Fox News is a national embarrassment, but maybe not in the way you think. The embarrassment is not it is force feeding Americans seditious propaganda, it’s that A LOT of Americans want that agenda. They are wilful in their consumption of hate.
So, if it wasn’t Fox News doing it, someone else would be doing the exact same thing — if not worse.
Which leads us to Kara Swisher’s idea that maybe Elon Musk is maybe trying to somehow turn Twitter into a new and improved MAGA Nazi media outlet. I suppose this is possible, but I think the thing we would have to keep an eye out for is Musk assembling some sort of editorial staff.
If he did that then,yeah, Ms. Swisher is probably right. But given how fucking old most of the people who watch Fox News are, I don’t think there would be a one-to-one replacement. The new “Red Pilled” Twitter might be something for younger people, but even if somehow Fox News went under the slack would be picked up by OANN and Newsmax, not Twitter.
Who knows. I think the Ms. Swisher’s idea has come credibility, but only time will tell how much.
I’m growing tired of Elon Musk’s bullshit. He wants to be the Red Pilled “main character” of Twitter everyday and it’s a lot to deal with on a regular basis. Now, I would prefer that Twitter remain the nation’s virtual town square where people of both sides of the political debate and discussion issues.
And, yet, every day, Musk tries to out Trump, Trump and I find myself hoping that Twitter rival Post starts to get the features I expect from Twitter. I hate the idea that yet another element of American life will be siloed for political reasons but it definitely seems inevitable.
There comes a point when you just don’t want to use a service where you’re being “owned” every day by people who are fucking Nazis. It’s darkly dumb that MAGA Nazis always think they’re being “shadowbanned” when, in fact, they’re just boring and the people they hate so much — people like me — don’t really feel like acknowledging that they tweeted anything at all.
And it’s always the most sincere, earnest MAGA Nazis like fucking “Catturd” who get upset about shit like this. “Oooh, Elon, I’m being shadowbanned, please make the people I hold with such contempt give me validation by saying nice things about me on Twitter.”
It would be funny if it wasn’t so idiotic.
Anyway, for the moment Musk is fine. Post simply isn’t something I can use full time instead of Twitter. But that might change. Or, it could be that all of this is going to be moot soon enough with the chatbot revolution and the potential of a coming Singularity.
Henry Ford changed the lives of millions of people in a practical, beneficial way. He was also an astonishing antisemite. So spare me the fanboy whining about how we can’t criticize Elon Musk just because of all the “cool” things he’s up to.
The more Musk leans into being a MAGA Nazis golden child, the more dangerous he becomes — and more danger not just America, but the entire globe faces. He’s adding to an already unstable situation in the United States by being a MAGA Nazi “edgelord” on the very service that he owns.
All of this is part of a broader, even more alarming trend — MAGA Nazis are politically and culturally ascendant. They hate to admit it because they’re about the catch the car again because then they would have to admit that maybe their rage over the “woke cancel culture mob” is…a little too much?
Anyway, I’m growing more and more alarmed by Elon Musk’s shenanigans. He’s really helping to make the next election — or the time immediately after the next election — a potentially extremely dangerous not not just for Americans, but the globe as a whole.
I just saw on Twitter an interesting use case for OpenAI ChatGPT — native integration into Twitter itself. I say this because people are already used to the Twitter prompt so the ability to ask ChatGPT questions directly from Twitter would be a very smooth addition to the Twitter UX.
It would make a lot of sense for Musk to add ChatGPT to Twitter.
Given that Elon Musk has a connection to both Twitter and OpenAI, this is a gimmie. It’s something that once ChatGPT is far more scalable could happen pretty much with the flip of a switch.
As an aside, it’s interesting how similar people’s speculation surrounding ChatGPT is identical to what people talked about with the late, great Blab. Everyone assumes that it will be pay-to-play soon enough. In fact, some people are pretty much begging it to be that way.
This raises a very interesting issue — what if, just like with the Internet, the actual service itself is free and the money is made from the things you can do with it. This is what caused the death of the online services of the 1990s — the Internet was open and it was, unto itself, the “killer app” that everyone seemed to believe was going to happen at some point in the future.
There is a lot I still don’t know about what is going to happen with chatbot technology. At the moment, it definitely seems like it’s going to be very disruptive — the only question is the degree. But I also don’t know if there will be ONE AGI or a multitude.
One curious thing that I’ve noticed is how many people are eager to worship someone like Elon Musk. It’s a very “what the what?” moment for me because I find any form of parasocial hero worship very dubious. But, then, all my public heroes are dead — I’m not one to worship anyone or anything.
The OpenAI chatbot is spooky good.
I think a lot of this has to do with an individual’s relationship to male authority. A lot of people — especially aimless young men — want someone they can imbue with their hopes and dreams. This, in turn, leads to fascism. But I also think there is an element of neo-feudalism, or techno neo-feudalism to what’s going on around us.
Because of a growing number of plutocrats who control the world’s economy, people like Elon Musk can step in and change the fate of global history. They have the means, motive and opportunity to take control of something as powerful as Twitter and bend its mission to their will.
Of course, the rise of techno neo-feudalism brings with it an element of innate instability. The could very well come a moment in the not-so-distant future where the global populace rises up against this shift in human existence and God only knows what happens next.
A Fourth Turning, a Great Reset, you name it.
And all of this would be happening not just in the context of America struggling to figure out what to do about Trump, but also the potential rise of hard AI that may upend the lives of everyday people in ways no one — especially not me — can possibly predict.
It could very well be that history is about to wake up in a rather abrupt manner, not seen since the end of WW2. The entire post-WW2 global liberal order could come crashing down in a rather dramatic fashion with little or no notice. If you game out current macro political and tech trends, it’s even possible that not only will the United States be facing the existential choice of autocracy, military junta or civil war in late 2024, early 2025, Humanity as a whole might be waking up to the mainstreaming of hard AI at just about the same time.
A great book that addresses this type of massive clusterfuck is one of my favorite scifi novels, The Unincorporated Man. It’s definitely thought provoking given how turbulent the next few years might be.
Given that Warner Bros. Discovery has some $50 billion in debt, the company is going to face a lot of pressure to not just cut costs but to merge again. And to me at least, the ideal company for WBD to merge with is NBCUniversal.
But by definition, doing this throws the fate of CNN up in the air because of the obvious existence of MSNBC. The only way the two companies could pass anti-trust concerns would be CNN being sold off.
There are a number of different scenarios one could think of as to the fate CNN. One possibility is some MAGA plutocrat buys it and turns it into a Fox News clone. Another is someone like Jeff Bezos buys it and makes it his play thing along with the Washington Post.
Then, there is the possibility that Elon Musk could swoop in and buy CNN. Remember, CNN was built upon the ego of Ted Turner. So, it would be a return to its origins for it to be the plaything of something like Musk.
But the key thing you have to remember is, given how important CNN remains to be, there’s a good chance that it’s current drift towards MAGA is going to accelerate.
So, let’s go through how an advertiser might use this Twitter killer that I’ve come up with. To me, the main appeal of this hypothetical service is you have a lot more freedom in what type of ads you push into the platform because they can pretty much be the same size as a Webpage. AND you have the option of using traditional banner ad sizes within Posts in the system as well.
Groups Anyone would be able to create a Group about anything you liked. It would be attached to your account ID, which would allow for redundancy, which would allow for scalability. This is a very flexible nature of the service — at least in this specific aspect. You would have to have a robust discovery feature for that to work, of course. Threads These would be presented much like a traditional blog inside of a Group. This would allow for huge page-sized advertisement. There would also be a subthread feature which would be pretty cool. Posts What would be interesting about this would be you would have inline, collaborative editing like you might find with a Google Doc. You would have, say, six people able to inline edit a Post before a new Post in the Thread is spawned because you would run out of colors.
So, here’s how an advertiser might use my Twitter Killer.
Remember, using their account, they can create as many different Groups as they like about whatever aspect of the service or widget that they’re selling. AND, what’s more, they can control who can Post into the Groups they’ve created.
So, if you were a major advertiser, you could have a variety of Groups devoted to discussion about any number of not just a widget, but an element of a widget that you felt people might really want to talk about. And also remember there would be an Excerpt feature that would work with a Feed feature like you might see with Facebook or Twitter, which would cut through the service to allow people to know when a new Thread or Post was created in Groups they might be monitoring that were run by people they might be monitoring.
This is a far more powerful brand tool than either Reddit or Usenet — or even Facebook, for that matter.
The thing about Elon Musk is he’s so erratic that it seems within the realm of possibility that he might just pull the plug on Twitter and walk away in a huff — hence all the tweets by people on Twitter talking like the service is about to go under.
Elon Musk
But there are a lot of reasons to believe that while possible, that’s just not going to happen. The biggest issue is, of course, banks. Because of the whole bank situation, it’s far more likely that Musk will find someone to run Twitter for him THEN walk away.
And, yet, there is the issue of not only all the money that Twitter is losing but also how it is going to survive long-term without any advertising. What if is just stops working for 24 to 48 hours? Would that be enough for people to stop using the service en masse?
I doubt it. I think, in the end, Musk might actually pull off a pretty interesting turn around of Twitter or, at least, take credit for it. And I think that’s really his ultimate goal — he wants to take credit for saving Twitter from itself, even if he’s not the one who does it.
With the crazy, fucked up things going on with Twitter at the moment, I find myself still daydreaming about my startup idea that cherrypicks some of the UX elements of the long-dead Usenet.
The key issue is, of course, the idea of Groups. I am well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both Google+ and Reddit. But I have really thought through how to use this service. Here’s the basic elements of the service as I imagine it
Groups Anyone would be able to create a Group about anything you liked. It would be attached to your account ID, which would allow for redundancy, which would allow for scalability. This is a very flexible nature of the service — at least in this specific aspect. You would have to have a robust discovery feature for that to work, of course. Threads These would be presented much like a traditional blog inside of a Group. This would allow for huge page-sized advertisement. There would also be a subthread feature which would be pretty cool. Posts What would be interesting about this would be you would have inline, collaborative editing like you might find with a Google Doc. You would have, say, six people able to inline edit a Post before a new Post in the Thread is spawned because you would run out of colors.
Of course, there is the problem — but very necessary — issue of controlling who can Post. Having a lot of the service Read Only for most people is the only way that any sort of service based on Groups can scale and be successful.
The fact that absolutely no one cares about this very well thought out concept despite the chaos surrounding Twitter at the moment is enough for me to realize that maybe….it’s time for me to give up and put all my attention on the six novel project that I’m working on.
And, yet, occasionally I get drunk and need to vent about something OTHER than all these novels I’m working on. All this talk about Twitter ending once and for all makes me think — then what? And if Elon Musk pulled the plug on Twitter, which I don’t think he will, then there’s a greater-than-zero sum chance that someone might take me up on all my rantings about a startup based on Usenet’s best bits.
There is a lot of talk these days that Elon Musk is going to drive Twitter into a ditch, declare bankruptcy and then walk away. While that may happen, I’m not yet prepared to write his chances of success off entirely.
Elon Musk
He has a track record of (turbulent) success to the point that it’s possible he’s going to pull this off — maybe. We’ll wake up a year from now and all these fanciful things that Musk wants to do with Twitter will be taken for granted as a part of life.
I say all this because the more I see how Musk operates, the more I see myself. I would do the exact same thing if I was Musk thrown into such a situation. I would make a lot of mistakes at first, but once I got my sealegs, I would shock everyone with how well I did.
But, then, I’m just a loser in the middle of nowhere, so I don’t know if anyone should take the above as any sort of ringing endorsement of Musk. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how all of this works out. It could be that social media is a whole different bird than SpaceX or Tesla. It could be that being an eccentric is so off putting to the userbase of Twitter that it’s inevitable that someone will swoop in with a better mousetrap.
And, yet, I’m just not prepared to assume this is the case. I’m taking a wait and see approach.
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