The midterms could lead us towards dystopian authoritarianism

It happened yesterday afternoon:

What does one person leaving Twitter mean?  It is no different from asking how one person's vote will matter in the overall scheme of things.  It matters.  It matters to all of us.

What Elon Musk says and does should matter to you too.  Even if you do not live in the US.

I was an early adopter of Twitter, similar to how I jumped on blogging a long, long time ago.  My first tweet on April 10, 2007, couldn't have been any more boring than what I tweeted:

getting ready for the 3:30 meeting
— sriram khe (@congoboy) April 10, 2007

Unlike in Facebook, there were no posts of people's vacations and dinners and children.  Over the years, it became a wonderful source of information and knowledge, through a few public intellectuals whose tweets I read through a "pundit" list that I put together for myself.

Musk's ownership does not mean that my trusted sources of news and analysis have gone away, though many were openly contemplating about leaving.  For me, I knew well that I would leave Twitter if Musk crossed a red line.  And he did, which is what I wrote about in the tweet as I put my account on hold.

The hellsite is rapidly deteriorating after Musk's ownership:

[Researchers] at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk’s Twitter “show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”

The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. “Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers have tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.

Whether or not the new owner made money, I did not want to participate in that sphere.  I chose the "exit" option of the "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" that Albert Hirschman wrote about decades ago.

I worry that we are sliding into an Eastern European, a Hungarian, world in which oligarchs who work hand in glove with the far right governments control the media, and preempt truth and discourse that are vital for a healthy democracy.

Meanwhile, one of the select people helping Musk manage Twitter is, yes, an Indian-American.  A Tamil-American from Chennai.  And he has the same name as mine.  Back in the old country, Sriram Krishnan would have been K. Sriram as I once was!

While little is known about Mr Krishnan's ties with Mr Musk, he has been an open admirer of the billionaire in the past, describing him as an "inspirational person and an iconic founder".

He has also openly supported Mr Musk's vision for Twitter and criticised practices such as de-platforming on the microblogging website. 

"Having extrajudicial internet cops that lead to enforcement on your platform is the road to dystopian authoritarianism," he wrote on Twitter last month.

The road to dystopian authoritarianism, as most science fiction and movies depict, runs through power-hungry scientists and entrepreneurs who develop and implement technology that crushes humanity and free thinking.

How rapidly are we traveling down that road?  Too bad that I cannot check with my pundits on Twitter!