It’s been the talk of the platform formerly known as Twitter: its sudden rebranding with a logo that looks like it might have been used by Nazi pirates.

What's it supposed to be anyway? A warning of adult content? An unknown quantity? A tribute to Fox Mulder, Charles Xavier or Wilhelm Röntgen? A deleted expletive? The mark of Christ?

Or is it the Roman number ten? Or simply a times sign?

Is it an alert that we’re just ten seconds till midnight on the doomsday clock? Or is the site’s new owner telling its loyal users to go forth and multiply?

Elon Musk has, of course, courted controversy since long before he spent an insane amount of cash to acquire Twitter, but his time in control of the social media platform has only served to exacerbate the degrees of outrage leveled against him.

The unpopularity gained by firing swathes of staff, charging for verified accounts, restricting access, reinstating banned users, and silencing critics clearly wasn’t enough for a man who appears to relish his image as a real-life movie villain.

The self-styled free speech absolutist has pledged to cover the legal costs of employees sanctioned by their companies for their activities on his site, while at the same time suing an organization which has condemned the platform for promoting hate-speech.

But now his sudden erasure of Twitter’s much-loved and highly valued brand has surely pushed his caricature of megalomania to a whole new level of loony, in an extraordinary display of commercial machismo verging upon arbitrary caprice.

It's the kind of erratic behavior that, even in a fellow supervillain, might be enough to prompt a call from Auric Goldfinger to check he hadn’t been overdoing things.

His replacement of the cheerful tweetie bird with a logo that you might find stamped on the back of a decently designed death threat would have had Ernst Stavro Blofeld reaching for his Prozac.

It seems almost forbidding in its negative intensity.

Last month, in an apparent warning of avian genocide, Mr. Musk had announced that we would “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually all the birds”.

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His plans to turn the platform into a multifunctional universal app seem just as sinister as his ostensible wish to rid the skies of our feathered friends.

This future app will, he hopes, be able to do anything and everything. It will be designed to be all-singing, all-dancing, all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-controlling, as they say. The Matrix on your phone.

But why does this matter? It matters because Twitter had become a key resource for democratic communication. A flawed tool certainly, but one which had grown to be highly prized by politicians, journalists, and the general public.

It was about openness and transparency – as well as malice and misinformation. Mr. Musk appears set on protecting only the latter facets.

It may have become briefly synonymous with the rants and ravings of Donald Trump, but it has also accommodated a host of marginal voices and promoted radical debate.

Here in the UK, it once proved a space for the public interrogation of power by ordinary people – although it’s true that for the most part, these challenges rarely elicited much of a response.

It was never a true democracy but it helped people to ask liberating questions and to engage in democratic actions.

It was, in short, a potentially alternative space, a place of revolutionary possibilities.

If the site’s users now flock off to another platform, then it may end up reinforcing the hegemonic ambitions of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire. And, if they stay where they are, then it might provide the foundation for Mr. Musk’s aspirations to establish his own virtual monopoly.

X marks the spot, the spot where Twitter was buried, and along with it the hopes of many of its more optimistic devotees.

It is, we may someday say, an X platform. It has, we will echo, simply ceased to be.

And on that day we may well look back upon the willful extermination of Twitter and the faltering birth of X, and wonder why he did it, why he chose to risk this global asset in the childish bravado of a game of noughts and crosses, an all-or-nothing game.

Why? Yes, Y? Because, of course, ‘Y’ is what inevitably comes next.