Thanks to Glen's clear/concise response to my fence-sitting
contemplations I <virtue-signal> /left twitter myself.../</virtue-signal>
I only had 123 tweets and 22 followers after 12+ years on the platform
so I surely won't miss it much. Several of my "follows" were of folks
I haven't seen or heard from in most of a decade... I guess since I was
able to "unfollow" them they must still have accounts, even if they
themselves haven't tweeted in all that time. I'm pretty sure I was
following Glen but had no indication he had left and was simply not on
my "followed" list... unsurprising that Twitter would support all of us
leaving as silently as possible.
I appreciate Marcus point about twitter having it's "finger on the
(im)pulse" of a huge subset of the first world's population. I'll be
waiting with 'bated breath to see how much of a "great resignation"
actually happens. Reminds me of a dystopian version of Brunner's
"Hearing Aid" or 999-999-9999 service in Proto-Cyberpunk Shockwave Rider
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider>.
In the process of making sure I understood how to *deactivate* I read a
few dozen tweets (mostly) by right-wing-loons saying "good riddance" to
the Libs/Dems/Snowflakes, etc. This naturally increased my resolve.
I think I'd be happy to concede *this* town square to become another
Parler/TruthSociopath/etc.
I obviously never found Twitter that useful to myself so no "town
square" there for me anyway, unless you call a rolling street-brawl your
kind of town-square. I put away my own brass knuckles long ago. FB had
the same structure/experience for me... maybe worse since the size of
the payloads were so much greater.
Most of the folks I'd crow to about leaving Twitter would never have
signed up in the first place... so I suppose this is my only "crow"
<CAW !>
On 10/31/22 11:39 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I guess it is the data he is after. People posting on Twitter are
being selected for impulsiveness due to limited message length.
Having models of hundreds of millions of individuals’ impulses could
be valuable to all sorts of organizations.
On Oct 31, 2022, at 10:28 AM, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
Great quote from CDs screed:
"Every billionaire is a policy failure, but every billionaire is
also a factory for producing policy failures at scale."
I think this logic held for *millionaires* at the turn of the
*previous* century but I doubt it will take until 2100 to raise the
exponent from 6 to 9 to 12 (trillionaire)?
Anyone else read Gibson's "Jackpot" series or at least start watching
"The Peripheral" on Netflix? Their dystopian 2100 feels *almost*
Utopian compared to what I sometimes feel is looming on the horizon.
On Musk/Tesla, I think I now understand better how the died-in-wool
capitalists who love-to-hate Musk choose to make their money on his
coat-tails by *shorting* against the volatility he generates with his
dumb-Tweets (everything from 420 to challenging Putin to resolve
Ukraine through personal combat to suggesting Zelensky give over
disputed territories to the latest Pelosi-conspiracy-talk). Buh!
On 10/31/22 7:50 AM, glen wrote:
Do you get this:
https://theweek.com/speedreads/972170/peter-thiels-largest-disclosed-political-donation-ever-possible-jd-vance-senate-run
Doctorow has an interesting take:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/26/boxed-in/
"The Uihleins are ideologues, but it's a mistake to view their
authoritarianism, antisemitism, racism, and homophobia as the main
force of their ideology. First and foremost is their belief that
they deserve to be rich, and that the rich should be in charge of
everyone else."
I'm not convinced. But it's plausible. What do Musk, Thiel, and the
Uihleins have in common? They *probably* think they're better at
something than the rest of us. What is that something they think
they're better at? If you answer that, then maybe it'll explain why
Musk bought Twitter?
On 10/31/22 06:42, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I don’t get it. It seems undisciplined to put his successful
companies at risk to buy this money loser, while at the same time
getting all this bad press.
On Oct 31, 2022, at 5:11 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
Yeah, I deleted all my Tweets, unfollowed everyone, and removed
all my followers. Musk is an asshole. I know my lack of
participation means nothing. But at least I won't be (as)
complicit. There are no good billionaires
<https://patrioticmillionaires.org/2022/09/21/dont-trust-the-good-billionaires/>.
It's interesting how, in some cases, the existence of the most
horrible of any species (e.g. Uihlein
<https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial>)
can make the others seem "good". It's like a murderer saying "At
least I'm not a rapist." Or a rapist saying "At least I'm not a
pedophile." And a pedophile saying "At least I don't kill 'em."
Honor among thieves.
As SteveS mentioned earlier, I'm almost diametrically opposed to
effective altruism for exactly this reason. The argument is
basically: Hustle! Then Dole. I'm willing to change my mind.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YgbpxJmEdFhFGpqci/winners-of-the-ea-criticism-and-red-teaming-contest
Even when we give Billionaires [ptouie] the benefit of the doubt,
forgive them for their rapacious and exploitative methods, and
say "At least they're doing Good Things, now", the Hustle! Then
Dole lifestyle hones/perfects dystopian Taylorism
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor>. It's
only when these old codgers begin to see Death a little more
clearly, do they discover some sort of moral frame, while
(metaphorically) meditating at the edge of their infinity pool
built on the ridgeline of some desert mountain range. And, as we
see in Musk, their lifetime of isolation within the outsized scope
of their own influence (because, well, money is God, omnipresent,
omniscient, etc.), puts them at risk of dimension reducing
attractors like most individualist, right-wing causes. E.g. "free
speech" (distinct from free speech, with no quotes).
On 10/30/22 11:37, Jochen Fromm wrote:
Until now I have used 3 Twitter accounts for scientific,
development and personal stuff. I have used them more frequently
since Google+ was shut down. One main reason why I do not use
Facebook or Instagram is Mark Zuckerberg. As Grady Booch used to
say "Facebook is a profoundly unethical company, and it starts at
the top, with Mark Zuckerberg".
For Twitter it is similar now. I really don't want to support a
platform that belongs to someone who likes to insult others, like
Garry Kasparov or the real Tesla founder Martin Eberhard or many
others, just the way Trump likes to do it.
The note for advertisers was plain marketing. His intention to
save the world? A lie. This town square stuff? Nonsense. He
certainly didn't write this, it was more likely written by
Twitter's CCO Sarah Personette and her team. However, he has
created his own hell by buying the platform he is addicted to.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation
I am using Mastodon instead now, which does not belong to an
egomanic or eccentric billionaire. Yes, it is named after an
animal which died out at the end of the Pleistoscene, but the
distributed and decentralized approach is much better than having
one big centralized system. My new Mastodon accounts are here:
fediscience.org/@cas_group
berlin.social/@JochenFromm
ruby.social/@jofr
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Steve Smith <[email protected]>
Date: 10/30/22 6:50 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<[email protected]>
Subject: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter
https://mashable.com/article/please-stop-tweeting-leaving-twitter
https://mashable.com/article/i-was-going-to-quit-twitter-but-elon-musk-takeover
I have a *very* limited twitter engagement myself. Same with FB
and *zero* with anything else *but* Instagram where I restrict
myself to viewing and posting and liking the equivalent of
"family" snapshots for my family and closer friends.
I tried *mostly* to ignore the implications of a Musk
privatization-takeover of Twitter during all the on-again
off-again period but/and now as it has become a "done deal" I
feel more able to engage in thinking about that (unable to avoid
thinking about that?). I thought I might de-activate/delete my
nearly unused account when I discovered that I had a renewed
interest (morbid fascination) in watching it spin out (decohere)
or not from the front row. I found myself looking for whether
Musk's magic pixie dust would somehow trigger a phase transition
(likely there will be one, but probably not the kind most of us
hope for).
Earlier discussions on *this* forum touched on what would make
for a proper *metaverse* (not the one Zuckerberg is trying to
create from whole-cloth). My (very loose) engagement with the
Cardano/Catalyst work and interest in blockchain is motivated by
this as well.
Musk's attempts to characterize Twitter as a "town square" feels
very off-base in many ways:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-twitter-is-unlikely-to-become-the-digital-town-square-elon-musk-envisions/
What do "town squares" look like in "company towns"? And why
does most social media so often feel more like a rolling
street-brawl?
I worked *peripherally* on a project at LANL trying to address
the possibilities/implications roughly 30 years ago:
http://library.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/pubs/00285557.pdf
there were some good insights, but it was all so young and fresh
and raw at the same time...
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