Thursday 30 April 2020

'But I'm not guilty', said K. 'There's been a mistake...'

Please refer to the set text.



Hi. Remember me? I'm GM0JHE. I'm from the Internet. I once occupied a lovely little spot on Twitter; comfy chair, great view, all the Custard Creams one could eat, that sort of thing. I had over 350 followers. I wasn't prolific (when was I ever?), but I was funny, and unlike radio, people could, and did, communicate with me.

One day, in the midst of a global pandemic, I logged on to my account only to discover that I'd been suspended. No, not from the ceiling, or from a tall crane, but from Twitter. 'Why?', I hear you ask. How the flying Duck should I know? I hadn't broken a single Twitter Rule, or any of their Terms & Conditions, yet seven and a quarter years of history - moans about trains, sausage rolls, computer-generated CW and band conditions, and my bad jokes - were flushed down the toilet at the stroke of a pen. If only it were that simple. This is where every angsty, psuedo-intellectual teenager's favourite Bohemian (from Bohemia, not a flowery-shirted, beardy weirdo) novelist comes into it. I'm the social media equivalent of Josef K.

Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, an über-rich, hairy, Irish-American software geek who dropped out of university before graduating. In other words, he's a rebel, and he'll never, ever be any good. He's a busy man. He has a lot of money that needs counting, so he's left the day-to-day ticking-over of his dysfunctional behemoth in the hands of underlings or, to be more accurate, a sentient, psychotic, sociopathic fascist of an Intel Pentium II-based PC running Windows 95. This soulless chunk of metal possesses zero social skills and zero sense of humour, and hates sunlight and people. IT carries out the culling of accounts, not Janice in Cubicle 27 or Jorge on the 3rd Floor. There's no tech support and no plinky-plonky on-hold music. There isn't even an e-mail address. There's just a yawning chasm into which your Support Requests fall. And fall. And fall:

'My account has been suspended'. Silence.
'Why was my account suspended?' Silence.
'Here's a my CV, two References, my shoe size and photo of me from the 1980s to prove that I'm a real person'. Silence.
'I'll just set up another account, shall I?' 'We cannot currently register that e-mail address'. Oh, a response! #facepalm

I guess you won't be seeing me on Twitter any time soon, if ever.

No comments: