Oh joy, a billionaire has another new toy. After a hefty amount of back-and-forth drama, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, recently sealed the $44 billion deal and successfully purchased Twitter.

What is Twitter and why should we care? If those questions have crossed your mind, then I’ll give you a shortened version of what the “social-networking” service is.

Twitter, Inc. is an American company that hosts a massive website which operates like a micro-blog.

People use the website to share on- line news and “network” amongst other registered users. They communicate with one another by posting short messages that are called “tweets”.

Think of it as the tiny carrier or “homing” pigeon that was used to send messages between two points. Now, that pigeon has transformed into eight billion super

pigeons flying all over the world, while some freshly pressed billionaire is overseeing all the tweets from the masses down below.

I find this frightening because looking back
in our history, I know the power of one man (Edward Bernays) controlling mass communication has made an impact on society that is still felt today.

Bernays is long gone now, but does the philosophy behind what he accomplished ever actually leave?

I ask these questions because Musk now serves as the chief executive of Twitter, Inc. The deal is done and he’s already making some big changes.

Musk fired Parag Agrawal (now the ex-CEO), changed the homepage and he’s put forth a brilliant idea about capitalizing on the registered users and generating profit.

“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue check mark is bullshit,” Musk tweets.

“Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”

His version of “power to the people!” stands for registered users paying for the ability to have a blue check mark attached to their Twitter profile.

Having that blue check mark seems to indicate that a person is famous, or important. He wants you to pay to feel important now, folks. Can we say out of touch?

The second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, Mark Zucker- berg owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and then you have two of the 10 richest men in the world, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, owning Google.

Thanks to billionaires like Musk and their fancy ideas, we are at risk of even being able to look up at the night sky without seeing the commodification of it.

Imagine looking out at the stars and seeing a giant Coca-Cola ad projected onto it.

You can thank Vlad Sitnikov from StartRocket for that one. His “brilliant” idea has been labeled as the “next logical step in advertising.”

I’m not saying let’s eat the rich, but billionaires can only own our digital brains if we let them. If we withhold the fruits of even our mental labor and organize our minds outside their billionaire trash, what would that accomplish?

Note: This editorial was originally published in “The Mariposa Gazette” on 11-10-2022.