On Halloween, the fifth day of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, an email landed in the inboxes of people who subscribe to Substack’s company newsletter. “Twitter is changing, and it’s tough to predict what might be next,” the message began. “If you’ve been lucky enough to build a follower base on Twitter, and you’ve ever thought about forging a direct link with them that you control via email, now might be a good time to start a Substack.” Next came a handy guide for “moving [your] relationships” off of Twitter. Step one: Link your Substack and Twitter accounts so that your followers on the latter platform are automatically directed to your account on the former. Step two: Make sure your Twitter bio has a big fat link to your Substack, which “makes subscribing extra clear for your followers.” Maybe even take it to the next level, like @TaylorLorenz, who now goes by the Twitter name “SUBSCRIBE TO MY SUBSTACK.”

The Twitter tutorial was an opportunistic marketing stroke from Substack, whose cofounder Hamish McKenzie once worked for Musk at Tesla. But it also hit upon something bigger, a sense of ominous uncertainty that’s coursing through the media world right now thanks to Musk’s rapid and anarchic Twitter transformation. Call it blue-check havoc, with Twitter’s media and media-adjacent denizens trying to process where all of this is headed and pondering whether Twitter will actually cease to exist as an essential town square and integral component of their professional lives—not at all an unreasonable question given the early signs of VIPs and advertisers heading for the exit. “Fellow Journalists (and Our Academic Friends), It’s Time to Leave Twitter,” read a headline in the lefty American Prospect, whose editor at large, Harold Meyerson, asked the rest of us, “Do you really want to discourse on a medium owned and operated by Elon Musk?” He later urged, “We need an alternative and we need to take a walk from his.” (By the way, have you heard of Mastodon yet? Because you may be hearing more about it soon: “The great Twitter exodus begins,” declared a Daily Mail headline. “As Elon Musk becomes ‘Chief Twit,’ more than 70,000 new users join rival social media platform.”)

Amid the mishegoss, the blue check itself has become a source of agitation, considering Musk’s plan to begin charging users $8 a month for the privilege of verification. “I’m a content creator on Twitter. I make it a better place. I’m painting their fucking fence,” Kara Swisher fulminated on her Pivot podcast. “I’m not paying them a dime for my verification. If they don’t think verification of knowing me is me is valuable, fuck it. I’m not paying for it. I’m not paying a dime for it.” The breathless chatter on my own Twitter timeline seems to align with Swisher’s point of view, not to mention an equally spicy tweet from Stephen King that went viral earlier this week: “Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

It’s worth remembering that the coveted blue profile signifier (technically a white check over a blue background) is about more than status—it confirms your identity and prevents trolls from hijacking it, which is a not-at-all-trivial security measure for any public-facing person. That’s why you’ve now got journalists wondering aloud if their companies will cover the cost when the time comes, assuming Musk doesn’t backpedal, though Insider’s Steven Perlberg mostly got crickets when he asked 14 news organizations whether they would foot the $8 monthly bill. “It’s unclear,” Perlberg additionally noted, “whether Musk’s plan is a serious attempt to generate subscription revenue after his tumultuous $44 billion takeover, an elaborate troll to nettle members of a mainstream media that he openly loathes, a test of the capabilities of Twitter’s engineering corps, or some combination.”

Loss of verification isn’t the only security-oriented concern that has entered the bloodstream. Some journalists are painstakingly deleting all of their DMs and asking contacts to do the same because, well, who knows what could happen with that? I received one such request the other day, and when I asked the person on the other end whether I should also consider a mass DM purge, they told me they were doing it because they’d been asked by several people to delete their DMs. And so the cycle goes. All of this is to say nothing of burning questions like, what happens if @realDonaldTrump comes back? Or, what if the volume of disinformation and hate speech and other dystopian cyber-junk becomes so overwhelming that you can’t be on Twitter without feeling utterly disgusting? There’s no shortage of worst-case scenarios to consider. “Get ready for verified fake accounts that insinuate Russian, Chinese, or Saudi propaganda; that sell fabricated celebrity sex tapes, quack medicine, and scammy investment schemes,” David Frum predicted in The Atlantic. “I’m not ready to cut the cord yet. I’m still hoping for the best—but preparing for the worst. You might consider doing the same.”

At an organizational level, media companies are likewise trying to make sense of Musk’s Twitter takeover. After all, their employees have long been the platform’s bread and butter, securing and sustaining—along with their political, celebrity, and Silicon Valley counterparts—the lion’s share of Twitter’s influence. When Musk rattled off perks that would come with a paid blue-check Twitter plan, one of them was “paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us.” It feels safe to say this idea probably won’t go over so well in the executive suites of America’s most powerful news outlets. “I can’t see any world in which NYT, WP, WSJ, etc., agree to let Twitter users paying $8/month ($96/year) to bypass their paywalls. Even if Twitter were to share 95% of the revenue,” remarked Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan. The Information’s Jessica Lessin bluntly concurred: “If they do, they will be forgetting the last two decades of history.”

For many publishers, Twitter is still a robust source of eyeballs, especially in the wake of Facebook’s algorithmic changes that put news on the back burner. Which is why social media managers and audience-development types are watching how things shake out under Musk with a healthy dose of anxiety. One such aud-dev pro told me that the potential loss of Twitter traffic is concerning. This person also said that no one has a good sense of how Twitter will treat publishers going forward. Right now publishers have good contacts at Twitter. What will happen to those teams? Will Twitter follow a model that deprioritizes giving publishers clicks? How are Twitter users and audiences going to change? Are tons of people going to leave?

For some perspective on that last question, which would appear to be the prevailing one, I texted Substack’s McKenzie, who was in the middle of wrapping up his own think piece about the current state of play. He emailed me his draft, which, of course, was a none-too-veiled pitch for using Substack: “We don’t think Twitter is going to disappear anytime soon, nor should it. It has its uses, and even cage fights can be fun. But it’s time for a real alternative—one where people, not machines, have control; one where writers and creators can make reliable incomes from the work they do on the platform; one where important conversations can take place with nuance instead of snark. It’s time to move beyond the era of Big Social using platform lock-in and attention traps to monopolize our minds. We shouldn’t need to fret so much about a dictator holding dominion over a vast digital media empire.”

Hear! Hear! But I had to ask, does McKenzie actually think we’re getting any closer to a post-Twitter world? “I don’t necessarily think this will be a moment of mass deletion,” he said. “But it is an important step along the way.”