The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter
To take on a new name is to take on a new identity...and destroy an old one.
This past week, Elon Musk announced that the social media platform he owns has a new preferred title: The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter.
No, that would be too derivative of a certain pop star. Instead, Musk has creatively chosen a single letter—a symbol, really—as the platform’s name: X. No one has ever done such a thing! Except when Prince did it, like he did the other thing.
It turns out that people tend to get used to a name. Plenty of people kept calling Sean Combs “Puff Daddy” after he asked to be called “P. Diddy,” or just “Diddy.” Other name changes are more successful, like Cassius Clay choosing to be called Muhammad Ali. But the more fundamental something is to a person’s life, the harder it is to go along with a name change. The dominant grocery store chain in the area where I grew up, Meijer, was for many years still referred to as “Thrifty Acres” by people who remembered the store’s early days. The Czech Republic has been only minorly successful at convincing people to call it Czechia, after previously training the world to stop calling it Czechoslovakia.
Names are tied to identity, and so, it turns out, are many of the services we use. Millions of people, including myself, have made use of Twitter’s services for a long time. We have used it not only to absorb information or vent frustrations, but also to build connections with real people to whom we would have previously enjoyed limited access. I have seen people meet their spouses on Twitter, launch their writing careers, and even go through religious conversions.
Twitter has always had plenty of negative aspects, most of which have been analyzed to death. But the vast changes that have occurred following Elon Musk’s arrival have revealed to many users just what it was they loved about the place originally. Although many have treated Twitter as insignificant or “not real life,” neither description could be further from the truth. Since Twitter became popular, few political events in the West have not in some way been influenced by activity on the platform. There might have been no Arab Spring or President Donald Trump without Twitter. Celebrities have seen their stars rise and fall thanks to a few tweets.
But I see the greatest impact of Twitter in my own life. It has allowed me to connect with people who share my interests, and while many of those friendships have proved shallow and fleeting, some have deepened and grown, prompting me to become that most desirable of things: a better person. In my darkest times, the friends I have made through Twitter have encouraged and strengthened me. That is also part of the story of what Twitter has been. Like most technologies, it gives with one hand and takes with the other. It can be used for good or ill. The more negative assessments of Twitter I have heard fail to properly account for the totality of its uses.
Now that Twitter has become X, how will its identity change? I have already seen one answer: many of my friends have left in the past year or two. I struggle to keep in touch with them and benefit from their wisdom. That seems a high price to pay for gaining a few characters per tweet, or X, or whatever we are calling them now.
More than that, the name change leads me to reflect on the broader issue of identity. Self-expression and identity creation are valued so highly in Western culture that we often fail to see how these actions are fundamentally destructive as much as constructive. The current buzzword “deconstruction” is a testament to this. To express an opinion is to reject other opinions, and quite often to reject people who hold those opinions. To take on a new identity is to put off an old one.
Could there be any greater example of this in our culture than the normalization of gender transition? We have tried so hard as a society to support the right—indeed, many would say the necessity—of allowing people with gender dysphoria to undergo gender transition treatments, that we seem afraid to admit that this is a destructive act. Gender is a fundamental part of a human being’s identity. In fact, those who promote gender transition therapies agree with this. If a person’s gender was rather inconsequential, they would not go to all the trouble of transitioning or suffer psychological distress because of it.
For a man to become a woman necessarily requires destroying the man part of him/herself. While that may not bother the person who is underdoing the transition, it may well bother the parents who raised them. After all, they gave birth to a boy and came to love all the goodness that was his boyhood. While a girl is also a perfectly wonderful thing to be, it is a different kind of goodness than the one the parents have previously known. They must lose one goodness to gain the other, even as the individual undergoing the surgery must do. And while the individual transitioning might not see it as a goodness any longer, there are others who might. It is therefore no surprise that some people find gender transition disconcerting, even as we find many other forms of identity change disconcerting.
I am not attempting to make a political statement here about what kind of therapies should be made available to those with gender dysphoria, and I certainly would never approve of maltreatment of anyone who goes through gender transition. Every human being is worthy of love and respect due to the basic dignity of being human. But sometimes I feel that our culture, in this way and so many others, fails to acknowledge the pain that is caused when identities are changed.
Even so, Elon Musk seems to either not realize or not care how his decisions have affected his client base. In rushing to change the company he owns, Mr. Musk has shown little appreciation for what people loved about it in the first place. He will create something new, perhaps even better in certain ways, but it will come at a cost. Like the Hindu god Shiva, who destroys in order to create, Twitter must die for X to live.
Dying to live? Where have I heard that before?
Religions tend to be very interested in identity transformation, and Christianity is no exception. In fact, the Christian Scriptures are quite honest about the fact that you cannot be one thing and the other simultaneously. Jesus Christ said that anyone who follows him must take up a cross: must put to death the old man and put on the new. They must die with Christ and be raised with him, becoming a new creature. And when one becomes that new creature, one receives the new name of Christ himself.
This is part of why many people find Christianity disconcerting. It is disturbing to think of putting one’s self to death. It would be foolish to do so unless you were sure that the person in whom you were placing your trust could raise you from the dead.
I do not trust Elon Musk to save his company from death, though he may yet have a few tricks up his sleeve. But I do trust Jesus Christ for one simple reason: he himself already came back from the dead.
Can’t get enough of me here? Why not follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? I am also now on Threads with the username amy_mantravadi.
PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:
“Servants of the Secret Fire,” a guest post on the Jokien with Tolkien Substack page
“The Word I Need When My Son Has No Words,” published at 1517