X marks the spot
Not content with filling space with junk, Musk’s actions have now polluted news channels with yet more garbage: the dreadful phrase, “formerly known as Twitter.”
On July 23 this year, Elon Musk seemingly decided that his already expensive purchase of social media platform Twitter could be rendered even less viable if it was renamed “X.” In under a few days, all traces of the famous blue bird were removed from the website as well as the company’s San Francisco office.
In a tweet, sorry, an X, Musk explained that: “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth — like birds tweeting — but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.”
Indeed you can. As the conspiracists have rushed back to the platform, passing advertisers fleeing in the opposite direction, X has very much become the place to post almost anything. Especially if it’s racist, anti-semitic, or neo-nazi. The platform’s owner has defended Russell Brand and threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, which advocates for Jewish rights.
But that’s for another time. In the same message explaining the reasons for killing the Twitter bluebird stone cold dead, Musk said: “Over the next few months we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.”
Now, it’s possible that X will indeed become the communications success that Musk has planned. We may end up conducting our “entire financial world” on the platform, helping to ease Musk’s own financial challenges and increasing the value of a business now worth less than half of what he paid for it a year ago.
But one thing is for sure: his rebranding has created so much written waste that nearly a quarter of a million unnecessary words have been dedicated to pointless explanation since that fateful July day, or sleepless middle of night, more likely, when he tweeted, SORRY, X’d, the news that the bird had flown the nest.
That’s because every single journalist since then must now place the four words “formally known as Twitter” after a mention of the new social media platform’s name. When they quote someone’s X (I think I got this now), they must write the words “formally known as Twitter.” When Musk’s own plans for the platform are discussed, any attempt at elegant analysis must be disrupted by the phrase, you guessed it, “formerly known as Twitter.” Even articles about its rival, Threads, must, by definition, feature the same damned four words, ad nauseum.
The need to explain a billionaire’s whimsy has therefore created a whole lot of written garbage in a little under two months. I searched English language print news media since 24 July using the Cision platform and discovered 12,616 articles that included the words “formerly known as Twitter.” That’s 50,464 entirely unnecessary words or more than a quarter of a million (277,552) characters that could have been avoided if Musk had not rebranded his platform overnight.
To put that in perspective, the US Constitution only contains 4,543 words. A basic search suggests the United Nations Charter comes in under 9,000. Hemingway only needed 20,000 words to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea. The book voted the best recipient of the Booker Prize in over 50 years, the English Patient, only took a few more thousand words to describe a vast world that ranged from extramarital liaisons in heady, prewar Cairo to an abandoned Tuscan villa of ghosts, Bach and morphine addiction. The book wasn't subtitled “The man formally known as Almásy” for good reason.
Some lazy googling reveals that the most widely recognised longest piece of literature is the Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, which comes in at a whopping 1.5 million words. Plenty of time to go, then, as we continue to be reminded of X’s feathered past and grow ever wearier about its future, harangued by the unrelenting death knell refrain of “formerly known as Twitter.”
Let’s just hope Musk has the brand recognition he wants for X by October 2025; by that time, and at the current rate, the pile of words needed to explain it will be higher than even Proust’s most wordy of memories.
Temps perdu, indeed.
