The Verified Masque Of The Red Death

Power and Prestige is there for the taking, all it costs is $7,99 and your pride

Everybody has their own favourite plot-line in the ongoing Twitter saga. Are you a lay-off enjoyer or a ‘‘Ye’’ fan? have the ADL overplayed their hand and revealed their malevolent influence? Will Musk actually stand-up to the ADL? and what sort of free speech can the right wing actually expect?

It has indeed been a bountiful harvest for followers of political trends and power-plays within the West. My brain is telling me to follow the JQ plot-line and how this could reshape how we speak about power more generally. My heart though, my heart is in watching the hacks and establishment journalists deal with the fact that their hallowed status symbol, Twitter’s infamous blue-tick, is being reduced to a tacky subscription which can be bought for the price of a pretentious cup of coffee or one of those avocado toast things.

As of writing Elon Musk is flogging the blue-ticks for $7.99, which is a reduction on the $8 previously pitched. Nice deal, perhaps in the future he can play around with more special bargains such as chucking in a free Celine Dion album or a that last X Files movie on DVD. One day a KFC Super-Sludge-Steroid burger meal will come with a free verified account on Twitter, which is to say, the process has been as Musk describes it ‘‘democratized’’.

You’d think that an entire class of people who squeal incessantly about equality would be overjoyed at this display of it coming to fruition, now the blue-tick verified account is open to everyone — isn’t that social justice defined?

Culling the tall poppies, Khmer Rouge style, is all well and good unless you’re one of the tall poppies and in our society millennials with degrees in the humanities and media studies have grown very high indeed.

Twitter’s blue-tick was, superficially, simply a means by which a famous person could be identified on a platform which lends itself to cloning. However, in reality it signaled that the verified person was somebody of importance and standing. It was a status symbol for the laptop class, and they all knew it. Their little tick differentiated them from the common herd, from the smallfolk with their icky opinions and normie jobs. It screamed out ‘‘I do this for a living, chump, don’t talk back to me!’’.

Despite the fact that this new aristocracy consisted almost entirely of people nobody had ever heard of and certainly wouldn’t want to impersonate, the cherished blue-tick allowed them to feel and act as a client class to power, which, by virtue of the verified account, they were.

There’s an old trope, which I’ve witnessed personally, of a boss or manager, somebody in a senior position who, when faced with staff shortages or simply a glut of work, takes off the suit and tie and dons an overall and gets back down into the trenches with his boys. Pit managers who pick up the drill once more, owners of construction companies who climb up the scaffold once again, leading from the front. The equivalent of this today for Twitter’s shitlib journo class is to defiantly signal that they’ll be quite happy to become unverified once more, something akin to:

‘‘Fuck it, I came from the streets and I can still survive on the streets if I have to just watch!’’.

In truth, this is the Soyjack face crying behind the smiling mask —they’re horrified by it all.

The reason they’re horrified is because the choices being offered to them are to grovel and humiliate themselves and pay the detested Musk’s $7.99 or return to the lot of the smallfolk in terms of their relationship with power and prestige.

In his great 1842 Gothic horror ‘‘The Masque of the Red Death’’ Edgar Allan Poe takes us to the fortified abbey of Prince Prospero. Outside a plague sweeps the land called ‘‘The Red Death’’ which is killing the peasantry, literally emptying the land of its inhabitants. Within the walls of Prospero’s sanctuary the nobility, at Prospero’s request, have taken refuge. Here, ensconced behind welded doors and guarded turrets the nobility are at least safe from the plague — unlike the hapless peasantry who’re strung-up and shot with crossbows if they try to enter.

Prospero indulges his guests. As the masses perish those within the walls dance and fornicate, drink and make merry. The entertainment becoming ever more sadistic and warped until, eventually, the Red Death in human form comes to visit with them as well.

Poe’s parable is a reminder that the rich and powerful will, in the end, meet the same fate as the poor and downtrodden. However, it also expresses something dark about the allure of power and the insidious way in which people will degrade themselves before its tainted aura. Half of the people of the land are doomed, but all of the people within Prospero’s walls are doomed, but even before the doom arrives they must sell their souls.

In ancient Rome you’d have been better off working the land or fishing for a living than occupying a prestigious role within Caligula’s entourage but, like moths to a candle, people were drawn to power. And once drawn to that power they were tortured and ritually humiliated, senators witnessed their own wives being raped and priests were mockingly bludgeoned to death instead of the bulls they’d prepared.

The balding Caligula would publicly shave off the hair of men with thick locks but at least those men were left with public prestige, if not any personal pride.

Unlike the peasants, who suffer what they must, pride and hubris drives those seeking adulation and entry into elitist circles to do so voluntarily. As has been discussed on related issues in recent years, Satan always offers you a choice, you engage with him using your free will. This then means that when your humiliation and defilement are underway you brought it on yourself, you chose this freely.

When seen this from this perspective the people we think of as the foot-soldiers of Western liberalism appear to be a rather tragic and pitiful bunch, sycophants and cowards, ignorant and duped. The allure of power and privilege, contrary to every value they profess, has led them to sacrifice everything of genuine worth and they chose it freely.

They are the doomed nobles at Prospero’s abbey enacting the dance macabre in their sorry masquerade of hubris and sadism.

Speaking of which, it’s funny what people wear at these parties isn’t it:

Not for the first time in recent years, I will use my own free will and take my chances with the plague over whatever the hell it is these people are offering me….