Invest your own money, let compound effect be your leverage, and avoid debt like the plague.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 6
Consider this: there are in fact alien entities that threaten the essence of our civilization. They are undermining education. They do consume our time. They do ruin our relationships. They do separate wives from husbands, children from parents. They polarize our politics. They enter into our very minds, reformatting them, cutting us off from what we once believed, what we once might have remembered. They prepare us for a generic life that is hardly life, separated from the history of what made each culture special and each individual different. They are truly inhuman!
Those entities, of course, are the algorithms of social media. They are the aliens who are penetrating us and changing us. And Musk has done as much (via his ownership and transformation of Twitter) as anyone to ensure that social media enters our lives in the worst possible form. It is he, as much as anyone, who has torn down the walls, opened the borders, and allowed the aliens in.
This, I think, is the source of the actual projection and displacement. At some level, Musk understands all of this; he is, after all, a very gifted man. But the responsibility is overwhelming. It cannot be he who has summoned all the chaos and destruction. It must be the human migrants. Blame them. Blame them every day. Blame them for everything. Never stop. Keep the truth at bay. The unbearable truth. About yourself.
We all do this sort of thing. But it is more consequential when the centibillionaires do it. Their giant self-deceptions affect not just the people around them, but the whole world.
—Professor Timothy Snyder
No. of Recommendations: 14
And Musk has done as much (via his ownership and transformation of Twitter) as anyone to ensure that social media enters our lives in the worst possible form.I mean, there's a lot that Musk has done - but this doesn't make sense.
Twitter was a twisted hellscape long before he bought it. And Twitter isn't an especially large social media platform. It's a fraction the size of Facebook or Insta or YouTube:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platf...If you were going to put this on a single person, it would be Zuckerberg - not Musk. Or perhaps Ruchi Sanghvi, who led the team at Facebook that developed and implemented the first version of the Feed: the first large-scale social media algorithm that Prof. Snyder is decrying. It's been FB under Zuck, not X under Musk, that really developed and propagated the algorithmic approach to social media.
No. of Recommendations: 6
And Twitter isn't an especially large social media platform. It's a fraction the size of Facebook or Insta or YouTube:
Things don’t always relate to size. The National Inquirer had a larger circulation than The NY Times, but the Times was a gazillion percent more influential. More to the point, Fox News has a smaller average audience than ABC, CBS, or NBC nighttime news, but Fox the one driving the national agenda, not the old-line TV network news departments.
Twitter has an outsize follower-ship among media importantes, tech gurus, and similar driving the national conversation. It swings a far larger bat than its simple “user” statistics might indicate.
Twitter was a twisted hellscape long before he bought it.
He has made it arguably worse, using it to artificially shape the conversation to the talking points he chooses, amplifying those with a point of view which which he agrees and diminishing others, and allowing the worst of the worst back in so there is no “penalty” for being a negative force for society. (Likewise the CiC with his endless and incomprehensible pardons.)
I don’t go there unless I am thrown there by a link somewhere else which happens rarely, but occasionally. But I do have an account, left over from the previous owners and it seemed to make little difference whether I kept it or deleted it, so it stands.
No. of Recommendations: 4
Twitter has an outsize follower-ship among media importantes, tech gurus, and similar driving the national conversation. It swings a far larger bat than its simple “user” statistics might indicate.
Perhaps, but that's not really relevant to the professor's point. He was arguing that being exposed to these algorithmic processes ended up "rewiring" the people using the platform (my term, not his). But that's something that happens to the actual user. His point wasn't that Twitter was changing the national conversation - it was that being exposed to the algorithm changes the people who are experiencing that.
That's not a Musk thing. Facebook originated the algorithmic feed, and affects many times more people than Musk. And all those Twitter users were being redirected and reprogrammed by getting their life experiences by the alien and predatory algorithmic feed long before Musk bought the thing. Musk may have made changes to what specific stuff gets elevated in the Twitter algorithm, but the algorithm itself long predates him.
