Truth is subjective. Truth that requires “free speech” to survive doubly so.
The more subjective an opinion the more it will be a cause of dissent and concern. As soon as there are more people who disagree with a truth than those who agree with it, there will be calls to suppress it as misinformation.
Elon is a capitalist, not a philosopher. He will slap his own brand of lipstick on the twitter pig and attempt to make it profitable. It’s not like everything he is doing at twitter is necessarily wrong, but it’s clear that the essence of what twitter’s internal culture was has imploded upon his entry. Any organization both needs this disruption and can be harmed by it. When any company becomes dominated by people who only exist to keep the organization itself alive as an organization independent of its original function and who accumulate authority and power for their own purposes within the organization, the company begins to die. Twitter was dying. Some of the people who had already run away have published horror stories about some of the attempts to mine user data, not all of them reflect well. In the perspective lensed by their stories and knowing of the friendship between jack dorsey and elon musk, one might almost think of musk as a dark hero, a joker come to inject some sanity.
In that context, the sink makes perfect sense- and so does firing half of everyone. The rats flee the ship.
It’s important to remember that twitter in the end is only a website where you can publish blobs of text to a personal feed which is shared with others. Most of what it can do can be maintained by just 10 people, it takes a lot more developers and associated personnel to provide the nice user experience, mobile apps, and the business end of it of advertising. Those people can be lost and twitter will continue to be able to keep the lights on briefly- and elon needs runway more than he needs wings at the moment.
In this world full of critics, it’s important to sit back and relax and realize that. There’s always a way to look at any situation from any number of angles before deciding to be invested in it. I am not invested in twitter because I had long since realized twitter is for journalists, politicians, and brands- it is a pager system for the web. If elon kills it, a new pager will emerge. The only true value to twitter is to offset facebook and reddit as major centers for discussion and propaganda run by corporations- it keeps the notional competition in the market alive and balanced. I hope elon can keep it strong so it continues to offer some balance and choice, but i won’t bet on it soon. Let’s let him run out of runway and see if he turns twitter into a submarine or manages to put wings on it.
Agree with everything. If there are two things to take away from this is that The End of Twitter is not the end of online blobs of text, and that every piece of media content created around it is just popcorn for a story nobody knows the end of yet.
That line you singled out is subordinated, Tinus. Don't worry, it's not important.
The point is not to highlight his autism, but the human propensity for tribe-induced, collective delusion. It's the reason why social media (and every other crowdsourced environment) can't escape things like fake news, propaganda, misinformation and mass manipulation if unsupervised freedom of reach is implemented.
Because Russian bots and spam accounts are technologically powered, but to bullshit is human.
To be candid, my only true critique of Elon here is the weight he's put on his "free speech" rhetoric. The meaning of freedom of speech ("to have the power or right to express one's opinions without censorship, restraint, or legal penalty") has changed in significance since the French Revolution. Nobody had heard of Twitter or the influencer economy back in the 18th century. Now, one's opinions could have so much reach and sway that it becomes a moral responsibility to start considering censorship, restraint, and even legal penalty when someone abuses their power to influence other people's minds.
I think Elon embraces this responsibility and will — very intelligently — put censorship and restraint systems in place to prevent Twitter from becoming a hellhole (e.g. Birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch)
That's why I think it was detrimental to his mission to present himself as a "free speech absolutist." Because free speech can very well put itself in the way of accuracy, trust, and truth.
But anyway, it's healthy to poke a bit of fun at him now and then because his unhinged whiz — whatever's made of; autism, raw IQ, the very same chemical X that spawned the Powerpuff Girls, or a combination of the three — has made him kind of untouchable. We gotta make a point of his flaws and humanity before we make a cult out of his proficiencies.
Truth is subjective. Truth that requires “free speech” to survive doubly so.
The more subjective an opinion the more it will be a cause of dissent and concern. As soon as there are more people who disagree with a truth than those who agree with it, there will be calls to suppress it as misinformation.
Elon is a capitalist, not a philosopher. He will slap his own brand of lipstick on the twitter pig and attempt to make it profitable. It’s not like everything he is doing at twitter is necessarily wrong, but it’s clear that the essence of what twitter’s internal culture was has imploded upon his entry. Any organization both needs this disruption and can be harmed by it. When any company becomes dominated by people who only exist to keep the organization itself alive as an organization independent of its original function and who accumulate authority and power for their own purposes within the organization, the company begins to die. Twitter was dying. Some of the people who had already run away have published horror stories about some of the attempts to mine user data, not all of them reflect well. In the perspective lensed by their stories and knowing of the friendship between jack dorsey and elon musk, one might almost think of musk as a dark hero, a joker come to inject some sanity.
In that context, the sink makes perfect sense- and so does firing half of everyone. The rats flee the ship.
It’s important to remember that twitter in the end is only a website where you can publish blobs of text to a personal feed which is shared with others. Most of what it can do can be maintained by just 10 people, it takes a lot more developers and associated personnel to provide the nice user experience, mobile apps, and the business end of it of advertising. Those people can be lost and twitter will continue to be able to keep the lights on briefly- and elon needs runway more than he needs wings at the moment.
In this world full of critics, it’s important to sit back and relax and realize that. There’s always a way to look at any situation from any number of angles before deciding to be invested in it. I am not invested in twitter because I had long since realized twitter is for journalists, politicians, and brands- it is a pager system for the web. If elon kills it, a new pager will emerge. The only true value to twitter is to offset facebook and reddit as major centers for discussion and propaganda run by corporations- it keeps the notional competition in the market alive and balanced. I hope elon can keep it strong so it continues to offer some balance and choice, but i won’t bet on it soon. Let’s let him run out of runway and see if he turns twitter into a submarine or manages to put wings on it.
Jay you eloquent mechanic.
Agree with everything. If there are two things to take away from this is that The End of Twitter is not the end of online blobs of text, and that every piece of media content created around it is just popcorn for a story nobody knows the end of yet.
We're just having fun here.
Yes, let's use his autism as an argument/ weird joke.
That line you singled out is subordinated, Tinus. Don't worry, it's not important.
The point is not to highlight his autism, but the human propensity for tribe-induced, collective delusion. It's the reason why social media (and every other crowdsourced environment) can't escape things like fake news, propaganda, misinformation and mass manipulation if unsupervised freedom of reach is implemented.
Because Russian bots and spam accounts are technologically powered, but to bullshit is human.
To be candid, my only true critique of Elon here is the weight he's put on his "free speech" rhetoric. The meaning of freedom of speech ("to have the power or right to express one's opinions without censorship, restraint, or legal penalty") has changed in significance since the French Revolution. Nobody had heard of Twitter or the influencer economy back in the 18th century. Now, one's opinions could have so much reach and sway that it becomes a moral responsibility to start considering censorship, restraint, and even legal penalty when someone abuses their power to influence other people's minds.
I think Elon embraces this responsibility and will — very intelligently — put censorship and restraint systems in place to prevent Twitter from becoming a hellhole (e.g. Birdwatch https://twitter.com/birdwatch)
That's why I think it was detrimental to his mission to present himself as a "free speech absolutist." Because free speech can very well put itself in the way of accuracy, trust, and truth.
But anyway, it's healthy to poke a bit of fun at him now and then because his unhinged whiz — whatever's made of; autism, raw IQ, the very same chemical X that spawned the Powerpuff Girls, or a combination of the three — has made him kind of untouchable. We gotta make a point of his flaws and humanity before we make a cult out of his proficiencies.
Thanks for reading 🖤
I think you might be jealous of the
”let that sink in” pun
I'm jealous he can afford a sink