I have also been fascinated by the progressive hatred of Elon, although as MY explains it does make sense. And as many have pointed out, it may be smart for an EV tycoon to be hated by the left in order to prevent EV adoption from becoming a partisan political issue. If conservatives can buy a Tesla to stick it to Biden (who generally refrains from mentioning Tesla in the context of the American EV industry) then all the better.
In many ways Elon may shitposting us to a greener future where conservatives embrace EVs to stick it to the libs and liberals accept EVs to address climate change with only slight apprehension towards Elon. The far left will do their part by demonizing EVs as an exploitative capitalist tool that allows us to address climate change without a proper communist revolution.
To me the most interesting thing about Twitter was how it revealed that when you have a close-up, real-time view of the thoughts of influential, famous people who are regarded as experts, most of time on most topics they are just uncritically repeating the same bits of unoriginal conventional wisdom as everyone else. And yes, as MY says, much of the time the conventional wisdom is correct but hearing so many people repeat it as if was their own fresh, original pearl of wisdom gets a little tedious and boring after a while. I guess bottom line, I think Twitter has the same basic problem as cable news -- there's just not enough fresh original commentary and news content to fill the airways 24/7. That requires longform writing and thinking, and more focused work; not chasing buzz.
The reaction to Musk's takeover of Twitter crystalizes a transformation of how the left views and handles dissent, especially dissent from within. Liberals used to set the tone on dissent with "the best response to bad speech is more speech."
Today, radicals and extremists on the left have taken charge and changed the ethos to something more like "purveyors of wrong-speak must be punished and punished harshly."
What you're missing is that American life is generally more pleasant without Trump Tweeting (in part because U.S. media has much less interest in reporting on crazy statements he makes when not in Tweet form for some reason) and this is more important to most people than some galaxy brain theory about party control dynamics.
What’s interesting to me is the extent media and politics folks seem to think they are imprisoned on Twitter. Previous management was basically unconscious, and that’s the way they liked it. it could be their clubhouse, staffed by a few people who share their general outlook. and it would both never make any real money (which might force them to chase some ad or algo model they don’t like) but also not be some rich guys vanity project / toy.
And maybe they are captured by the network and incompetent diffuse management was the best situation for them. It seems odd to me though. I know folks really like having access to famous athletes and musicians dumb tweets but it feels like the ‘important’ part of Twitter is this tiny media / pol corner which is like 1% of an already small social platform and will never be worth much money (and remain useful to those folks). Why don’t you all just email each other? Start a ‘we hate ourselves and everyone else too’ discord for dc and Brooklyn residents.
I think it’s not just that Musk enjoys tweeting, it’s that he enjoys trolling and shitposting that seems to rile liberals up. They hate that he doesn’t abide by elite rules of conduct.
Okay, but is his $44 billion purchase of Twitter effective altruism?
More seriously, I still don’t get it. Like, look at numbers 7 & 8. Those two demographic points about twitter are kind of “the problem”, right? It’s a warehouse for the richest, most educated, most left and liberal people. Isn’t one of the biggest criticisms of “the discourse” today that it is entirely driven by the concerns of left-elites? That’s why we talk about rearranging the deck chairs at Harvard instead of broad higher education reform, including *gasps in PMC horror* trade schools. That’s why we focus so much discussion on callouts, naming and shaming, etc. That’s why there is so much attention on fringe left “theory” and not on substantive policy.
It’s a club for a specific subset, the meritocratic elites, and bears little resemblance to most peoples lives. Were you shocked on Twitter when Trump became president? Were you shocked on Twitter when Youngkin became governor? Maybe Twitter is only passingly related to reality?
I’m not convinced Twitter matters except in that so many “top” people clearly think it is the most important thing in their lives.
Mike Pesca had a great spiel about the reaction to Elon buying Twitter. I can't cram it down to a single idea, but two interesting observations:
1. A lot of journalists view moderation on Twitter as the only thing shielding people from a non-stop torrent of identity-based abuse. That abuse always comes from 'white men'. (A telling quote included how 'white men' harass gay people, as though those two groups are mutually exclusive.) Elon is the embodiment of everything they hate about 'white men'.
2. More than one journalist has referred to Elon Musk, a man with autism spectrum disorder, as a 'sociopath' who therefore should not be allowed to control a social media platform. See above: in any other context such a comment would render you a hateful bigot, but 'white man' trumps all other identities so it's ok in this context.
It's instructive when ideologues (left, right or whatever) unknowingly reveal their internal understanding of the labels we use to describe (groups of) people because it gives you a glimpse into the pathology that underlies their attachment to said ideology. Here, it is simply defining 'everyone who does not agree with my identity-obsessed worldview' as 'white men'. A recently example on the right is the jump from LGBT to 'groomer' to 'pedophile'.
When I was growing up I spent a lot of time on old-school internet forums. You would talk a lot, and people would link to things, and you would get into these furious arguments (usually with other teenagers and college students). In particular I remember the furious and bizarrely frequent debates between creationism and "evolutionism".
The thing is, like 50% of the shit people were talking about was false, misstated, poorly understood or otherwise. Honestly 50% might be generous. It was a shitshow, no one smart and well-informed was on these forums.
At the same time, I was getting most of my science information from a couple of print magazines and conversations with my dad and his friends. They were also wrong about everything.
Being right about stuff is basically an elite practice and people being wrong about things is not that dangerous.
What IS concerning is that the velocity and scope of communication has increased such that people can all be wrong about the same thing at the same time very suddenly.
So really what we need is not a solution to misinformation, Twitter could solve the main problem by just fragmenting the conversation more and making it a little harder for everyone to be seeing roughly the same 'main content'
It's interesting to find someone with socialist politics, eg. views about how society should be ordered that are highly at odds with my own views, offering interesting insights about what's behind the outrage about Musk:
Here's Freddie deBoer
>> Should we stop the free flow of ideas is a meaningless question because we can’t. France and Germany’s decades-old laws against far-right arguments and organizations have failed entirely to prevent extremism in those countries. Drug cartels communicate around the world effortlessly. When ISIS was being pursued by the entirety of the Western military and intelligence establishment, they still actively recruited. In English! They got white middle-class teenagers to fly to goddamn Syria to sign up! And you’re telling me that tweaking Twitter’s terms of service is going to eliminate the ideology that wasn’t ended by a war that killed 4% of the world’s population? What the fuck are we talking about here?
No, liberals and leftists are afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter not because they think it will contribute to right-wing extremism, which exists and always has and always will but which is also far more marginal than they like to pretend. They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives. Which is why it’ll never stop at “the really bad stuff.” The things that liberals believe should be eliminated from social media have grown and grown as time has gone on, and will continue to grow. Eventually people will say that those who disagree with them about the correct size of the Earned Income Tax Deduction are literal fascists.
I think Ben Thompson described an interesting plan for addressing Twitter’s content moderation and financial model on Apr 18 in his article, “Back to the Future of Twitter”. [1] His basic idea is to separate Twitter into a backend service that hosts content and a front end client that provides moderation and algorithmic amplification. Twitter would then open the backend up so that anyone can develop their own client by paying for access.
The backend would do the minimal amount of moderation necessary to conform with the law in each jurisdiction and then provide optional services to the clients for more sophisticated moderation and algorithmic ranking. Twitter would continue to host their existing front end and possibly create more over time.
The idea is that the plethora of clients would allow for experimentation and meeting the diverse user preferences. You could have heavily moderated clients as well as wild west anything goes. While all clients would reference the same social graph and tweets/replies, each client could use whatever methods they want for filtering and ranking.
Some possible clients I’ve considered.
1. A client geared towards journalists and other prominent people that provides them with a layer that filters out harassment. This could include manual curation of their DMs, replies and retweets. The service would also have a team of lawyers for reporting credible threats of violence to law enforcement and sending cease-and-desist letters for proper libel. (Note this works well with Elon’s plan to require human identity verification, even for anonymous accounts.) This service would be expensive and geared towards people that value this layer of protection for professional reasons.
2. A client geared towards techies like myself that want to experiment with their own algorithms. While we’re a niche group, many of us would gladly pay quite a bit of money to support such a nerdy hobby. There’d be sharing and critique of each other's work as we toil to optimize our own Twitter experience. Over time some of the ideas might filter into other clients' algorithms.
3. Partisan clients. Fox news could provide a client as could CNN. Even the DNC, RNC, and other parties could provide their preferred view of the social graph. They’d be openly filtering and ranking the social feed in a way that corresponds to the user's political preference.
“The Boring Company is actually a subtle genius play at setting up a mars colony” strikes me as… motivated reasoning at best.
An underrated way of figuring out what people want and are concerned about, in my experience, is to listen to them when they tell you what they want and are concerned about. Elon Musk is on the record, continuously and vigorously, that he thinks single-car-width tunnels dug by the Boring Company are a solution to traffic congestion.
The safest hypothesis here isn’t that this is part of some grand mars colonization plan, but that Musk thinks this is, in fact, a way to make vehicular traffic move faster. The fact that this leads inexorably to the conclusion that Musk is a complete crackpot is no one’s fault but his.
My own, even more incoherent theses that are subject to revision from any good pushback:
1. What I sense is at the core of Musk hate from the left is the simple fact that he's a really rich guy. A lot of the left get viscerally opposed to a rich guy being able to throw around his wealth to influence society, and while buying Twitter is hardly the most pernicious thing a rich guy throwing around the weight of his wealth could do, it's still triggering to some to see the idea that someone could just swipe up a prominent company for $44 billion.
2. I also sense some sort of intersection with identity politics here, in that Musk at least gives off tech bro vibes that don't sit well with those that feel women and racial and other minorities are underrepresented in everything.
3. The "whole idea of colonizing Mars is stupid" thing seems like a microcosm of "Why care about Mars when we have so many problems on this planet" which turns quickly into a EAish style argument about "Why should he allowed to buy Twitter when we can do so many better things for $44 billion?"
4. The greatest promise I see from Musk buying Twitter is taking it private. That frees Twitter from the clutches of Wall Street and its overwhelming demands to increase shareholder value, which could lead to an end or reduction of the algorithmic amplification identified as problematic. It's a hard TBD to see if Musk follows through on that promise, but given that the founder of Twitter himself said the same thing (https://twitter.com/jack/status/1518772754782187520) that makes me a little more bullish.
5. The major thing Twitter needs to throw the grand majority of its moderation capacity behind is to keep going against harassment. My non-pseudonymous Twitter contribution is rather small and deals with a rather banal topic, but it also puts me parallel with some more prominent users who are not shy about the harassment they face, and how it gets so much worse if you're part of a disadvantaged group. I would hate to see some of my favorite Twitter follows feel like they have to leave because they're being harassed too much, and a tradeoff where Twitter focuses on that while taking a generic free speech approach on everything else would be acceptable.
6. "Buying solar panels and electric vehicles to own the libs" would be a great outcome if Musk gets coded as a right wing guy.
Amplification of engaging misinformation isn’t just algorithmic, it’s behavioral. If people retweet some juicy tidbit of nonsense, it mechanically shows up in all their followers’ feeds, even if Twitter is acting as a dumb pipe. Unfortunately, it’s inextricably linked to the content-discovery method where you are a retweet of something interesting and true.
Most people don’t hate Elon Musk for real progressive reasons. They hate him because he’s an obnoxious dork and because the people who worship him are also obnoxious. Most of the “He should spend that $44B on XYZ instead” takes are just a performance. He’s annoying and immature and those people are much more tolerable when they aren’t influential.
He bought a falling knife. Nobody goes to twitter to engage in actual discussion. That is what substack and slowboring are for.
Why is discussion here better? You pay in and have some incentive to be civil and not sound too unhinged, lest you get a reputation as the village idiot.
Here, we can talk to each other like adults, even if I only share 20% of views of Republican regulars here. When it’s people yelling at each other in poorly written 280 char headlines with zero reputation at stake, of course it’s going to sound like a crazy street corner rant.
I hope the “you must be a human rule” helps… but I have my doubts.
I have also been fascinated by the progressive hatred of Elon, although as MY explains it does make sense. And as many have pointed out, it may be smart for an EV tycoon to be hated by the left in order to prevent EV adoption from becoming a partisan political issue. If conservatives can buy a Tesla to stick it to Biden (who generally refrains from mentioning Tesla in the context of the American EV industry) then all the better.
In many ways Elon may shitposting us to a greener future where conservatives embrace EVs to stick it to the libs and liberals accept EVs to address climate change with only slight apprehension towards Elon. The far left will do their part by demonizing EVs as an exploitative capitalist tool that allows us to address climate change without a proper communist revolution.
To me the most interesting thing about Twitter was how it revealed that when you have a close-up, real-time view of the thoughts of influential, famous people who are regarded as experts, most of time on most topics they are just uncritically repeating the same bits of unoriginal conventional wisdom as everyone else. And yes, as MY says, much of the time the conventional wisdom is correct but hearing so many people repeat it as if was their own fresh, original pearl of wisdom gets a little tedious and boring after a while. I guess bottom line, I think Twitter has the same basic problem as cable news -- there's just not enough fresh original commentary and news content to fill the airways 24/7. That requires longform writing and thinking, and more focused work; not chasing buzz.
The reaction to Musk's takeover of Twitter crystalizes a transformation of how the left views and handles dissent, especially dissent from within. Liberals used to set the tone on dissent with "the best response to bad speech is more speech."
Today, radicals and extremists on the left have taken charge and changed the ethos to something more like "purveyors of wrong-speak must be punished and punished harshly."
What you're missing is that American life is generally more pleasant without Trump Tweeting (in part because U.S. media has much less interest in reporting on crazy statements he makes when not in Tweet form for some reason) and this is more important to most people than some galaxy brain theory about party control dynamics.
What’s interesting to me is the extent media and politics folks seem to think they are imprisoned on Twitter. Previous management was basically unconscious, and that’s the way they liked it. it could be their clubhouse, staffed by a few people who share their general outlook. and it would both never make any real money (which might force them to chase some ad or algo model they don’t like) but also not be some rich guys vanity project / toy.
And maybe they are captured by the network and incompetent diffuse management was the best situation for them. It seems odd to me though. I know folks really like having access to famous athletes and musicians dumb tweets but it feels like the ‘important’ part of Twitter is this tiny media / pol corner which is like 1% of an already small social platform and will never be worth much money (and remain useful to those folks). Why don’t you all just email each other? Start a ‘we hate ourselves and everyone else too’ discord for dc and Brooklyn residents.
I think it’s not just that Musk enjoys tweeting, it’s that he enjoys trolling and shitposting that seems to rile liberals up. They hate that he doesn’t abide by elite rules of conduct.
Okay, but is his $44 billion purchase of Twitter effective altruism?
More seriously, I still don’t get it. Like, look at numbers 7 & 8. Those two demographic points about twitter are kind of “the problem”, right? It’s a warehouse for the richest, most educated, most left and liberal people. Isn’t one of the biggest criticisms of “the discourse” today that it is entirely driven by the concerns of left-elites? That’s why we talk about rearranging the deck chairs at Harvard instead of broad higher education reform, including *gasps in PMC horror* trade schools. That’s why we focus so much discussion on callouts, naming and shaming, etc. That’s why there is so much attention on fringe left “theory” and not on substantive policy.
It’s a club for a specific subset, the meritocratic elites, and bears little resemblance to most peoples lives. Were you shocked on Twitter when Trump became president? Were you shocked on Twitter when Youngkin became governor? Maybe Twitter is only passingly related to reality?
I’m not convinced Twitter matters except in that so many “top” people clearly think it is the most important thing in their lives.
Mike Pesca had a great spiel about the reaction to Elon buying Twitter. I can't cram it down to a single idea, but two interesting observations:
1. A lot of journalists view moderation on Twitter as the only thing shielding people from a non-stop torrent of identity-based abuse. That abuse always comes from 'white men'. (A telling quote included how 'white men' harass gay people, as though those two groups are mutually exclusive.) Elon is the embodiment of everything they hate about 'white men'.
2. More than one journalist has referred to Elon Musk, a man with autism spectrum disorder, as a 'sociopath' who therefore should not be allowed to control a social media platform. See above: in any other context such a comment would render you a hateful bigot, but 'white man' trumps all other identities so it's ok in this context.
It's instructive when ideologues (left, right or whatever) unknowingly reveal their internal understanding of the labels we use to describe (groups of) people because it gives you a glimpse into the pathology that underlies their attachment to said ideology. Here, it is simply defining 'everyone who does not agree with my identity-obsessed worldview' as 'white men'. A recently example on the right is the jump from LGBT to 'groomer' to 'pedophile'.
When I was growing up I spent a lot of time on old-school internet forums. You would talk a lot, and people would link to things, and you would get into these furious arguments (usually with other teenagers and college students). In particular I remember the furious and bizarrely frequent debates between creationism and "evolutionism".
The thing is, like 50% of the shit people were talking about was false, misstated, poorly understood or otherwise. Honestly 50% might be generous. It was a shitshow, no one smart and well-informed was on these forums.
At the same time, I was getting most of my science information from a couple of print magazines and conversations with my dad and his friends. They were also wrong about everything.
Being right about stuff is basically an elite practice and people being wrong about things is not that dangerous.
What IS concerning is that the velocity and scope of communication has increased such that people can all be wrong about the same thing at the same time very suddenly.
So really what we need is not a solution to misinformation, Twitter could solve the main problem by just fragmenting the conversation more and making it a little harder for everyone to be seeing roughly the same 'main content'
It's interesting to find someone with socialist politics, eg. views about how society should be ordered that are highly at odds with my own views, offering interesting insights about what's behind the outrage about Musk:
Here's Freddie deBoer
>> Should we stop the free flow of ideas is a meaningless question because we can’t. France and Germany’s decades-old laws against far-right arguments and organizations have failed entirely to prevent extremism in those countries. Drug cartels communicate around the world effortlessly. When ISIS was being pursued by the entirety of the Western military and intelligence establishment, they still actively recruited. In English! They got white middle-class teenagers to fly to goddamn Syria to sign up! And you’re telling me that tweaking Twitter’s terms of service is going to eliminate the ideology that wasn’t ended by a war that killed 4% of the world’s population? What the fuck are we talking about here?
No, liberals and leftists are afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter not because they think it will contribute to right-wing extremism, which exists and always has and always will but which is also far more marginal than they like to pretend. They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives. Which is why it’ll never stop at “the really bad stuff.” The things that liberals believe should be eliminated from social media have grown and grown as time has gone on, and will continue to grow. Eventually people will say that those who disagree with them about the correct size of the Earned Income Tax Deduction are literal fascists.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/just-keep-it-off-my-timeline
I think Ben Thompson described an interesting plan for addressing Twitter’s content moderation and financial model on Apr 18 in his article, “Back to the Future of Twitter”. [1] His basic idea is to separate Twitter into a backend service that hosts content and a front end client that provides moderation and algorithmic amplification. Twitter would then open the backend up so that anyone can develop their own client by paying for access.
The backend would do the minimal amount of moderation necessary to conform with the law in each jurisdiction and then provide optional services to the clients for more sophisticated moderation and algorithmic ranking. Twitter would continue to host their existing front end and possibly create more over time.
The idea is that the plethora of clients would allow for experimentation and meeting the diverse user preferences. You could have heavily moderated clients as well as wild west anything goes. While all clients would reference the same social graph and tweets/replies, each client could use whatever methods they want for filtering and ranking.
Some possible clients I’ve considered.
1. A client geared towards journalists and other prominent people that provides them with a layer that filters out harassment. This could include manual curation of their DMs, replies and retweets. The service would also have a team of lawyers for reporting credible threats of violence to law enforcement and sending cease-and-desist letters for proper libel. (Note this works well with Elon’s plan to require human identity verification, even for anonymous accounts.) This service would be expensive and geared towards people that value this layer of protection for professional reasons.
2. A client geared towards techies like myself that want to experiment with their own algorithms. While we’re a niche group, many of us would gladly pay quite a bit of money to support such a nerdy hobby. There’d be sharing and critique of each other's work as we toil to optimize our own Twitter experience. Over time some of the ideas might filter into other clients' algorithms.
3. Partisan clients. Fox news could provide a client as could CNN. Even the DNC, RNC, and other parties could provide their preferred view of the social graph. They’d be openly filtering and ranking the social feed in a way that corresponds to the user's political preference.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2022/back-to-the-future-of-twitter/
“The Boring Company is actually a subtle genius play at setting up a mars colony” strikes me as… motivated reasoning at best.
An underrated way of figuring out what people want and are concerned about, in my experience, is to listen to them when they tell you what they want and are concerned about. Elon Musk is on the record, continuously and vigorously, that he thinks single-car-width tunnels dug by the Boring Company are a solution to traffic congestion.
The safest hypothesis here isn’t that this is part of some grand mars colonization plan, but that Musk thinks this is, in fact, a way to make vehicular traffic move faster. The fact that this leads inexorably to the conclusion that Musk is a complete crackpot is no one’s fault but his.
My own, even more incoherent theses that are subject to revision from any good pushback:
1. What I sense is at the core of Musk hate from the left is the simple fact that he's a really rich guy. A lot of the left get viscerally opposed to a rich guy being able to throw around his wealth to influence society, and while buying Twitter is hardly the most pernicious thing a rich guy throwing around the weight of his wealth could do, it's still triggering to some to see the idea that someone could just swipe up a prominent company for $44 billion.
2. I also sense some sort of intersection with identity politics here, in that Musk at least gives off tech bro vibes that don't sit well with those that feel women and racial and other minorities are underrepresented in everything.
3. The "whole idea of colonizing Mars is stupid" thing seems like a microcosm of "Why care about Mars when we have so many problems on this planet" which turns quickly into a EAish style argument about "Why should he allowed to buy Twitter when we can do so many better things for $44 billion?"
4. The greatest promise I see from Musk buying Twitter is taking it private. That frees Twitter from the clutches of Wall Street and its overwhelming demands to increase shareholder value, which could lead to an end or reduction of the algorithmic amplification identified as problematic. It's a hard TBD to see if Musk follows through on that promise, but given that the founder of Twitter himself said the same thing (https://twitter.com/jack/status/1518772754782187520) that makes me a little more bullish.
5. The major thing Twitter needs to throw the grand majority of its moderation capacity behind is to keep going against harassment. My non-pseudonymous Twitter contribution is rather small and deals with a rather banal topic, but it also puts me parallel with some more prominent users who are not shy about the harassment they face, and how it gets so much worse if you're part of a disadvantaged group. I would hate to see some of my favorite Twitter follows feel like they have to leave because they're being harassed too much, and a tradeoff where Twitter focuses on that while taking a generic free speech approach on everything else would be acceptable.
6. "Buying solar panels and electric vehicles to own the libs" would be a great outcome if Musk gets coded as a right wing guy.
7. Add a damn edit button, Elon!
Amplification of engaging misinformation isn’t just algorithmic, it’s behavioral. If people retweet some juicy tidbit of nonsense, it mechanically shows up in all their followers’ feeds, even if Twitter is acting as a dumb pipe. Unfortunately, it’s inextricably linked to the content-discovery method where you are a retweet of something interesting and true.
Most people don’t hate Elon Musk for real progressive reasons. They hate him because he’s an obnoxious dork and because the people who worship him are also obnoxious. Most of the “He should spend that $44B on XYZ instead” takes are just a performance. He’s annoying and immature and those people are much more tolerable when they aren’t influential.
He bought a falling knife. Nobody goes to twitter to engage in actual discussion. That is what substack and slowboring are for.
Why is discussion here better? You pay in and have some incentive to be civil and not sound too unhinged, lest you get a reputation as the village idiot.
Here, we can talk to each other like adults, even if I only share 20% of views of Republican regulars here. When it’s people yelling at each other in poorly written 280 char headlines with zero reputation at stake, of course it’s going to sound like a crazy street corner rant.
I hope the “you must be a human rule” helps… but I have my doubts.