The Blue Ticks Are Gone, and the (Former) Star-Bellies Are Having a Meltdown

If a social-media check mark is what defines your sense of self-worth and relevance, you’ve got problems that Elon Musk can’t solve.

The Sneetches ranks as one of the greatest Dr. Seuss stories of all time, even if, for some reason, it often gets left out of all those best-of Dr. Seuss lists and anthologies. In that category of Seussian tales that offer real, identifiable life lessons, it’s right up there with Yertle the Turtle and I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.

For those who haven’t read it, the tale’s eponymous characters resemble dumpy looking flightless birds who all live on beaches—a fact that has no plot significance whatsoever, and seems to have been included only so that the author had a dependable rhyme for “Sneetches,” as in these (quite brilliant) opening lines:

Now, the Star-Bell Sneetches had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.
Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small.
You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.
But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches
Would brag, “We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.”
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort
“We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!”
And, whenever they met some, when they were out walking,
They’d hike right on past them without even talking.

Okay, so the Star-Belly Sneetches are dicks. But the story’s real villain (though I’m not even sure that’s the right word, because he ultimately leaves the Sneetch Beach a better place than he’d found it) is a non-Sneetchian interloper named Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who rides up to the depressed-looking Plain-Bellied Sneetches in a reverse halftrack, and invites them to step into “a very peculiar machine” that would festoon a star upon each of their bellies—for a price, of course. Soon, everyone on the beach has a star.

Needless to say, the original Star-Bellied Sneetches become extremely distressed, since they now have no way of differentiating themselves from the parvenus.

The wily McBean has a solution: a second device—the “Star-Off Machine”— that removes stars (also for a fee, of course). So the original Star-Bellies now pay up to become Plain-Bellies. “Then, with snoots in the air, they paraded about. And they opened their beaks and they let out a shout, ‘We know who is who! Now there isn’t a doubt. The best kind of Sneetches are Sneetches without!’”

The Sneetches was published in 1961, forty-five years before Twitter came into existence. Yet the story (and you really need to see all the illustrations to get how pitch-perfect the analogy is) well and truly captures the desperate status anxiety that now suffuses the original Star-Bellied blue-tick community as its members watch helplessly as plain-bellies star up their midsections.

It’s also possible to see Elon Musk as a sort of failed Sylvester McMonkey McBean. True to McBean’s example, Musk’s first grand outreach gesture back in 2022 was aimed at the plain-bellies, who were offered a blue tick for $8 per month. But uptake was slim, in part because many plain-bellied Sneetches worried that there’d still be some way of distinguishing them from the original star-bellied aristocrats.

What came last week was, in effect, Elon McBean’s Plan B: All of us became plain-bellied Sneetches, except those willing to pay.

This has caused a cataclysmic reversal of the Sneetch status-signalling system, one roughly equivalent to that sparked by the Star-Off-Machine in The Sneetches’ third act—though with the crucial distinction that Elon McBean isn’t getting paid on the star-removal end of the operation.

Which is to say that while having a tummy star was once a badge of status on Twitter, many of the original Star-Bellied Sneetches are now desperate to let everyone know that they definitely do not have one…since who but an original plain-belly rando would pay for such a thing? At the same time, many are also trying to find ways to signal that they once had a starred belly—basically showing everyone the tan line marking the former star’s outline.

At the end of The Sneetches, the beach creatures (who are now broke, having given every last cent to McBean during endless cycles of belly-starring and de-starring) internalize a valuable lesson about status hierarchies. But from what I’ve seen on Twitter this past week, humans are less morally developed creatures than Sneetches.

On Mashable, Matt Binder gushed about the old-money blue-tick Twitter elite joining together to mass-block the jumped-up plain-bellied sans-culottes who showed up in their feeds with those oh-so-tacky store-bought stars: “NBC News reporter Ben Collins, Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic's Alejandra Caraballo, and countless other highly-followed Twitter accounts have already shared their intention to block all Twitter Blue subscribers.” Collins and other Very Famous People are quoted at some length to the effect that the parvenu blue ticks are vulgar, racist, and don’t properly understand sophisticated star-bellied humor, dahling. (An account called @BlockTheBlue that was helping people automate this mass blocking process has already been suspended.)

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Here in Canada, a more-progressive-than-thou Vancouver journalist named Mo Amit has decided that blue checks are “red flags.” Another Canadian-famous social-justice-tweeter nursing his lost (“heard-earned”!) blue tick, Sugith Varughese, Tweeted, “I used to have a hard-earned blue check but given what it means now, I’m glad I don’t.” (To make sure everyone knew that he once had a blue check in times of yore, he went to the trouble of putting the thing in his profile’s background photo.) And Rachel Gilmore, a tiktokker and one-time journalist, now spends her time attempting to shame political figures who opt for a check mark. Needless to say, the social media network she uses to do this is Twitter. Oddly, these former blue ticks are perfectly okay with everyone using Twitter (which means we’re not going back to that heady period when the eloi were demanding that we flock to Mastodon), just not with us paying 8$ per month for the privilege. Which is weird, because that’s less than I pay monthly to Spotify, Netflix, Google, and a half-dozen other digital services.

The ostensible rationale given for this odd position is that we shouldn’t be giving money to the evil Elon McBean. The real reason, one suspects, is that many of the knocked-down noblesse d'épée are simply taking a peevish public swipe at the noblesse de robe whom they see parading around in their lost badges of status. The whole spectacle reeks of snobbery, and it’s all the more unattractive given that many of the biggest snobs at play here imagine themselves to be social-justice heroes seeking to break down society’s inequitable power hierarchies.

As I noted earlier this week on Twitter, I have known life on both side of the Sneetch-Belly divide, having lost my own blue tick in 2018 for coming to the assistance of Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, who was then being defamed by a despicable trans-identified troll who self-styled as “Jessica Yaniv.” (These were back in the dark days when talking about the realities of human sexual dimorphism on Twitter was seen as a form of hate speech.) If it brings any reassurance to all of the emotionally beached Sneetches mourning the recent tickocalypse, I can attest that being plain-bellied made zero difference to my Twitter experience. What I found is that if you have something interesting and original (and hopefully funny) to contribute, people will follow you, blue tick or no. If your views are trite and boring, and you simply Tweet slogans and hashtags that you imagine Very Famous People would approve of, you will be a dud on Twitter (especially if you’re not funny), and your tick won’t help you.

Unless.... unless that tick was the only thing you had going in your life that gave you a sense of status and self-worth. In that case, I’d suggest, you’ve got problems that go well beyond anything that Elon McBean’s machines could ever solve.