\u201cX\u201d marks the spot.\u00a0 For the modern advertiser, this is problematic.\u00a0 It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness.\u00a0 And now Elon Musk has decided to impose himself upon a brand he loved as a plaything of juvenile ecstasy.\u00a0 Farewell the bird of Twitter; welcome the X of Musk.<\/p>\n
The company rebrand is certainly all Muskian in manner, part of his monomaniac obsession with the letter.\u00a0 In 1999, he created the online bank X.com, which eventually merged with PayPal the following year.\u00a0 Just shy of two decades later, Musk reacquired<\/a> the X.com site from PayPal.\u00a0 Over time, it seems to have become an ideology and practice, a purpose and an end.\u00a0 X is seen as an \u201ceverything app\u201d that will function as a platform to transfer money, order meals, and share posts.<\/p>\n Linda Yaccarino, the company\u2019s chief executive, described<\/a> it as follows: \u201cX is the future of unlimited interactivity \u2013 centered in audio, video, messaging, payments\/banking \u2013 creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities\u201d.\u00a0 As if this did not sound sinister, Yaccarino also declared<\/a> that there was \u201cabsolutely no limit to this transformation.\u00a0 X will be the platform that can deliver, well\u2026.everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Like a spreading cult, it has rushed through the Musk empire, afflicting all manner of products and themes.\u00a0 Twitter even has conference rooms<\/a> with X-oriented names, be they the cringeworthy \u201ceXposure\u201d, or the less revolting \u201cs3Xy\u201d.<\/p>\n For even the most junior of advertising minions, the whole matter has been an example of counter-intuitive madness.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s a rookie mistake to throw away decades of equity in those assets [the name Twitter and the blue bird logo],\u201d remarked<\/a> marketing consultant Gareth Turner.\u00a0 Negative assessments of the rebrand exercise have suggested that billions of dollars have been wiped from the value of the company.<\/p>\n The company is being tanked with a fanatic\u2019s relish, submerged in a sea of depraved indulgence.\u00a0 Its mutilating, despoiling owner hardly seems to care.\u00a0 In the meantime, there is a lot of management rot that\u2019s crept in, just to replace the initial management rot that seeped through prior to Musk\u2019s acquisition.<\/p>\n The substance of the rebrand, for all the lamentations about extinguishing the bird logo, is hard to discern.\u00a0 There is the lexical dimension, which seems to have bothered a goodly number of social media users.\u00a0 What, for instance, are posts on the renamed platform meant to be?\u00a0 Has the verb of tweeting been abandoned altogether?\u00a0 According to the Associated Press stylebook<\/a>, the platform is to be referred to \u201cas X, formerly known as Twitter.\u201d\u00a0 Usage of the term \u201ctweet\u201d is still considered acceptable.<\/p>\n Beyond the labels, the Musk experiment remains infantile.\u00a0 Far better to simply reflect on the boy-child nature of the entire enterprise, a Peter Pan mad venture that rejects adulthood in favour of an arrested, preserved adolescence.\u00a0 The video game designer Ian Bogost is certainly on to something in noting<\/a> that \u201cTwitter, like other social platforms and the very internet itself, is already redolent of a seventh grader\u2019s mindset that Musk\u2019s behaviour betrays.\u201d<\/p>\n The seventh grader mindset is one based on noise, shouting, and deafening declarations.\u00a0 It repudiates the notion of trusted small communities, where limits and protocols of good conduct matter.\u00a0 \u201cThe shift from social networks to social media,\u201d writes Bogost, \u201cwas culturally destructive.\u00a0 It set the expectation that everyone deserves \u2013 is owed, even \u2013 an audience for every notion, quip, photo, or activity.\u201d\u00a0 The consequences that follow have been manifold: the surfeit of public data, the stratospheric rise of the outrage culture, the prevalence of misinformation, the normalising of shame.<\/p>\n As if to serve up a perfect illustration of the problem, Musk decided last month to fire off a number of social media posts challenging his technology rival and Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to a penis \u201cmeasuring contest\u201d and cage fight<\/a>.\u00a0 Much of this came about because of Zuckerberg\u2019s own efforts to create Threads, a shameless rival platform to Twitter that apes many microblogging features of the latter.\u00a0 Aiming low, Zuckerberg agreed<\/a>, requesting that Musk send him the location. \u201cVegas, Octagon,\u201d Musk shot back.\u00a0 To date, the man child bullies have yet to go through with their arrangements, which was hardly surprising.<\/p>\n In a sense, Musk and Zuck resemble the generation of another era, one so beautifully and plangently captured by Cyril Connolly in his memoir, Enemies of Promise<\/em>.\u00a0 Published in 1938, a year before the catastrophe of the Second World War, it captures a distinct, spoilt view of human development, one where privilege and luxury blight, and where growth is to be feared.\u00a0 On leaving Eton, Connolly distilled his \u201cTheory of Permanent Adolescence\u201d, where the \u201cboys at the great public schools\u201d undergo experiences \u201cso intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.\u201d\u00a0 For Musk and his fellow tech nerds, the future is a necessarily stunted one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cX\u201d marks the spot.\u00a0 For the modern advertiser, this is problematic.\u00a0 It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness.\u00a0 And now Elon Musk has decided to impose himself upon a brand he loved as a plaything of juvenile ecstasy.\u00a0 Farewell the bird of Twitter; welcome the X of Musk. The company rebrand [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4116,739],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173846"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1173846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174200,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173846\/revisions\/1174200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1173846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1173846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1173846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}