In 1998, folk singer Jewel released a book of poetry called A Night Without Armor. (The title was a pun, you see. It plays with the homophones “night” and “knight” … Oh, you do see? OK, never mind.) It wasn’t particularly mind-blowing—at best, it featured what you’d expect from a master of the inoffensive coffeehouse jam—but it sold a lot of copies. Jewel was at the height of her Lilith Fair-and-VH1-powered stardom, and the book seemed to be at every Barnes & Noble coast to coast. Like the boy bands and pop stars who would come after her, she outsold Rilke that year (probably), because she was a name everyone knew. Monoculture was strong in ’98. My point—and I do have one—is that pop culture back then wasn’t much different then than it is now. These days, though, the chart-toppers, the people everyone listens to most, are the people with the blue checkmarks.
Yesterday, those people with the blue checks, those “verified” social media users, found themselves silenced on Twitter. Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, and a host of other Twitter mega-users had their accounts compromised Wednesday afternoon in what appeared to be an attempt to pull off a bitcoin scam. To staunch the bleeding, Twitter blocked verified accounts from posting messages. Suddenly, many a Twitter blowhard was locked out; the drivers of conversation were muzzled, and the plebes had the controls. Nature was healing. It was a night, or at least a few hours, without
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