Month: November 2022

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

-Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men

Of course this is the week that we’re all supposed to give thanks for what good fortune we had this year and to specify what exactly we are thankful for. Off the top of my head, I can give thanks to at least two people this year.

The first, perhaps not surprisingly, is Donald Trump. The Republican Party has failed to gain more than ten seats in a Congressional midterm where a Democrat was president, and Trumpnik Republican candidates have largely failed to win key races for state government. This historic failure to perform is almost entirely because the Party felt the need to stay in Trump’s good graces and so agreed to nominate election-liar candidates like Adam Laxalt for US Senator in Nevada, Doug Mastriano as Governor in Pennsylvania, and pretty much every Republican in Arizona. All of whom lost.

Now, of course Trump was already planning to announce his wonderful re-election campaign to be Vladimir Putin’s Viceroy for Russian North America, and he was hoping he would get a huge boost from supporting all these candidates who were supposed to sweep against an unpopular Democratic Party and Biden Administration. It turns out, there’s one thing more unpopular than the Biden Democratic Party, and that’s the Trump Republican Party. So that meant Liddle Donnie Clown Boy didn’t get the big push he was hoping for in his campaign announcement. Worse than that, the truly amazing performance of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and some other Republicans (like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp) who are just as authoritarian as Trump but not as erratic mean that for the first time since 2016, some Republicans are actually advocating for someone else to be President. Of course Trump has to run anyway, basically to stay out of prison, but it’s getting that much harder. In a further act of disloyalty, “his” Supreme Court ordered that he must hand over his tax returns to a House investigative committee. The fact that Democrats won’t have charge of the House after December doesn’t matter, because they can share those documents with Senate committees, and the Senate hasn’t changed over to the Republicans. Again, largely because of the Party going along with Trump’s incompetence.

None of all the establishment Republican huffing and puffing against Trump is going to make much difference, because the professionals haven’t been in charge for a while. I plan to write in much greater detail about this subject, but I am thankful for Donald Trump because he always wants to make everything about him, even when he isn’t on the ballot. And by forcing his party to go along with his Big Lie, he did indeed make the election all about him, because everyone knew that all of those Church of Trump candidates for Governor and Secretary of State were going to change the rules to protect their party, and Trump in particular, from competition in 2024. So he made this election matter about as much as 2024, and a whole bunch of people, probably including some conservatives, realized we had to put a stop to that campaign this year. And we did. And in the process we made it a little less likely that Trump’s scheme to grab power again will work.

Again, none of this is going to stop “the base” from goosestepping in line to elect Trump so that they’ll never have to vote again, but that’s the other reason to be thankful. If Trump’s lies and schemes forced the non-Republican part of the country to move actively against him – which required acting against his Party – he’s forcing Republican and conservative influencers to consider if their slavish loyalty was worth it in the long run. A party that literally is only a Party of Trump, that is only about catering to his whims and delusions, cannot survive. And yet it has taken over precisely because celebrity worship and irrationality are more prized in the public sphere than professionalism and intellect. To really address the broader problem we need to address a culture that would make somebody like Trump president, which is where I get to the other person I want to thank:

Elon Musk.

I have already gone over how much Musk is fucking over Twitter, but apparently he’s not done. In his continuing tilt to squeeze a profit out of a medium that has never been profitable, Musk decided to fire a whole bunch of technical employees only to ask them to come back because they were fired “by mistake” or because he needed them to handle software issues that he didn’t realize needed to be dealt with. It turns out two of these people never worked there in the first place and were just trolling the company. I had said that the Occam’s Razor explanation for Musk’s erratic behavior is that he made a deal without knowing what he was doing or how to run this particular company, and he is hardly disabusing me of that notion.

I now put Elon Musk on a list with Rudy Guiliani and Vladimir Putin – men whom I used to think were intelligent. It turns out they’re just latter-day cases of the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, for those who didn’t grow up in the ’70s, states that “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Consequently, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.” Like, maybe Vladimir Putin’s skill set at destroying opposition on a political level led him to believe he could invade the largest country in Europe other than Russia, with draftees and trainees and inadequate air support and logistics for the operation, and get the capital to fall in three days. Almost a year after the fact, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Of course Trump is an even bigger example of the Peter Principle, but the difference is that Musk used to be considered competent. As in, even the people who didn’t like his management of Tesla or Space X didn’t think he was running them into the ground. But now the Tesla stock he was using to back up his takeover has gone down $700 billion in value from a year ago.

I can’t remember where, but someone recently said that Musk’s Twitter purchase was like a gambling addict buying the race track. This is about what you would expect. But I am thankful because not only is Musk wrecking Twitter, he is wrecking its credibility as an information source in the event that someone else takes charge. Liberals have been complaining for some time that Twitter is a monopoly, as if it were the only company providing a posting medium and as if that were the same thing as a public information service. But Musk’s utter disregard for information security really is a problem for anybody who wants to post on Twitter, and illustrates the problem we face when such a large and influential company is suddenly taken over by a capricious nitwit. But the difference between the Twitter base and the Republican Party is that social media users really do have other options. The one currently getting a lot of the buzz is Mastodon. The difference between that service and Twitter is that Mastodon is open-source. A Reason Magazine article explains it this way: “Essentially, Mastodon is a federation of independent but interconnected servers. It’s common to see Mastodon users refer to it as the “fediverse.” For the most part, folks in one part of the Mastodon fediverse can see and interact with folks in all other parts of the Mastodon fediverse.” One poster said, “This really isn’t a place of influencers – at least in its current iteration. If you don’t want to reply to comments on your posts you probably shouldn’t post. This (is) engagement and community not hot takes and “influence” that can be monetarized by advertisers.”

Of course that last bit may illustrate why Twitter got as toxic as it did and why all the people complaining about it didn’t leave until it became more liability than it was worth.

As Adam Conover said recently regarding Musk in particular, “(Sam Bankman-Fried), Elon and (Mark Zuckerberg) haven’t been hurt by their apocalyptic failures, but their image has. Everyone from the media to the government can finally see the truth. And that’s a good thing, because if we remember that these guys are actually dumbasses, then we can beat them.”

Of course that’s the bright-side way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that these con men got as far as they did because the majority who gave them power are that much bigger dumbasses.

On Friday November 11, it was Veterans’ Day, when we honor our veterans, including those who died in service. And I checked my cellphone as I was getting out of bed, and found out that Kevin Conroy, the definitive Batman voice actor, had died. Not only that, Gallagher died.

Gallagher doesn’t die. I always thought that 50 years from now I would be dead and cremated and Gallagher would still be touring the clubs, his skeletal arms lifting the mallet to crush watermelons with maniacal focus, his remaining hairs wisping behind him like the angry ghosts of better comedians.

It’s like when I found out Lou Reed died. Once I was watching a concert video with him and somebody asked, “Who is that old guy? He looks like he’s dying, like he’s starving to death.” And I said, “No, he’s not dying, he’s just Lou Reed!” Lou Reed doesn’t die, he just gets homelier and homelier! And then he really died. Wow. Man, when Lou Reed died, it was a sad day for trans junkie hookers everywhere.

But at this morbid moment, I can at least take solace in an impending death that will actually do the world some good.

Twitter.

People have been bagging on Elon Musk for a while now, and his latest tilt towards the LOL Right has only confirmed why so many people hated him in the first place even as the rest of us admired his entrepreneurial moxie. But his latest and biggest mistake was sealing the deal to buy out Twitter even as he’d found out early on that it wasn’t profitable enough to be worth the investment. And so he is apparently deciding to make it an actual business. And in the process he is doing more to destroy the Twitter brand than he could if he were trying to liquidate Twitter on purpose, and I can’t prove that that isn’t what he’s really doing.

The first thing Musk did was to fire its previous executives including its general counsel, cause I guess Twitter had too much content supervision. Apparently, Elon’s takeover was so poorly done that the Twitter company got locked out of its own account for 12 days because login details had not been shared for the transition.

But the biggest policy change Musk made was to the status of “the blue checkmark.” For most of Twitter’s history, having a blue checkmark next to your account name marked you as the verified user and protected against fakes. To get it, you had to fill out a form. Most public figures’ accounts, like the accounts of the President (and the individual who is or used to be the president) are verified this way. I did not know this until recently because I don’t give a rat’s tail about Twitter and until now it really didn’t matter. But now Musk, officially “Chief Twit”, decided his main goal with the site was to monetize a communications medium that he’d sunk $44 billion into. He told everybody that in order to keep their blue checkmarks, they’d have to pay him $20 per month. And a lot of those verified posters pointed out it was their traffic that built the site, with Stephen King saying “Fuck that, they should pay ME.” So Musk haggled himself down to $8. But then he said that with the monthly fee service, which he christened “Twitter Blue”, you got to use after-post edits and other features that previously weren’t in Twitter before. That’s good. Although most of these features are on Facebook for free. But the company seemed more concerned with monetizing something that had previously been free but optional than with screening out spam/bot accounts, which everyone agrees are a problem on Twitter and that Musk has promised to address as highest priority. Since anybody could “verify” they were who they said they were by paying for the privilege, you had a whole bunch of people doing Elon Musk clone accounts and saying goofy things to demean his image, which meant that Mr. Free Speech banned a whole bunch of people and specified that any such fake account that is not specifically labeled “PARODY” will also be banned. But that wasn’t it. You had another guy who has taken the handle of Jesus Christ (‘Carpenter. Healer. God’), and somebody who took a verified Nintendo account and used it to post an account picture of Super Mario giving the finger.

Of course, if I was running Nintendo and I were running their Twitter account, showing Mario giving the finger would be exactly what I’d do. But maybe that’s why I’m not running Nintendo.

If you believe in free speech, that means you protect the integrity of free speech. Even for corporations. We have a right to state our opinion and not have it mistaken for someone else’s, or have someone else claiming to be us and giving us issues. Like, with Eli Lilly having to explain that insulin ISN’T free now.

Somewhat predictably, Elon backed off the Twitter Blue spiel once it became clear how much legal liability it was creating.

Not to mention, Musk is so hopped up on cost controls that he is basically filling all the executive posts by himself while expecting his people to give up work-from-home arrangements and go without days off. Which is further evidence that he’s running things into the ground deliberately, but then he wouldn’t be making things so hard for himself in the short term. The Occam’s Razor explanation would be that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Somebody joked, “Hey Elon, you should buy Chik-fil-A and Hobby Lobby next.” The difference being that those businesses are actually making lots of money. Which among other things means that they wouldn’t have been vulnerable to a takeover because they don’t need a buyout.

As much as I hate to say, maybe liberals were right about libertarianism. Because a totally free, unregulated society still requires some level of implied rules that everyone voluntarily agrees to, and the reason we have all the damn rules we have is apparently because some people need to be told the obvious. Like “Don’t shit where you eat” and “Don’t be a racist moron.” The lesson with Twitter is that however much you believe in free speech and a marketplace of ideas, if your institution doesn’t adhere to a minimal set of principles and make them clear to everyone who wants to participate, then any jokester or opportunist can take over the medium and undermine it to the point that no one can trust it or take it seriously. Y’know, like what happened with the actual Libertarian Party.

Once again: Nothing is a priori. Nothing in this world sprang fully formed and equipped straight from the head of a god. People assume that Twitter is or should be some ideal public medium that fits their standard of what the ideal is, when Jack Dorsey and his people just built it as a small-scale, personal post platform, and because of that very informality, it took off. It was never really intended to become a profit instrument, much less the world’s “town square.” But that is what the community did with it.

And just as some in the community think of Twitter as an objective communications medium when it was never really intended to be such, Musk seems to think that because he paid many billions of dollars for Twitter that it ought to turn a profit. Again, Twitter only has value because of the people who are on it, and that value doesn’t necessarily translate directly into money. Remember what they say about social media: If you’re not paying for the product then you ARE the product. Someone on Pajiba pointed out, “If Twitter goes down, so does the easiest method Ukrainians have to inform the world of Russia’s war crimes, and an easy way for labor unions, dissidents, and other folks without much power to organize efforts. Twitter may have more problems than solutions, but it does have value. Or it did, before Musk’s ongoing crises gave him reason to smash it.”

A while ago, I concluded my opinion of Twitter with the following: “media critic Matt Zoller Seitz was quoted (from Twitter) saying “I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it now: if a superior alternative to Twitter appeared tomorrow, I’d be gone from here in a heartbeat.” My advice to Seitz would be to get together with like-minded people and come to a consensus about what “a superior alternative to Twitter” means, and then find people of means to finance it and experts to create it. My personal goal is to make enough money to where I can buy out Twitter with the specific purpose of destroying the website. Either that, or use the space for something more ennobling, like bumfights or fetish porn.”

Somebody still needs to figure out what a better alternative to Twitter would be and whether it would be more feasible as a profit site or a non-profit medium. As it is, I’m predicting Twitter bumfights and porn any week now.