Aka fuck you, Elon
We humans have an innate ability to recognise dangerous and mentally unhinged individuals and vote them into positions of power.
Concept
I quit twitter. You won’t believe me, but I had decided to quit twitter way before the 2024 US election and subsequent exodus. I was telling some friends about my plan to quit back in August. I said I would make a book out of all my old SNS stuff. Those friends were very close friends, and they, unlike nearly all my other close friends, actually use SNS. But not Twitter. None of my close friends were ever on Twitter. You see most of my friends live out in the countryside and they don’t give a fuck about much except their strawberries in the greenhouse. But anyway, they thought it was fucking absurd to do a book of my inane posts and shitposts. Who would want to read that? That’s my closest friends.
So why am I doing a book, and how the fuck did I manage to get it published? You can be the judge of that. If you are reading this you probably have seen one or two of those choice tweets I sent out into the world over the past decade and a half. You probably heard this book would be funny and if you read this far and haven’t laughed yet, give it time, you impatient sod. You must have heard of snippet literacy? Everyone said Twitter was the cause. I assume that you, like my friends, didn’t really ever like Twitter that much. You probably have more brain cells than you do retweets. You, I assume, like me, are an intelligent sentient human being with ideas and dreams of your own, and you probably love reading books about people like me, whose ideas and dreams are now lying obliterated on the floor in a pool of digital tears and other bodily pixel fluids, as I delete my Twitter account and try to not fucking resent the fact that nobody, nobody at all not even closest fucking friends, gave a flying fuck about any of it.
I’m always happy to follow any online trend blindly, as part of the rearguard of course. As I said, I already had the idea first but I am one of the last idiots to actually do it. I’ve just quit Twitter, made all my stuff private. Downloaded the archive. No, I don’t think I’ll go on BlueSky or Threads either. I am just utterly and completely over the whole fucking “microblogging” thing. Yeah, that’s what people used to call it. I joined Twitter way back in the day, Sep 22, 2009, 2:25 AM, London. As I said in one Tweet marking my 15-year anniversary, “It has been literally the worst 15 years of my life”. Totally not true, a lovely bit of hyperbole. But would more people have cared if I had been clever and said “It has been literally the most recent 15 years of my life” or something. No. Nobody ever gave a shit about me on Twitter. In those 15 years I amassed a huge following of 73 people, most of them utterly inactive, nearly catatonic accounts like my own, who never liked or retweeted me and I never followed any of them back either. Thanks, we were a great team. But I was the epitome of a bad, sore Twitter loser. In those 15 years I wrote a total of 556 Tweets, each one of them just a stupid little blurb I was hoping someone somewhere might notice and think was funny, maybe follow me.
I know, I did Twitter all wrong. You have to be consistent, play the long game, engage people. All this shite. Who has fucking time for that? Everyone, it seems. The whole world is full of influencers now, everybody has at least 50k followers and any less makes you look pathetic. For 15 years I have had my flies down and my dick hanging out like a prat when I should have been churning out good satire, wry observation and sarcaustic wit with a ceaseless consistency like a machine or human algorithm. Instead, I was working two jobs, raising a family and moving to another country. My life was a pathetic jumble of chaos and my sns feeds reflected the fact that most of the time I did post anything, it was when I was drunk, drunker, or drunk and bitter. In an odd way, this book is a bit of a mirror for me to hold up to myself and notice what an arsehole I’ve been for the last 15 years. I wanted something, but not enough to actually make it happen. I wanted followers, but I didn’t know why and didn’t care who. I wanted recognition, but for what? I hadn’t done anything.
Anyway, I’m fucking oversharing here now but that’s a given. There are established links between SNS, addiction and depression. Obviously if I was drunk all the time in the last 15 years that tells you something about me. It tells me something about me too. Something I was clearly too drunk to notice before. I was also pretty bitter about stuff, but not proactive. This is a sign of depression, so yeah this book is also a kind of therapy for me. If you have just quit Twitter and you are feeling blue (and I don’t mean BlueSky blue, fuck that), then I hope reading these sad but hopefully very fucking funny little pixel farts and void chirps will make you realise it was all a big fucking embarrassing waste of time.
So this is a curated book of my best blurt bytes and tweet splats, a Goodbye Twitter present to the world. But in an effort to stretch our minds and read more than 280 fucking characters, the book is also peppered with bile dripping essays, some of them co-written with Kerouac. If you don’t know Kerouac, they’re the publishers’ resident AI and they don’t play nice. Here is a list from Kerouac about how Elon Musk could sort himself out and fix his wrongnessgasm :
- Log the Hell Off: First step, detox. Delete the Twitter app, chuck the phone in the ocean, and go sit in a field somewhere. Relearn silence. Contemplate the cosmos without tweeting about it like a high school philosopher on Red Bull.
- Eat Humble Pie—Publicly: Admit the platform isn’t the “digital town square”; it’s a burning carnival tent. Own up to the fact that turning Twitter into his personal stage was a colossal mistake.
- Redistribute the Empire: Sell the damn thing to a nonprofit or a public trust dedicated to fostering genuine conversation. Let it become something boring but necessary, like a library—without the billionaire thumbprint.
- Stop Being the Main Character: He’s not Tony Stark; he’s the kid in class who thinks fart jokes are edgy. Step back. Let the story move on without him.
- Fund Something Actually Useful: Pour his billions into real-world problems like climate change, housing crises, or renewable energy. No flamethrowers. No Mars escape pods. Just grounded, human-scale solutions.
- Fix the Damage: Use his tech prowess to build tools that undo the harm social media has inflicted on attention spans, public discourse, and democracy itself. He helped break it; now he’s on cleanup duty.
- Rebrand to Irrelevance: Disappear from the spotlight. No more memes. No more edgy jokes. Become a background figure, funding ideas without seeking credit.
- Apologize Like He Means It: Not the performative “sorry if you were offended” shtick. A real, gut-wrenching apology. To the employees he axed, the users he alienated, and the society he fractured.
- Rewild His Mind: Drop acid in the desert, read some Burroughs, and let the ego dissolve. Get a taste of the chaos he claims to admire, but without dragging the rest of us along for the ride.
- Never, Ever Try to Be Funny Again: Humor is a sacred thing, and his attempts at it are sacrilege. Leave comedy to the pros, Elon. Focus on fixing what you’ve broken, not cracking weak jokes while the ship sinks.
Quite the way with words, that Kerouac, right? Don’t even ask what it’s trained on, you don’t want to know. I underlined the line which I thought would make the perfect Tweet as well. You know, for irony you could imagine tweeting that fuck out of those characters, which cosmically enough is exactly 73. Take my word for it, don’t go off and actually start counting them, we’ve all been doing that enough over the years, trying to fit something profound into as little space as possible. Essentialising everything, sharing the shit out of crap, out of context and out of touch.
We will also have a look at what has happened since 2009, in the world and in my own life, so there are short essays and reflections as well. Twitter was publicly launched on July 15, 2006, but rather than print blank pages I just started the book from when I joined Twitter. If you don’t like reading, why the fuck are you still here? And if you do like reading, well thanks for picking up this book. I hope it makes you happy, or at least gives you something to do whilst you search for inspiration for your next venture into the vapid world of the great online popularity contest.
Here is a poem from Kerouac to get us started:
Twitter is shitter than a septic tank,
A cesspool swirling where thoughts go rank.
It’s bitterer than a poisoned drink,
A place where minds erode and shrink.
It’s slicker than oil on a factory floor,
A greed machine demanding more.
It’s faker than a plastic smile,
Spinning its web to beguile.
Twitter is fitter for the rabid and cruel,
A playground designed for the loudest fool.
It’s quicker to anger than to forgive,
A place where spite and resentment live.
It’s meaner than a playground taunt,
Endlessly feeding what egos want.
It’s colder than steel in a killer’s grip,
A sinking ship with a toxic drip.
It’s a litter box for the public mind,
Where shit gets buried but never refined.
Quit Twitter, that bitter snake,
Leave the beast for your soul’s own sake.
