Politixia
A person poses for a photo signing into the Twitter website which is now displaying the new logo for Twitter, in an office in central London, Monday July 24, 2023. (Jonathan Brady/PA via AP)
I have nothing as such against X.
X marks the spot, after all.
The band called X — motto, Got there first, dude! — are in a forever dead heat with Los Lobos as the greatest Southern California rock music makers of the 1980s (OK, and beyond). Viva Exene, John Doe, Billy Zoom, DJ Bonebreak!
The X I’m having a problem with is the new social media platform X that was the old social medium platform Twitter until new owner Elon Musk took the tweetie out of the bird.
I always had a bit of a difficult relationship with old Twitter, too.
Not much of a poster, more of a lurker. Since signing up as @publiceditor in June 2009 I’ve mostly put up my twice-weekly newspaper columns from our website and then scrolled the little blue pajaro for news.
I have an incredibly tiny following — 1,369, it is said. Let’s just say few of them ever @ me.
It’s a weird thing — while almost all of my friends in journalism were on Twitter, almost all of my non-journo friends are not. Whereas your Instagrams, your Facebooks — the Venn diagram of both those friend groups intersects greatly on those two platforms.
Twitter, no.
But I would sometimes find items of interest on the Twit and send them to a group text message made up of five of my closest guy friends.
The last time I did so — hey, it was really interesting, and a relief from today’s awful politics: A letter from reggae genius Lee “Scratch” Perry to Japanese officials back when Paul McCartney was jailed for weed! — I was severely admonished by my college roommate: “Love you, Lar-dog, but please no more Twitter s… to my phone. You gotta quit that fascist groove thing.”
Being a journalist, and thus addicted to the news, with Twitter a very easy place to follow the news — and for all I know, it still is — I did not quit. I just stopped forwarding stuff.
And then, a week or so ago, the thing happened that made me at least quiet-quit Twit. The little blue bird disappeared from the app on my home screen one morning. In its place, a white X on a black background. I couldn’t put my finger on it and open it up, as I usually would have, that moment, and I haven’t done so since.
I’m done.
I really think the platform could have maintained my 14-year addiction, and the income that pertained to it, if they had even gone a little way toward designing a gentler, kinder X. Or something even a little Goth, like the L.A. band sometimes uses in its graphics. But the typography of this new X logo calls to mind nothing so much as the Z symbol that has become a militarist meme in Russian propaganda and is used by Russian civilians to indicate support for the war in Ukraine.
To press on that baby to discover what’s beneath would feel like hitting a button launching hypersonic Kinzhal missiles from the Russian steppes to downtown Kyiv. Can’t do it. Not nearly curious enough. There are other places to find the news, and the opinions.
I will really miss Dodger Twitter. It was great. And golf Twitter — geeking out about a relatively minor sport was a tonic on a busy work day. Poetry Twitter — so gossipy and erudite (and political). Journalism Twitter: so smart and newsy.
Funny thing, the letter X is being used in other new ways that I don’t find at all objectionable. There’s that kinda sweet new zoomer vibe of writing Mx. sted Ms. That Latinx, etc., non-binary movement? Not in any great tizzy against it.
The ruination of Twitter, though, through inept and weird business practices? The emoji turds its owner sends to journos asking him any question at all? The bad X is just the last straw.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
