It’s been a little over a year since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, and I’m prepared to admit that--on at least one count—I was wrong as shit.
1) I think it's high time that people start investing more interest and money in the specific people they know who make a living being bloggers, meaning pundits who aren't dogshit. Substackers too, obviously, if they already have a well-established history of focused, insightful content. There's been bloggers (and commenters) posting accurate and correct analyses of national politics and business stuff since Bill Clinton, which is perfect considering we're living through another Iraq War sales job right now wrt Israel.
2) The biggest thing that comes out of a shift like this at a psychological level is an increased sense of vanguardism. You are responsible for being informed, choosing what to think about (*cough* This Is Water *cough*), and for trying to do stuff that actually impacts the world. There was an ability to 'make a difference' when Twitter did the context collapse and you could feel like you were at City College in the 1950s standing on soapboxes and arguing about Stalin, or go to Woodstock, etc. Now you have to nut up or shut up when it comes to what you believe in - talk is cheaper since you don't have that wider audience that includes disagreeable trolls.
Source: I lurked SomethingAwful and Tumblr a lot.
3) Kind of summing up, I think being able to estimate The Powers That Be in a general sense is much better for your health and survival than keeping track of specific elite tastemakers/opinionators. Access journalism/journalists as stenographers is the position that's going to take a beating from the return of the counterculture, David Bowie-ness and all.
The former is also a fallacy of reasoning, but coming from the other way. It's referred to as the continuum fallacy, or as LessWrong calls it, the fallacy of grey. It's the proposition that if nothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain (e.g., if you are a black-and-white thinker, you see the 98 or so shades of gray between them as a single gray color).
I really like your commentary. When I have a job, I may become a paid subscriber. The thing you haven’t considered as part of Elon Musk‘s plan: he may be just looking to break Twitter so he can file for bankruptcy, and disentangle himself from his choice of buying the platform in the first place. He’s not a stupid man —saying something that was anti-semitic he knew would drive away advertisers. Without advertisers, he’s well positioned to claim bankruptcy as an out.
I think he's a supremely stupid man when it comes to anything involving empathy for other human beings or admitting that he's bad at anything (see his genuine belief he can beat Zuckerberg in a fight). And there is some baseline empathy for other human beings, however twisted it ends up at the top of the org chart, that is necessary to run a place where people are the product.
If he literally was on the verge of getting the cops called on him from locking himself in his office after getting booed at Dave Chapelle's show, then I was married to someone just like him. And it's pretty comfortable to say that an information society in theory exists to filter out people with intellectual gifts and no capacity for empathy. In conclusion, it's all downhill from here for him.
If Elon Musk were intentionally trying to tank Twitter as a way to file for bankruptcy, he would be criminally stupid.
By using other people's money to finance his purchase, he has a fiduciary duty to spend that money in a way that would make money for anyone who lent to him. Also, in corporate law and accounting, an organization has an obligation to be a going concern.
If Musk intended to tank his business, and there's evidence of his intent, he can go to prison.
1) I think it's high time that people start investing more interest and money in the specific people they know who make a living being bloggers, meaning pundits who aren't dogshit. Substackers too, obviously, if they already have a well-established history of focused, insightful content. There's been bloggers (and commenters) posting accurate and correct analyses of national politics and business stuff since Bill Clinton, which is perfect considering we're living through another Iraq War sales job right now wrt Israel.
2) The biggest thing that comes out of a shift like this at a psychological level is an increased sense of vanguardism. You are responsible for being informed, choosing what to think about (*cough* This Is Water *cough*), and for trying to do stuff that actually impacts the world. There was an ability to 'make a difference' when Twitter did the context collapse and you could feel like you were at City College in the 1950s standing on soapboxes and arguing about Stalin, or go to Woodstock, etc. Now you have to nut up or shut up when it comes to what you believe in - talk is cheaper since you don't have that wider audience that includes disagreeable trolls.
Source: I lurked SomethingAwful and Tumblr a lot.
3) Kind of summing up, I think being able to estimate The Powers That Be in a general sense is much better for your health and survival than keeping track of specific elite tastemakers/opinionators. Access journalism/journalists as stenographers is the position that's going to take a beating from the return of the counterculture, David Bowie-ness and all.
Being certain it’s all confused is better that being confused into thinking that things are certain?
The former is also a fallacy of reasoning, but coming from the other way. It's referred to as the continuum fallacy, or as LessWrong calls it, the fallacy of grey. It's the proposition that if nothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain (e.g., if you are a black-and-white thinker, you see the 98 or so shades of gray between them as a single gray color).
I really like your commentary. When I have a job, I may become a paid subscriber. The thing you haven’t considered as part of Elon Musk‘s plan: he may be just looking to break Twitter so he can file for bankruptcy, and disentangle himself from his choice of buying the platform in the first place. He’s not a stupid man —saying something that was anti-semitic he knew would drive away advertisers. Without advertisers, he’s well positioned to claim bankruptcy as an out.
I think he's a supremely stupid man when it comes to anything involving empathy for other human beings or admitting that he's bad at anything (see his genuine belief he can beat Zuckerberg in a fight). And there is some baseline empathy for other human beings, however twisted it ends up at the top of the org chart, that is necessary to run a place where people are the product.
If he literally was on the verge of getting the cops called on him from locking himself in his office after getting booed at Dave Chapelle's show, then I was married to someone just like him. And it's pretty comfortable to say that an information society in theory exists to filter out people with intellectual gifts and no capacity for empathy. In conclusion, it's all downhill from here for him.
If Elon Musk were intentionally trying to tank Twitter as a way to file for bankruptcy, he would be criminally stupid.
By using other people's money to finance his purchase, he has a fiduciary duty to spend that money in a way that would make money for anyone who lent to him. Also, in corporate law and accounting, an organization has an obligation to be a going concern.
If Musk intended to tank his business, and there's evidence of his intent, he can go to prison.