X: Nearly Completely Useless

The Experiment, and What It Cost

I persevered with X for a week, which is about as long as a Victorian explorer might have survived on a diet consisting entirely of boot polish and malaria tablets. At the end of the experiment I concluded that the platform is not completely useless. Nearly completely useless, certainly, but not quite all the way there.

Sold nowadays as one of the last citadels of free speech — although “free speech” on the internet usually turns out to mean the freedom to announce that the moon is controlled by Albanian lizard bankers — X, formerly Twitter, initially sounded attractive. The promise was simple: one could say almost anything without being marched off the premises by a committee of hall monitors armed with emotional support whistles. I had no particular wish to test the outer limits myself, but there was something reassuring in knowing the ceiling existed somewhere above ankle height.

Modern Britain, and the Front Door

This is especially relevant when one lives in modern Britain, a nation increasingly possessed of the nervous, twitching authoritarianism once associated with countries where the secret police wore sensible shoes and neighbours learned never to finish a sentence. Consequently, I tend to choose my words carefully online. The government’s various enforcement bodies are unlikely to devote much time to trawling through obscure technology forums populated by middle-aged men arguing about Linux kernels, but X is another matter entirely. The platform appears to be monitored with the diligence of a prison watchtower, and I remain sentimentally attached to my front door in its current, un-kicked-in condition.

The Canyon, and the Abyss That Checks Its Notifications

But censorship paranoia was not the chief disappointment. The real problem with X — at least if one declines to pay Elon Musk tribute like a medieval peasant surrendering grain to the local lord — is that using the free version resembles standing alone at the edge of a canyon, screaming your opinions into the abyss while the abyss checks its notifications and ignores you. No one hears. No one responds. One begins to suspect that the entire enterprise exists chiefly as a monument to Musk’s ego, which has now swollen to such planetary dimensions that even the internet struggles to provide adequate parking space.

The Interactions That Do Occur

Then there are the interactions that do occur, most of them originating from AI bots masquerading as human beings. These counterfeit personalities are usually easy to identify. A profile photograph depicting a breathtaking twenty-two-year-old Scandinavian fitness model is seldom accompanied by a believable interest in an ageing hacker’s views on obscure tech legislation. When “she” replies with “Interesting perspective sir” followed by a small digital flame, one feels less flattered than medically examined.

The Case for “Nearly”

Still, I did say “nearly” useless. X retains two practical functions. First, it grants access to Grok, Musk’s in-house AI contraption, which occasionally produces answers unavailable from rival large language models, though often with the tone of a cocaine enthusiast explaining astrophysics in a nightclub queue. Second, and more importantly, it remains unmatched for real-time local panic. If twenty police cars hurtle past your house pursued by a helicopter clattering overhead like the apocalypse with rotor blades, X will already contain fourteen eyewitness accounts, three conspiracy theories, and a blurry photograph of someone’s wheelie bin on fire.

This is, one concedes, something. Whether it is enough to justify the Albanian lizard bankers, the Scandinavian fitness bots, and the canyon, is a question each person must answer for themselves, ideally over a cup of something sceptical, well away from the abyss.