At some point it becomes suddenly, disconcertingly clear that we have very few pals left
By George Chesterton 24 July 2023 • 8:00am ‘I’m both envious of those who appear to have lots of friends and suspicious of how they’ve acquired them’
Five times a year. That’s how often I see the friends I have left. It feels like slim pickings for a man with my winning personality. What happens to male friendship in middle age? The question comes with a pang. Am I missing out, or deficient in some way? I mean, I have plenty of friends. Well, I have a decent number of friends. OK, I have a few friends.
I’ve talked myself into a kind of loneliness that’s hard to justify given that I’m surrounded by so much familial love. (“Poor widdle me,” as Kim Jong-il once sang in Team America.) I’m both envious of those who appear to have lots of friends and suspicious of how they’ve acquired them.
“Friends” is a dominant theme of the cliché-industrial complex, appearing in an endless feed of Facebook platitudes and Instagram posts. Taylor Swift said, “All you need to do to be my friend is like me”, which is either very profound or very stupid. Let’s assume it’s the former and that a definition of friendship is unconditional affection, rather than needy sycophancy. If I’m Billy No Mates, and Taylor is correct, then it means I don’t like many people and they don’t like me. So I appear to have brought this on myself.
This phobia of being clubbable is perhaps best expressed in a passage from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, when Colonel Korn finally consents to send Yossarian home from the war on one condition.
“What must I do?”
Colonel Korn laughed curtly.“Like us.”
Yossarian blinked. “Like you?”
“That’s right,” said Colonel Korn. “Like us. Join us. Be our pal … Become one of the boys. Now, that isn’t asking too much, is it?”
“That isn’t going to be too easy.”
To truly like a person, you need trust, and that requires emotional investment – an increasingly rare commodity as you age – so as old friends fade away, they cannot simply be replaced. The space to build trust with newcomers is just not there.
Most often your partner becomes your best friend by default, which is no bad thing, while an imperceptible drift from sociability takes place over the years – sometimes it’s because of children, sometimes physical distance, sometimes lifestyle choices, like religion or polyamory.
Lasting significance
It doesn’t help that three of my oldest friends are currently unavailable. Of the men I spent most of my youth and young manhood with, one is in Los Angeles, another lives an alternative lifestyle in Devon and the third joined me in a spectacular falling out that killed our 30-year relationship overnight (mostly my fault, naturally).
It’s easier to be blasé and picky when you are young. There are so many friends to choose from and so many relationships you can roll into and out of again without the sense of any lasting significance. Having so few friends can’t be foreseen at 21, but maturity nudges out the immediate need, with the hours dominated by family and work. Once-intense friendships blow up or become diffuse, yet I still see other men managing it better than me.
Moments of envy that other men my age have armies of besties are countered by the cynical assumption that to have so many must mean a decent proportion are false or flimsy in some way. If friendship means something, then how can it be so effortless for these mysteriously popular men, who dangle their mates like an ageing hipster’s neck chains?
The more I witness friendship groups treating Glastonbury like a middle-aged Christmas (“only six sleeps to Glastonbury”), the less I want to know. It’s the fun that really puts me off. I carry the remembrance of festivals past, which is enough to dissuade me now. It’s great if 250,000 people want to enjoy music and drugs in a pop-up town with less diversity than Antiques Roadshow, but don’t sell it to me as a return to Eden. This is the kind of sentiment that evinces comments such as “I feel sorry for you”. They’re not necessary. I already feel sorry for myself.
Design and necessity
Apparently there is a dire need for a safe space for men, which is a bit like saying grey squirrels need a safe space from red ones. But I would concede there is a particular state of ease that’s only possible for men among other men.
There is also consolation that with those few friends you have left, months or even years between meetings are written off with the wave of a hand. Just as well really. This is when you notice the unfettered affection and loyalty male friends feel for each other. It’s kept simple by design and necessity.
Having lost interest in football I’ve destroyed 50 per cent of my conversation options – and I wasn’t exactly Bantersaurus Rex to begin with. Male bonding is sometimes little more than a home-cooked version of a radio phone-in on an infinite loop.
True male friendship is paradoxical, in that it is intimate without intimacy. Men neither touch each other physically nor discuss anything directly – what is said out loud is trivial and everything important is unspoken. If a subtext is identified, it’s quickly ignored before moving on, since no man wants to turn a subtext into an actual text over a few beers.
Like a lot of things about getting older, acceptance is the only meaningful response. My friends are real. My loneliness isn’t. It’s a product of a faulty memory and an ego that hasn’t yet burnt itself out. At least we have yacht rock to talk about. During those occasional and precious tribal gatherings, you all become carriers of each other’s memories, like the shaman or village poets who guard the oral history of your collective lives.
If you want lots of friends, you will probably have lots of friends. Therefore, if I don’t have many, I must not need many to begin with. Either that or I’m unbearable. Answers on a postcard, please. But don’t expect a friendly reply.
Not to mention, so I can stop seeing pictures of him, pressing his fingertips together in front of his face like he’s some fucking pensive genius. I’m goddamn tired of it
The vast majority of these users aren’t paying for subscription, and many advertisers have dropped it. Meanwhile it needs to pay additional debt and interest from the acquisition itself.
It is on its death bed already. All it takes is for the owner to realize it’s not worth taking losses over it anymore.
All these people are terminally attached to the people they are connected to on the platform. Moving over is easy. Convincing your friends to move along with you is hard. As a creator, convincing your whole follower base to move along with you is nearly impossible.
No offense but this is so goddamn stupid. We don’t live in a bubble and unfortunately their actions may have an impact as they ripple through the business and political world.
Intentionally censoring news because “lol get wrecked Jeff Bezos” is hurting no one but yourself.
He has long list of terrible shit he’s done, but this is literally nothing lol
People acting like he stole someone’s property. He changed the username of some random squatter on his own personal website.
Which also there’s a huge underground communities who hack, trade, and sell these “rare” usernames. So no doubt it was owned by some squatter or someone who obtained it through malicious means.
So you’re saying rare usernames have a monetary value, but also that it’s perfectly fine for a website to steal these rare usernames because the man-child owner of the site has a weird obsession with a certain letter of the alphabet? And how do you know they obtained it via “malicious means” and not that they weren’t just an early adopter of twitter?
The fact that he’s treating twitter like his “personal website” is part of the problem.
It’s not stealing. He owns the website. It literally is his personal website. Tf are you guys smoking. Usernames are not property. The entitlement here is ridiculous and just objectively wrong.
Where is the part where that matters in the slightest. Still a username on a live service that is subject to change at any time, and there has never been an expectation of ownership.
Where is the part where that matters in the slightest.
You are proposing that, in justification of the dick move, this user is “no doubt” squatting or obtained the username maliciously when that isn’t the case based on the third paragraph of the article and other interviews with the original registrant of the handle. I don’t really think that’s a good faith discussion.
Regarding your second sentence, I don’t disagree but at I’m also not trying to make a point beyond my first reply of “sometimes you shouldn’t do things that you are able to do”.
I’m guessing he’s trying to spell something dirty again with his companies like he did with the Tesla models (S, 3, X, Y). Dude basically is a 13 year old boy if they were given billions of dollars.
Ford really should have released the electric Mustang as the Model E. Not only because Mustang was a bad brand to use for that but because Elon losing his shit about it would have been hysterical and free PR.
You’ve got to assume that Twitter can revoke any users access at any time for any reason under its existing terms and conditions. This is a predictable douche move by Musk but the original account holder very likely has zero recourse.
The article quotes the TOS that gives only one reason why a person might lose their twiX handle, and it’s not “Elon Musk wants it”, so there’s probably going to be a line of lawyers wanting to take this case.
They should have at least offered to give him the twitter handle. haha
TOS aren’t legally bindingTOS aren’t always legally binding, and they’re a private company, appropriating an account stored on their private servers for their own service only. There’s no legal standing There’s probably no legal standing to do anything about this. It’s just shitty and immature, not illegal.
(Technically, the TOS even says they can take accounts for trademark violations, and since Meta owns the trademark on the use of ‘X’, clearly they’re just taking it so they can give it to Meta and help them enforce their trademark.)
Source on them not being legally binding? They have a mixed track record but I’ve never seen anyone flat out say they aren’t legally binding. Sometimes they are; sometimes they are not.
I am no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that something pre-dating the trademark is grandfathered in. Hence why Steam uses steampowered.com and not steam.com
Utility bills aren't binding because they're subsidized. They're binding because they are contracts, and contract law is a thing that exists.
It's a complicated thing and there are many restrictions and conditions on what makes a valid contract and what kinds of things are and aren't allowed. Many Terms of Service violate contract law and thus wind up not being enforceable, but it is absolutely not correct to say that Terms of Service are in general not binding.
Looks like they’re binding if they follow very specific criteria; I don’t know if TwitterX’s qualify, but I’ll accept that my above statement is probably wrong.
That said, they do have a carveout for trademark violations which technically this is, because X is trademarked, just not by Twitter.
It’s also specifically about a trade. If I had a vitamin company called X and a vacuum cleaner company called steam, neither of those companies could legally have anything to say about it.
He thinks that lawsuits are great publicity. Plus he apparently has some sort of psychological defiance disorder, so he would love to say “oh yeah? Make me!”
Microsoft and Meta both own trademarks on the letter X. Trademarks are always context-sensitive, meaning multiple entities can trademark the same sequence of letters in different contexts.
TOS aren’t legally binding only when they are not compliant with existing laws! For example when a hotel says in it’s TOS “we can murder you in your sleep” that is not binding, but when they say “we can expell you for wearing a pink polo shirt” that is legally binding
I had a landlord who had a really hard time understanding that state law specified what was legal for them to put in a rental contract, and that if someone signed a contract with illegal provisions, they were not bound to follow it.
Your first sentence is so unbelievably and obviously wrong that you there’s no way we should trust any of your other thoughts on the matter. You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
You know, everyone should start calling the service twiX, just to irritate the candy bar company, which is actually a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that does care how its brands are perceived.
But, as I mentioned above, Twix the candy bar and TwiX the portmanteau for Twitter/X exist in different product spaces. Consumers are unlikely to be confused between the two. I still wouldn’t mind it catching on, haha.
I used to like Twix bars until I saw the kind of shit they are saying on their online platform. They are kinda all over the place, but I think it’s because the people at Twix know their racism is bad for business so try to hide it a little.
They don’t even allow me to delete my account. They suspended me (never posted anything) and now I’d need to beg to be unbanned, just to get off Mr. Elons wild ride. I’m in the EU so I’m thinking about making use of my right to be forgotten.
Which makes his desire to have x be the everything app so much more horrifying. That level of consolidated power is horrifying on its own, and it’s even more horrifying knowing the person running it enjoys abusing his power.
Whether or not they can sue, I think the point is everyone knows that one could sell a one letter Twitter account for tens of thousands (or, could have 2 years ago, anyway). So, just that Musk is a gigantic dickhead.
Shitty as this behavior may be: Why would there have to be any payment? It's just an account with a private company.
They can setup arbitrary rules or ban you without any rules. It's their service, their database... Just like a club can throw you out on a whim. You may tell your friends and eventually that club may go out of business because of their shitty behavior but that's about it.
This would have been a whole other story if it had happened with the x.com domain name...
That is exactly why. If you need to do something shitty, soften the blow. If you don't, you're an asshole. Making something hurt less means you have empathy. I'm honestly confused why you needed to ask. You're taking something of value from someone and providing nothing in return.
Edit: just because something is allowed (taking the account) doesn't mean it's "good" (in the moral sense). And just because something isn't required (offering compensation) doesn't mean it can't be used as a sign of good will or the lack of it can't be viewed negatively.
And just because something isn't required (offering compensation) doesn't mean it can't be used as a sign of good will or the lack of it can't be viewed negatively.
I agree. The headline could've said "@x user handle grabbed in an asshole move". Expecting payment for something like a Twitter handle is just weird to me.
Twitter handles have exchanged hands in the past for large sums. The precedent exists that handles have monetary value, especially single character ones. It's not much different than selling domain names.
I am rarely a hipster, but I was definitely on the "Musk is an asshole" bandwagon waaaaaaaaaaay back in the days of grabbing credit for PayPal and founding Tesla. He's always been an asshole, but for the longest time his very loud fan club was willing to overlook the various indicators.
They can setup arbitrary rules or ban you without any rules. It’s their service,
Indeed this shows the change in meaning that “service” has undergone in the past 10 or maybe 20 years. Before, the very notion of “service” was that this kind of events could not happen – otherwise it wasn’t a “service”. Reliability and reliance were integral part of the definition of “service”.
Well, back then you paid for service. Then it's a different story, there's an actual contract which is legally binding. Enshittified internet doesn't have those. Nor are users customers but we all know that here.
What if instead of taking over Twitter handle X, he had taken over Twitter handle of say NY Times. Not blocked it or suspended but straight up takeover. They’re part of that company’s brand. X May have not been important monetarily to that person but doing something like this without offering some sort of compensation signals to all other companies who use Twitter that their handle isn’t safe. This may be a unique instance because he wants the X Twitter handle for their rebranding, but it is an asshole move and undoubtedly others will be watching closely.
I agree. They are within their rights to do whatever with their database, their service. But if their decisions impact someone else’s business then they shouldn’t be surprised if someone takes legal action.
Yes they have the right and ability to seize any account on their service for any reason. But if they want to be a stable platform where people build their brands and their businesses, there should be an expectation that this would not happen. Due process for when there is a dispute.
Clearly musk wants people to view the platform as such a place so this is a dumb move. In addition to being asshole
if they want to be a stable platform where people build their brands and their businesses
See, I don’t think that’s the goal anymore. I think the goal now is to repackage Xitter into something that looks new and different with all the right buzz words about AI. And then he desperately offloads as much of his position as possible on some other sap.
Musk took the handle as part of his monetization "strategy" to rebrand so with money involved payment for taking something from a user is a logical step.
Not taking it would be the most logical step, but exchange of money to compensate would be a close second.
I don't understand how he expects to brand a letter. It'll do poorly in any kind of searching. Especially since it's a common letter to see on its own.
The part I’m really blown away by is that I just saw this final project in the intro to design class I teach from a group of international students earlier this spring. The project was to create a logo design and brand guidelines as a small team. The students can pick the business and whether it’s new or a rebrand, and this group went with social media all-in-one apps and made the justification that they are hugely popular in China, but nothing like that exists in the US. My favorite part is that the letter X was a HUGE part of the logo/branding, but they did not name it just “X” specifically for the reasons you listed - it’s not discoverable or unique in searches, the App Store, etc.
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