, he really wants people to like him. He wants to be be cool. When he finally gets to Mars and people don’t like him there either, it’s going to really burn him up.

4. I mean, even if I did have Twitter blue, what am I paying for? Amplification? This is the equivalent of paying for a sponsored tweets. I didn’t buy sponsored tweets either.

5. Look, there’s something pathetic and childish about needing Twitter. It brings to mind Laura Loomer handcuffing herself to the Twitter headquarters.