Elon Musk can take my blue tick, but he'll never take my inability to quit using a site like Twitter that is bad for me - Alexander Brown

I have a blue tick on Twitter, something I don’t like to mention aside from in conversation, column headlines and this sentence right now.

If you don’t know what a blue tick is, it’s an entirely meaningless symbol that people put value on, like a football crest or crucifix.

It’s a vaguely cool thing that means something really only to up-and-coming journalists who do not have them, or incels angry they don’t.

It shows you are who you say you are, or at least the version you’re pretending to be to derive joy from a website in lieu of real life.

The Twitter application as seen on a mobile device. Picture: AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File

Having a tick also indicates you’ve possibly made it in journalism, or at least worked somewhere that makes it look like you did.

I got mine in a previous job because they were just handing them out, rather than desperately wanting to authenticate my terrible tweets.

Nobody is following me and using it to check it’s the real @alexofbrown, the authentic Alexander, full fat Ally B.

It’s a thing next to my name because of my job, something I know exists without ever thinking about it, like my student loan payments or Luxembourg.

In reality it has little to no value whatsoever. Or at least it didn’t, until Elon Musk decided to charge $8 a month for it.

Oh how the discourse exploded. It was finally a chance for journalists to talk about our status, but also the indignity of having to pay for a shiny sticker on the internet.

When considering whether to pay or not, it’s important to know doing so would be incredibly embarrassing and in any normal society see you shunned as a sycophant for social status.

Paying for a blue tick would be, to put it mildly, totally insane and show an online persona is more important to you than, say, a nice cake or one pint in London.

Musk explains he’s doing so to break down the “current lords and peasants system”, which is a deeply funny thing to hear from a billionaire.

For context, $6 billion is what the UN World Food Program say could end world hunger. But Musk thought it more important to protect comedy online, something he could help do by simply deleting his account.

His argument is that it will help deal with troll and bots online, which again, he’s decided is a bigger issue than fixing world hunger.

But I’m not a billionaire, so what do I know.

Like a dog chasing his tail, Musk seemingly doesn’t know what to do with Twitter now that he's actually got it.

He’s fired Twitter’s chief executive and chief finance officer, as well as the head of legal and policy, with further plans to sack up to half the staff, and is making up policy in arguments with Stephen King.

Now the question is what to do. Will we all leave Twitter in a strop, angry that a conspiracy theorist has taken over a site populated by fellow conspiracy theorists.

No, obviously not. Rich men are in control of most things, and at least this one has memes to get us through.