by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
In a growing sign of how surreal the modern world is, and how difficult it is sometimes to get through news headlines with a straight face — Elon Musk has blocked Catturd on “X.”
This comes after Space Karen made a big deal about how he wants to eliminate the ability to “block” someone on X. (I still have to do a double take whenever I write out “X” instead of “Twitter.”)
Anyway, the whole thing is bonkers. Both that Musk would block Catturd and the idea that Musk would do away with Blocking in favor of “enhanced Mute.” For someone so smart, Musk totally misses what is going on with social media at the moment.
If I was Musk, I would be a lot more focused on dragging X into AI era than I would screwing around with basic, existing features like Block. It is very easy to imagine a scenario whereby you could organically make an AI prompt a central feature of the text-based X.
And, yet, here we are, yelling at each other about the “who shot John” specifics of being blocked or even having the ability to block someone. We are living through the twilight of social media and Space Karen would be smart to leverage the user base of X in preparation for the next technological era, rather than worrying about dumb feature issues.
But, then, it’s not like I had $42 billion on hand to buy Twitter, only to drive into the ground.
