I neither write nor read tweets.  I understand both the value of disseminating information and the very natural inclination of people needing/wanting to be heard.  Yet, in a world where an increasingly unsubstantiated reference resource, Wikipedia, has become the font of all information, the open spigot of Twitter blather scares the piss out of me, (a not-so-easy task given my nearly seventy-six-year-old prostate).  That the world’s most-used info dump is now owned and lorded over by a single, quirky, Asperger-y man-child, is scarier still.

Elon Musk is an enigma wrapped in a conundrum.  His big-brained single-minded, (am I rocking it with the hyphens, or what?), approach to wielding his richest-man-on-earth status, is both tantalizingly awe-inspiring and terrifying.  There can be no doubt that the recent, rapid race to convert from carbon-burning transportation to electric vehicles is due to his determination to make Tesla viably competitive.  His laser focus to make Space-X at least an option, if not the leader in space exploration, is miraculous.  His Bucky Fuller long-sight, backed by his seemingly bottomless pockets, gives any sci-fi aficionado visions of androidal coexistence, teleportation, immortality and yummy non-fattening snacks.  But…before the god-king delivers us into a utopian world, we have to get through this Twitter thing, this melee of the chaotic exercise of “free speech”.  Ahhhh, there’s the rub.  Humans are incapable of self-policing and policers, except for maybe Solomon, have been neither wise enough nor vigilante enough to fairly regulate human behavior, never so more evident than in today’s Twitterverse.  Musk has indicated that all speech should be free.  That, historically, gave us Hitler and Stalin and McCarthy and Putin and Trump.  Lies upon preposterously repeated lies masquerading as acceptable alternatives to truth have usually ended in millions of lost and ruined lives.

This dire warning has no “So, then…”.  The Inter Net has, like a state fair greased pig, slipped the bonds of regulation.  It has obliterated the value of intellectual property, rewritten Emily Post and mesmerized most of our species into believing it to be essential.  It is, in fact, an evil genie that cannot be returned to its bottle and Elon, with the intellect and resources to choose any part(s) he wishes to play, has chosen Pandora.