Free Musketeers 2

Thank you to those both pro and con who wrote to me about your relationship to/with Twitter.

To the cons, I hear you, and to a couple of you I hope you overcome your addiction. To those pro, I scrolled through one of your accounts and noted a thread on why it is important to leave an abusive relationship, ideally if you are the abuser. But isn't that what many are engaged in as participants in Twitter? An abusive relationship? And isn't that the modern villain's game (from the Joker to Hannibal Lecter)  -- pointing out our hypocrisies? 

I doubt I'm the first person to assume that Elon Musk has read enough Edgar Allen Poe to know a mean game when he sees one -- to say nothing of the one he is playing with his most recent acquisition. All these people tweeting their goodbyes to Twitter, only to follow them with "I am livid" vituperations against some celebrity or another. It saddens me that people will endure something if it's "free", as if a free service precludes adherence to the conditions that underlie and, of course, infect it.

Terry Southern's The Magic Christian (1959) and its 1968 film version showed us how far people will go for money (recall the swimming pool scene). Twitter has shown us how much people will put up with as long as they are not being seen to be paying for it. But now that they are required to pay? What can it mean to pay to stay on something when everything you've tweeted says otherwise? That you "contain multitudes"? This from the same poet: "Resist much, obey little. "