Elon's biggest problem @ Twitter - he's not funny at tweeting

This stuff is maybe too on the nose for our middle aged muskmen - trigger warning


https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/elon-musk-twitter-gop-redpilling-humor-posting.html

I’m not here to home in on the particulars of Musk’s politics. (I already did that, a month ago.) In fact, I’d argue that his recent redpilling is barely relevant to why his stewardship of Twitter has been so uniquely agitating. Sure, it isn’t ideal that Musk has restored the accounts of guys like Jordan Peterson, but I am not of the opinion that social media has much effect on corporeal reality. (May I reiterate one more time: the midterms!) Instead, the worst part about Musk’s Twitter tenure is that he is simply bad at posting. He was consistently one of the most oppressive presences on social media in the mid-2010s, back when he was promising to dig a tunnel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and he’s only grown more obnoxious as he attempts to fabricate a strained MAGA pivot while he slowly loses all of his famous friends. We have handed over the Crucible of Posting to someone who has a remedial understanding of the art; honestly, that might be the impetus for his radicalization.

There’s already a lot of literature that’s been published on Musk’s shortcomings as a poster. In 2021 the New York Times went long on the frequency at which Elon pilfers memes he finds on Reddit without proper accreditation (a big no-no—just ask @****Jerry). The underlying thesis here is that he was never able to engineer the creativity, humor, or cultural fluency necessary to become an elite tweeter, so, like innumerable struggling YouTubers and canceled podcast hosts before him, Musk has started playing to the cheap seats by taking on the woke mob in the name of free speech, which has, frankly, become the hackiest and most overplayed hand on social media.

But he can’t even do that right. Musk’s newfangled based persona is wooden and vibeless, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. To clap back at CBS News, he’s using terrible photoshops of Brokeback Mountain, which has to be the most inept, warmed-over touchstone in anyone’s meme arsenal. He believes that millennials spend too much money on Starbucks Frappuccinos—that old “$12 avocado toast” chestnut—a satirical terrain most often explored by guys like Andrew Dice Clay. He’s shared a photo of his bedside table, which is covered with four cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke and an antique pistol, which I assume is a way to better endear himself to the only demographic who will still be on Twitter by 2023. All of these missives are nakedly counterfeit and desperately needy—like someone who’s learned the contours of alt-right diction from an academic journal—but most pertinently, Musk is plainly not very funny. It is the eldritch truth that eats at his core—his Rosebud, if you will. Musk can never outrun it for long, so he jumps from one pandering scheme to another, owning the libs to diminishing returns. A few years ago, Musk was poaching Onion staffers to start a competing national lampoon. (It never got off the ground.) Now he’s restored Twitter access for the Babylon Bee, a MAGA-tinged Onion facsimile that also happens to be one of the cringiest humor publications on the internet. The political polarities have flipped, but the fundamental fraughtness of Musk’s being remains the same. He doesn’t have the juice, so he must outsource his way toward the repartee he so clearly desires.​

@Os Trigonum @tinman @AroundTheWorld


Let me say in my personal view, that i have in fact found VERY MUCH FUNNY in the whole Twitter takeover saga. But, mostly it's situationally funny! Like, Musk making a terrible deal for Twitter because he's bored on Twitter, trying to renege by making up nonsense excuses, and being forced to do it anyway by a court was darkly funny! As is his post takeover fumbling! Also the fact that his hangers-on like @AroundTheWorld and @Space Ghost have to leap to his defense because - internet or something - funny to see them do this no matter how silly it is!

But the sink tweet and the Babylon bee? Those jokes are flat as **** my friends and no amount of toadying can warp that reality! Sorry!

 

This is the one @AroundTheWorld @tinman and @Os Trigonum, and of course @Elon don't want you to read though.

 

My underlying thesis is that, like Musk, certain posters here were never ever able to engineer the creativity, humor, or cultural fluency necessary to become an elite poster

I mean, threads about VHS videotapes and the 90's rockets were funny haha for a little while, but what really gets you attention?

Spamming alt right memelord posts again and again and again! Or becoming an antivax alt right Florida man! Ann Althouse RSS feed reader posts!