Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2023

A modern irregular verb: I mis-spoke. You spread misinformation. He has been banned from social media

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I derive my headline from the original words of Bernard Woolley: “That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” It was a joke in Yes, Minister, but as Jon Miltimore shows, it’s a model for how the powers-that-be want to treat how information is shared on social media:

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data — or “spreading ‘misinformation'”.

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion”, NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way — at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud”. Prior to him, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

All of these accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company. Twitter is hardly alone, however. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability”.

Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions”, and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

[…]

What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”.

“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team”, Psaki explained. (Today we know that these companies are staffed with dozens of former CIA and FBI officials.)

All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

February 6, 2023

TikTok – threat and menace

Filed under: China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Wrong Side of History, Ed West linked to this post by Gurwinder on the TikTok threat to western civilization:

For thousands of years, humans sought to subjugate their enemies by inflicting pain, misery, and terror. They did this because these were the most paralyzing emotions they could consistently evoke; all it took was the slash of a sword or pull of a trigger.

But as our understanding of psychology has developed, so it has become easier to evoke other emotions in complete strangers. Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale.

As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.

[…]

Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possibly your facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.

The result is a system that’s unsurpassed at figuring you out. And once it’s figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you.

Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos — such as “how to” guides and field journalism — tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info. Many of the most popular TikTokers, such as Charli D’Amelio, Bella Poarch, and Addison Rae, do little more than vapidly dance and lip-sync.

Individually, such videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn’t intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it’s got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There’s evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.

A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges”, where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. Acts include licking toilets, snorting suntan lotion, eating chicken cooked in NyQuil, and stealing cars. One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge”, in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.

The Chinese government — not wishing this kind of insanity spreading among their own people — have ensured that it’s only foreigners getting the full TikTok experience:

Last month FBI Director Chris Wray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could “use it for influence operations”. So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops?

The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok’s malign influence on kids is that it’s forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am.

Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.

February 3, 2023

Who will be the first ones to lose their jobs to ChatGPT? The confidence men

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia somehow manages not to fall for the ChatGPT con:

The fast-talking hero of the TV show Sneaky Pete hates it when he’s called a con man.

“I’m not a con man”, he insists, “I’m a confidence man.” And that’s actually how the term originated — as “confidence man”. The scam only works because of that happy and confident relationship between criminal and victim.

“I give them confidence,” Pete explains. “They give me money.”

In the ultimate con, victims don’t even know they’ve been conned. They really think they’re sending cash to some gorgeous babe in Moscow, or bought a genuine Rolex, or whatever.

The confidence game is a real art — more than just cheating or lying. Those are boring and pathetic vices by comparison. A con job requires something grander, a fast-talking sureness that always seems to be right, even when it’s dead wrong.

If you’re caught in a lie, you just build a bigger lie to hide it.

Which brings us to the subject of ChatGPT, the AI bot that’s the hottest thing in tech right now.

Judging by my Twitter feed, ChatGPT is hotter than Wordle and Taylor Swift combined.

It’s even hotter than its predecessor Sam Bankman-Fried, who was doing something similar 12 months ago. ChatGPT is just better than SamFTX in every way. It can’t even be extradited — because it’s just a bot.

People love it. People have confidence in it.

They want to use it for everything — legal work, medical advice, term papers, or even writing Substack columns. If I believed half of what I heard about ChatGPT, I could let it take over The Honest Broker, while I sit on the beach drinking margaritas and searching for my lost shaker of salt.

But that’s exactly what the confidence artist always does. Which is:

  • You give people what they ask for.
  • You don’t worry whether it’s true or not — because ethical scruples aren’t part of your job description.
  • If you get caught in a lie, you serve up another lie.
  • You always act sure of yourself — because your confidence is what seals the deal.

Am I exaggerating? Is the hottest AI chatbot in the world really doing this?

Instead of offering up my opinions on this, I’ll just share some tweets from knowledgeable observers who are starting to suspect the con.

I’ll let you decide for yourself whether this measures up to a confidence game.

January 25, 2023

The “everyone is literally Hitler” expert

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray helpfully points out that Benito Mussolini combed his hair, which is also what Emmanuel Goldstein does:

We’re overproducing hysterical expert-scolds. I keep finding more of them in social media, loud and weirdly nasty, like feral cats in a hay pile. Here comes a shrewd take from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at NYU who has a highly marketable sideline as an expert on authoritarianism, responding to some genius-level political analysis from a guy with the requisite Ukrainian flag in his profile:

Observation: Marjorie Taylor Greene wore makeup on television.

Analysis: “That’s what Fascists do.”

See, members of Congress usually go on television in just an old pair of gym shorts and a dirty Schlitz Lite t-shirt, but this one particular person is trying to be Literally Adolf Hitler, so she wore a necklace and some lipstick. Textbook fascism!

Meanwhile, the governor of Florida just said that students in schools should put their phones away until recess, so they can focus on learning. This, too, is precisely identical to blackshirts marching on Rome:

Spend five minutes with this person’s social accounts, if you must, because this is what she does. It’s fascinatingly random, like a lady who lives on a bus bench wandering around the neighborhood describing random objects as Nazis. That’s a Nazi tangerine! That scrap lumber invaded Poland! Discarded juice boxes are Francisco Franco!

Eventually, if you make enough completely random angry noise, you get tenure and a book deal.

January 6, 2023

QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I’ll be the first to admit that I not only don’t understand the business side of it, but the whole concept leaves me cold. Yes, of course, like any young man from the latter half of the 20th century I’ve seen a few pornos, gone to a few strip clubs, and so forth. Both were bachelor party rites of passage in my day; lord knows what they do now, and maybe that’s part of the OnlyFans sales model — since guys can’t go out to seedy strip clubs or get together as a bachelor party and watch a porno (too much Toxic Male Gaze, #MeToo) they have to do it virtually. And I don’t get that, either. Looking at sex strikes me as pointless — either put me in, coach, or I’m going to find some other, more productive use of my time — and looking but not touching at a strip club seems even dumber.

Given that I am not in the target audience for OnlyFans, then, perhaps all my speculations are hilariously wrong. And obviously there’s a robust market for porn, so it stands to reason that a la carte porn would have, if anything, an even bigger market …

… but do we trust those numbers? Everything in Clown World is fake and gay, and everything to do with the Internet has always been … how shall we put this? Factually dubious. This was true even when the Internet was a Libertarian paradise (for the young guys out there: Back in the build-your-own-modem days, I’m told, the Internet was hardcore Libertarian. By the time I got there, it was still very, very Right. Which stands to reason — you needed patience, discipline, and a little savvy to be online back then, and those are not Leftist qualities). OnlyFans claims a subscriber base of X, with revenues of Y. Do we have any reason to believe those are even within shouting distance of reality?

Money laundering seems like a live option.

My other guess was kompromat. I understand that Chinese Intelligence has all but openly admitted that TikTok is part of a targeted program to spread deviance, and if it has some intel benefit that’s a bonus. I figure OnlyFans had some sort of similar function. We all know that the classic “honey pot” is alive and well — Eric Swalwell and of course Hunter Biden say hi — but why bother running a real agent at somebody when he’s perfectly willing to put all his deviant desires in writing, backed by his credit card number?

I checked out OnlyFans — on Wikipedia; for research — and hey, whaddaya know, they got in on The Current Thing in Ukraine. Given what we know about Vladimir Putin, I’m sure he’s real broken up about that. It probably works pretty well as “open source” domestic intelligence, too — just as your enemies are busy uploading their own blackmail photos, so your domestic deviants are busy outing themselves on the other side of the transaction. Indeed, the only thing that surprises me is that the usual (((retards))) aren’t blaming it on the Mossad …

… actually I’m sure they are, and I do NOT want to know about it, but the point is, the whole thing seems really sketchy. So what are your thoughts? Money laundering scheme? PsyOp? Really obvious intelligence ploy? Or is it exactly what it seems like, desperately horny betas doing their thing?

(Based on what I saw on Facebook etc., I’m almost willing to believe the latter. All a recognizably human female has to do is post a cleavage shot on Facebook and she’ll get a hundred thirsty simps complimenting her. It’s the money thing that gets me, though. Being a simp in the Facebook comments is free).

Severian, “The E-Thot Economy”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-05.

December 31, 2022

The Twitter Files – “Let’s at least try to stop lying for a while, see what happens. How bad can it be?”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Taibbi on the continuing revelations about Twitter’s deep entanglements with agencies of the US (and probably many other) government:

In the coming days you’ll find a new thread on Twitter, along with a two-part article here at TK explaining the latest #TwitterFiles findings. Even as someone in the middle of it, naturally jazzed by everything I’m reading, I feel the necessity of explaining why it’s important to keep hammering at this.

Any lawyer who’s ever sifted though a large discovery file will report the task is like archaeology. You dig a little, find a bit of a claw, dust some more and find a tooth, then hours later it’s the outline of a pelvis bone, and so on. After a while you think you’re looking at something that was alive once, but what?

Who knows? At the moment, all we can do is show a few pieces of what we think might be a larger story. I believe the broader picture will eventually describe a company that was directly or indirectly blamed for allowing Donald Trump to get elected, and whose subjugation and takeover by a furious combination of politicians, enforcement officials, and media then became a priority as soon as Trump took office.

These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.

In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).

The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that”, offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.

What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked”. As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news? Former baseball analytics whiz Nate Silver chimed in on this front:

December 28, 2022

The Twitter Files – “How does anyone run a business under these conditions?”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the sheer magnitude of government(s) meddling in Twitter’s business (even though, yes, Twitter’s management was totally on-board politically with most or all of this meddling):

[…] Twitter has been constantly flooded with requests from at least dozens of separate federal entities, all of them needy and pushy and consuming the company’s time and energy: CENTCOM wants a meeting this week and CDC wants a meeting this week and NIH wants a meeting this week and the FBI wants a meeting this week and the White House wants a meeting this week and DHS wants a meeting this week and DOD wants a meeting this week even though CENTCOM already has one, and several members of Congress have some concerns they want the senior team to address this week, and …

Now: Twitter is a global platform. I would bet a kidney that there’s a Twitter Files equivalent for the Ottawa Police Department during the Freedom Convoy, and an RCMP file, and a Trudeau government file, and that Chrystia Freeland had some thoughts to share about some tweets she didn’t like. I would bet the other kidney that Twitter has equivalent files, in dozens of languages, from multiple government agencies in Iran and New Zealand and Australia and the Netherlands and the UK and Brazil and on and on an on.

As for my third kidney — just go with it, and we’ll clean up the biological metaphors later — state and local governments also expect Twitter to act on their content concerns and complaints about disinformation, which means fifty governors and attorneys general and state directors of public health and state police commanders picking up the phone, and 3,243 sheriffs and district attorneys and public health directors expecting to be able to reach out to their partners at Twitter, and close to 20,000 mayors and police chiefs, and thousands of state legislators and tens of thousands of city councilmembers, and on and on and on. “You tell this Jack Dorsey that I’m the damn mayor pro tem here in Glendale, and I want my concerns to be dealt with.”

And so, if we accept the premise that governments have special rights to demand content moderation, if the staff director of a legislative committee in the Arkansas state legislature and a sheriff in Maryland and the flag officers at all the MACOMS and Jen Psaki’s deputy assistant and a member of a county board of supervisors in Oregon and the chief of staff to the governor of Rhode Island, being Very Important People, all expect to by God get a direct meeting with Twitter executives because @buttchug623 is saying some things that they do not like at all, and oh by the way the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is holding on line 6 and he’s pissed and when can you pencil in a half-hour with Turkmenistan’s finance minister, then how much does it cost to manage all of those relationships?

The regulatory affairs staffing buries the business — you can’t pay for that much face time with that many self-important officials. We need to schedule the senior management team for a meeting with the White House this week, ’cause they don’t like Alex Berenson. How does anyone run a business under these conditions? “Before you cook that cheeseburger for order number seven, the deputy assistant secretary for sustainable agriculture would like to share some thoughts on the environmental trajectory of industrial protein cultivation. And about that milkshake …”

In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches.

Twitter’s path to bankruptcy runs through the premise that every government official who doesn’t like a tweet deserves a meeting.

December 22, 2022

Pseudo swear words “like fuckpuffin, spunktrumpet, shitgibbon, but, most of all, by the undisputed king of the new pseudo swear words, cockwomble“

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Sturgis would like you to swear properly without all these modern pseudo swear words that are all the rage:

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as “Derek and Clive” in 1976.
Full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYGy-j_oH5Q

Warning: this article features a number of words and terms which some readers may find offensive.

As it happens, I have been offended frequently myself lately — by a growing trend for replacing traditional expressions of anger, aggression or exasperation with neologisms.

I am speaking of terms like fuckpuffin, spunktrumpet, shitgibbon, but, most of all, by the undisputed king of the new pseudo swear words, cockwomble.

Cockwomble’s origins are hard to pin down. There are earlier examples of compound swear words from overseas: the American dickwad, the (I think) Australian fuckwit. They weren’t a significant phenomenon here until around five years ago when cockwomble first began to circulate.

Since then its popularity has grown and grown. Just last week it was trending on Twitter, apparently in relation to Matt Hancock. In fairness, Hancock probably does embody the qualities suggested by the expression better than any other living person.

That exception doesn’t excuse its proliferation: cockwomble has now begun to be picked up overseas and celebrated as an example of our native humour. The British Council really ought to step in and disassociate the nation from this awful expression.

My problem with cockwomble isn’t so much that it’s vulgar, but that it’s not vulgar enough. The addition of the completely innocuous womble to what is already one of our tamer core swear words, serves to neuter it to the point where it’s almost entirely inoffensive, even twee. The fictional furry creatures from Wimbledon have absolutely no place in meaningful swearing. Swearing shouldn’t be nice; it should be the preserve of the slightly scary: the docker, the builder, the fishwife, the public rather than saloon bar. Swearing should be a little bit dark, dangerous, even underground. It should certainly not be underground, overground.

December 19, 2022

“Both sides have their crazy folks … But usually, they’re on the semi-fringe”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton on the increasing difficulty of taking some people seriously:

There are some people who are completely unhinged. We all know this and have seen it ourselves throughout our lives. This is especially true if you spend much time in the political space.

Both sides have their crazy folks. They exist in the realm of conspiracy theories, rationalizations, and fearmongering with absolutely no basis in reality.

But usually, they’re on the semi-fringe.

Or, at least, they used to be.

However, I came across this tweet from an account with over 400,000 followers and reportedly run by a group of mental health professionals, and if this isn’t the height of unhinged, I don’t know what is.

Now look, I know that the official reason these journalists were suspended was because of doxxing, but I don’t know just how valid that is. I didn’t see their tweets so I can’t say.

I do know that they caught a seven-day suspension, so they’ll all be back.

But for these jackwagons to claim it reminds them of Kristallnacht …

At least 91 Jews were murdered during Kristallnacht. Some experts say the actual death toll should be higher due to post-arrest maltreatment with at least one saying over 630 people died as a result of Kristallnacht.

I looked to see if this was a parody account, but it doesn’t look like it, which means these dipsticks are serious.

And that’s terrifying.

See, if they’re mental health professionals, then it means at least some in our mental health system are crazier than most trying to get help in the first place. This is beyond deranged.

And yet, it’s unlikely that those more than 400,000 followers are hate followers. They’re people who actually like what these people say and take it seriously. That’s downright terrifying.

December 16, 2022

“To hear Musk tell it, his motivation is obvious: It’s about saving the world”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Bari Weiss at The Free Press (formerly known as Common Sense) on what went on in preparing to reveal the “Twitter files” and what Elon Musk is hoping to accomplish with Twitter:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

“I’m not going to spend $44 billion to reinstate a satire blog”, Musk said about the Babylon Bee, which had been banned from Twitter in March 2022. “I did it because I was worried about the future of civilization”, he told us late one night. 

As far as Musk sees things, “birth rates are plummeting, the thought police are gaining power, and even having an opinion is enough to be shunned. We are trending in a bad direction.”

He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission: that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard, and the best will win out. 

“If there is one information source that breaks ranks, then I think it ultimately forces others not to have the same narrative”, he said. “If even one organization competes hard for the truth, others will have to follow.” 

To win back that trust, Musk figured it would require being honest about what had, until very recently, been going on at the company he had just bought: the suppression of disfavored users; the curtailing of certain political views; the censorship of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop; and the extent to which the government had tried to influence such decisions.

“We have a goal here, which is to clear the decks of any prior wrongdoing and move forward with a clean slate”, Musk said in one of many conversations that took place over the course of a week. “I’m sleeping at Twitter HQ for a reason. This is a code-red situation.” (He put it even more forcefully on Twitter, where he said that the company was a “crime scene”.) And so he has been sleeping there on-and-off, claiming a sofa. His 2-year-old son, named X, was almost always nearby. 

Musk, who is a South African native, analogized the work of cleaning-house at Twitter several times to a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what looks to some like truth and reconciliation can look to others like revenge.

At one point after midnight, as Musk showed off a closet of swag, including t-shirts left by the previous crew that said “Stay Woke”, he joked: “The barbarians have crashed through the gates and are pillaging the merch!”

Remember: After Musk made his offer to buy Twitter in April, he tried to get out of it in July, arguing that the company had not been honest about the percentage of fake users and bots on the site. But the company sued to force the deal, and he went ahead with it. 

Musk estimates that he paid at least twice what it was worth but that he had to “chew down this hairball” — which is to say, he had to buy Twitter. 

The price tag isn’t his only grievance. There’s also the fact that the company, to hear him tell it, wasn’t really a functioning company at all.

When Musk took over, he said, he found Twitter in disarray. Employees had unlimited vacation time and permanent work from home. The company had stopped doing performance reviews altogether, according to a long-time Twitter employee. “As long as Twitter could just keep its head above water and be roughly cash-flow break-even, then that’s all that they cared about”, Musk said. 

Musk calls the Twitter he purchased a “non-profit”. Twitter, as it existed, wasn’t pursuing net earnings but “social influence”, he said. “This was fundamentally an activist organization”. 

Since he took the helm at Twitter, he has fired 80 percent of the staff. He has insisted that those not prepared to be “extremely hardcore” and work “long hours at high intensity” show themselves out. Several engineers I spoke to had been working 18-hour days for the past month. They looked like it.

“It’s like if an aircraft was going in one direction and then suddenly pulled a U-turn and hit the afterburners in the other direction. That’s what happened to Twitter”, Musk said, making a vroom noise and laughing. 

December 10, 2022

“Notes from the administration of a private social media company: ‘Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI'”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the tendency of people in a group to “go along to get along” with the group consensus:

Elon Musk has gone from letting us in on some very interesting things to holy shit somebody just dropped a bomb, with a little help from Matt Taibbi:

Especially:

Notes from the administration of a private social media company: “Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI“. Re: election security, they say, in a discussion about killing a story that harmed one political party and helped the other political party.

This isn’t left and right, anymore — if you regard yourself as a liberal, a progressive, a Democrat, or any other related identity, surely you agree that the national security state shouldn’t be intervening in our political discourse, even though in this instance the person who was harmed was Donald Trump. Surely this is something we can all agree on, across lines of identity and party politics. Right?

“We blocked the NYP story”, of course, means that they blocked the story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, wide public awareness of which could have changed the outcome of the election. So the alphabet-soup agencies were shaping the public discourse around partisan politics during the run-up to an election, at least sometimes telling private social media companies what posts and accounts they wanted limited, silenced, and removed. And Twitter was glad to comply. (See Taibbi’s complete thread for more.) Federal agencies intervened in our politics, for what the available evidence strongly suggests to have been partisan ends.

I suspect the statement “could have changed the outcome of the election” is overstated. From everything I’ve read, the election results were “fortified” enough to survive any amount of unwelcome fact leaking through to the voters. I mean, really: who would want to live in a country where the unwashed voters might have a say in what went on with the government?

December 8, 2022

Orwell wrote about the dangers of letting well-worn phrases do most of your writing for you back in 1946 – it’s still valid today

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I posted a short paragraph from Orwell’s brilliant “Politics and the English Language” essay as a QotD entry earlier this year:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

As Chris Bray shows, things are, if possible, even worse today than in Orwell’s day:

We do not advance. The dominion of the ready-made phrase doesn’t provide a path for advancement. It provides a locked language for a long stalemate that edges into steady decline.

(Stella Morabito covers this ground in a new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer, excerpted here in a short package of tremendously useful ideas about the way we shape ourselves to the prevailing discourse to avoid the feeling of isolation.)

So Tracy Beth Høeg graduated from medical school in 2006, and later completed a PhD in epidemiology, then a medical residency. She does medical research and treats patients; you can go to her clinic and get medical help. Another person who went to medical school but then decided not to complete a residency or treat patients or publish peer-reviewed research casually dismisses her as “this Hoeg hag”.

In the dominion of the ready-made phrase, the many prevailing and easily grasped terms of social disapprobation provide comfort. The well-known denunciatory words and phrases give credentialed but unaccomplished people who live with social panic and status anxiety a way to elevate themselves by standing on someone else. That fucking hag, that anti-vaxxer bitch! Something something Koch Brothers something something! This ritual use of social denunciation as a status signal is precisely the dynamic Milan Kundera described in a series of novels about the social practices of late communist societies. The grab bag of social ruin trigger terms is easy for mediocre minds, which are empowered by the ability to shit on people for status without having to do much work.

It’s a psychological wall: white nationalism Fox News anti-vaxxers Koch brothers! You can be important and powerful without doing anything, by performing the degradation of someone who has — using the useful shortcut of the ready-made phrases. You don’t have to do or be; you can signal and display. Status is a performance of familiar words directed at the usual and useful targets. It’s lazy, it’s mindless, and it gets a good number of people through their days. Imagine being the 34,567th public intellectual to slam a Covid vaccine critic on Twitter. So fresh! So brave!

December 7, 2022

Facebook’s strategy for collapse

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia clearly isn’t a Facebook fan — and I sympathize, having lost access to my Facebook account a few years ago — but it’s not just people like us that have contributed to Facebook’s epic decline:

Most companies fail because of competition. They simply aren’t fast enough or smart enough to keep up with the marketplace.

But the big web platforms aren’t like that.

In many instances, they are quasi-monopolies. They are so big and powerful that they hardly need to worry about competition.

After all, who can match Google for search? Who can beat Amazon for online shopping? Who does more to keep you connected with family and friends than Facebook? Who helps you clean out the junk in your garage better than eBay?

But even the most dominant players can falter. There was a point in living memory when Sears controlled 30% of all retail spending in the US. I’m not exaggerating: three out of every ten dollars were spent at Sears.

Sears once operated 3,500 stores. Today only 22 are left. Many of my readers have never seen the inside of a Sears store.

This happened because Sears was so big that it didn’t need to worry about competitors.

That sounds impossible. How can you fail by being too powerful? But this has happened in many instances, even on the web. There was a day when Yahoo was the leader in search. There was a day when MySpace was the dominant social network. There was a day when Tumblr was the place to share photos.

There was even a day when the two companies in total control of your access to the Internet were called Netscape and America Online.

Not anymore.

This has happened before and will happen again. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

[…]

The situation at Facebook is now uglier than MC Hammer’s wardrobe closet. Meta is the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 this year. In other words, there were 499 other companies in the composite that did better — and this was a tough year all around in financial markets.

Mark Zuckerberg has personally lost more than $100 billion. In fact, he lost $11 billion in a single day. Has that ever happened before in human history? Almost exactly 12 months earlier, I’d written an article entitled “Meta Is for Losers” — but even I never envisioned losses on this scale,

Of course, there are many losers in this story — including the 11,000 workers who got fired a few days ago.

What’s going on?

You probably think that this is the result of Zuckerberg’s fool’s bet on the Metaverse. That’s what everybody is saying. But as we shall see, the Metaverse is just a symptom not a cause.

I can actually explain the problem in one sentence:

Instead of serving users, the dominant company decides it’s better to control them.

This would never occur to a small business. The owner of your neighborhood deli or gas station has no grand plans to control people — for the simple reason that this is an impossible dream.

That’s the reason why they say: “The customer is always right.” It’s not because the customer isn’t often wrong. Customers are frequently wrong — go listen to them sometimes and cringe at the stuff they demand. But if you’re in business, you must act as if they’re right even when they aren’t. And you do learn things by listening, even (or especially) when their demands are excessive.

By the way, you succeed by listening in every sphere of your life — starting at home.

There’s a good reason why students at hospitality school are told never to use the word never — or “no” or “can’t” or “impossible” — when talking to clientele. Instead of saying: “No way, dude, we’re not putting mayonnaise on your pizza, that’s disgusting”, you offer something positive:

I wish we could do that, dude, because it does sound super tasty — but I will put extra mozzarella on your slice, and our high temperature oven will give it a kind of mayo texture.

That’s how you roll in retail.

But at Facebook, the customer is always wrong.

December 2, 2022

The whole music culture, it seems, is now under the sway of a chipmunk aesthetic

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia explores the oddity of musical tastes on TikTok:

When I was a child, a band called Alvin and the Chipmunks enjoyed a brief taste of fame. Hot bands come and go, but this one had a bizarre back story.

First of all, it didn’t really exist. The band consisted of cartoon chipmunks. In this regard, Alvin and his rodent colleagues get credit for anticipating the anime pop stars of the current day.

Second, these singing chipmunks were more a brand than a band. Because these animals were make-believe, they couldn’t go on tour — but they could sell boatloads of merchandise, from lunch boxes to comic books. This, too, anticipated much of our current music industry — where the side deals often make more money than concerts and records.

But even stranger, this group aimed to imitate the sound of singing chipmunks by speeding up recordings of human vocalists. The end result was arguably the most annoying sound in 20th century music (a rare distinction, that). I can’t stand listening to these tracks, but they somehow won five Grammy Awards. Alvin and the Chipmunks actually enjoyed two number-one singles.

That’s two more than Bob Dylan can claim.

In all fairness, these same tracks sound even worse when slowed down. So maybe there’s something to be said for getting to the end of the song as fast as possible.

But here’s the most surprising part of the story. This sped-up sound also anticipated the contemporary music of our own time — it’s actually one of the hottest trends on TikTok.

The whole music culture, it seems, is now under the sway of a chipmunk aesthetic. This, to my way of thinking, is even more foreboding than all those people who want us to eat bugs and compost our deceased loved ones.

I’m starting to think that Alvin and the Chipmunks belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe I can’t stand listening to the stuff, but these cartoon critters clearly pointed the way to the future. A dark dystopian future, perhaps, but I guess that’s what happens when you treat rodents as role models.

November 29, 2022

QotD: People have always lied about sex, but GenZ’ers lie even more than you’d expect

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve been out of academia for a few years, but this bespoke sexuality nonsense was already exploding by the time I got out. I saw two big shifts in the studentry during my academic career. The first was the catastrophic drop in academic readiness, thanks mostly to No Child Left Behind (et al. Lots of trends contributed, especially Participation Trophy culture, but NCLB is a good synecdoche). The second was the end of all-out college kid hedonism.

By the end of my last tour of duty, most college kids were dour puritans. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is the thing people keep forgetting about the Internet: People lie. I know we all know that consciously, but we seem hardwired to believe confessions. In the same way that we might not consciously watch TV — might go some distance out of our way to avoid it — but find ourselves staring mindlessly at the blinking screen when we’re in a bar or a waiting room or something. It seems to be hardwired. So when these folks start writing about all the bizarre sexual shit they’re into, we just … believe them. Sight unseen.

But y’all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I want to state, unequivocally and for the record, that my entire knowledge of undergrads’ sex lives is secondhand. I have zero personal experience in this area. But it’s a close secondhand. For one thing, there’s not much to do in College Town that doesn’t involve undergrads, so I ended up drinking at a lot of the same bars, and in vino veritas. Second, kids these days have no filter. None whatsoever. Finally, social media — my last tour was at a SPLAC, where they strongly encouraged the faculty to be “friends” with the student body on their campus social media apps.

And yeah, they SAY a lot of things … but I highly, highly doubt they actually DO much of anything at all.

For one thing, those “student” bars were lucky I and a few other semi-normal profs were still in our “drink away the pain” phase, because otherwise they would’ve gone out of business. Friday and Saturday nights during football season were still pretty lively, but the rest of the week the “downtown” bars had all the crackling energy of singles’ night down at the mortuary.

Kids just don’t socialize much IRL, and when they do, they don’t hook up. In my not-inconsiderable experience, college drinking these days is like college anything — a grim, pinch-faced, assembly-line business. They intend to get blackout hammered, and they get after it like Heroes of Socialist Labor. Pausing for a quickie in the bathroom would mean skipping a turn in the drinking game — and they all play drinking games; it’s bizarre — so no thanks.

And y’all, those are the outgoing ones. The ones who still have some slight urge to see and be seen out in physical space. The rest of ’em never leave their rooms except at gunpoint, and when you force them to, their eyes never leave their phones.

That’s why I’d bet many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that all the “kink” in their social media profiles — even their personal ads — are just for show. They’re not listing all that stuff in order to find someone to have sex with. They’re using it as an excuse not to have sex with anybody, because “having sex with” entails personal interaction and they’re terrified of that. If they ever perfect those VR sex helmets like they had in Demolition Man, watch out, but as of now the whole idea is to seem weird and daring and liberated and kinky, but with no possibility of a follow-up. Oh, you’re into aardvarks and dental tools too? Um … yay? Oh, wait, you dress up as O. a. erikssoni, and I’m only into O. a. leptodon. Sorry!

Severian, “Saturday Miscellania”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-13.

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