How bad will it get? - by Brian Merchant

Well here we go, the cursed election is finally upon on us, and we have reached what must be near-historic levels of everything feeling very, very bad. For me, as for too many of us, the direct conduit for a lot of this very bad feeling is X, né Twitter, and the one solitary guaranteed outcome of this election is that no matter who wins, the platform will be even worse in the days during and following it. We think it’s bad now, with Elon Musk tweeting “Interesting” to every self-described ‘race realist’ who shares some graph they made in MS Paint about great replacement theory, or tweaking the algorithm to boost users who post ‘evidence’ that Haitians are eating neighbors pets. Just wait until Musks’ blue checkmark army, eager to get promoted into the For You feed or even win the lottery with a QT from Elon himself, start sharing ‘proof’ of election interference. Blood in the Machine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free o

Well here we go, the cursed election is finally upon on us, and we have reached what must be near-historic levels of everything feeling very, very bad. For me, as for too many of us, the direct conduit for a lot of this very bad feeling is X, né Twitter, and the one solitary guaranteed outcome of this election is that no matter who wins, the platform will be even worse in the days during and following it. We think it’s bad now, with Elon Musk tweeting “Interesting” to every self-described ‘race realist’ who shares some graph they made in MS Paint about great replacement theory, or tweaking the