[FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

Tue Nov 1 14:23:22 EDT 2022

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 <sasmyth at swcp.com> 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 <gepropella at gmail.com> 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 <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>>>>>> Date: 10/30/22 6:50 PM (GMT+01:00)
>>>>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>>>>>> <friam at redfish.com>
>>>>>> 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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