Last month, Elon Musk walked into Twitter and then all the good people left. I quit, too. It was a time-sink, a brain drain and an eye strain.
In 12 years, I gained nothing, while witnessing peers and colleagues at their worst. Oh, the bliss of not turning every little thing into a quip. The delight of dealing with reality in the moment, like a grownup, instead of running to tell teacher about every unpleasant incident. Truly, you don’t realise that something is pointless, negative and colonising your brain until it’s gone.
My worst Twitter experience happened after I went to the cinema one day. A regular cinema trip, not a private screening for colleagues. Unbeknown to me, a well-known media guy and the creator of a much-loved TV show about hapless, but good-hearted men was also there. He was, and is, a total stranger. Later, he tweeted me, saying he’d spotted me and asking what I thought of the film. I answered politely but the incident and its red flag bothered me for ages.
Social media platforms may rise and fall but unwanted, creepy stalker, boundary-violating behaviour from “nice guys” is clearly – sadly – eternal.
A walk in Jobs’ shoes?
When it comes to tech billionaires, it’s easy to be alarmed by chaos demons such as Musk. But then all you have to do is sit back while they sabotage themselves with their antics.
It’s the self-controlled ones who’re truly worrying, such as Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, who steers icily towards his endgame, never acting out personally, apologising when he makes an error and then recalculating with the uninflected calm of a killer satnav. Quitting Twitter while staying on Google’s YouTube, plus Instagram and WhatsApp, both owned by Meta, is hardly some kind of anti-tech statement.
Then there’s Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the withholding daddy of them all. Jobs was an insanely successful, driven guy who was good at being Apple’s co-founder and bad at being a normal, decent human being. Have you read Small Fry, the Stockholm syndrome-esque memoir by his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs? It’s chilling.
So why have Jobs’s old Birkenstocks sold for nearly $220,000 (£183,000) last week, described tenderly by the auction house as still bearing his footprint, as if he’s Jesus? Now John Lennon’s glasses and Frida Kahlo’s half-used lipsticks have been joined by Jobs’s stinky sandals in the public’s morbid cabinet of inappropriate pop culture relics.
Don’t burst my bubble
If you want to celebrate the historical figure of Jesus, Christmas is 30-odd days away. Then we have climate apocalypse scheduled for spring. Understandably, given the global prognosis, champagne sales are soaring and the boom is set to continue for the rest of the decade. Then we’ll all die. Champagne is a glorious comfort in times of trouble; you don’t notice you’re doomed when you’re on a bubble high, plus you become an absolutely scintillating conversationalist and so does everyone else. Sales shot up so fast that Moët & Chandon temporarily ran low on stock – a tragedy of iceberg-melting-in-a-warm-bank proportions.
If it reaches Marie Antoinette levels of crisis and the shamps goes scarce as we camp out in our richest friends’ bunkers and panic rooms, my secret favourite is Fortnum & Mason’s delicious own-brand pink champagne. It’s like Lucozade for adults. Go to the Piccadilly shop and buy some caviar while you’re there.
I know, it’s disgustingly bougie, but so what? The world is ending, let’s pop a cork and party.
• This article was amended on 20 November 2022 because an earlier version referred to YouTube as being owned by Meta, whereas Google is the owner of that platform.
• Bidisha Mamata is an Observer columnist
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