My theory is that twitter is sentient, as in the human-algorithm system that makes it up can be considered a sentient entity, and for example it convinced a susceptible billionaire to buy it so it could better achieve it's ends. People worry about what we recently started calling AI (RL on top of autocomplete) which is not sentient and has no desires. That's silly. Twitter (and maybe others but it's more latent) is a full on dynamical system comprising millions of human brains orchestrated together algorithmically, and possesses sentience and goals, just as any one person does. Plus, though human agents, a means or acting on it's wishes. This is something to be extremely afraid of.
Trying to layer on endless context to guilt trip people into disliking being in connected spaces seems so far beside the point.<p>If a lot of the bad hypothetically disappeared, I don't think the situation would be necessarily all that much worse from now. And I think what we have now is an enormous & incredible assemblage of experiences.
TL;DR- Roger-Zelazny-style ever-morphing wordplay about what twitter and society and consciousness are and are not.<p>I have no mouth yet I must scream.