[FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

Tue Nov 1 14:34:03 EDT 2022

I forgot to mention that I've been on Mastodon for ~5 years (I think): @gepr at mastodon.social

I took a brief hiatus to check out @gepr at counter.social, pnw.social (now defunkt), and @gepr at pdx.social. But having moved away from PDX and being irritated with the permanent layout of counter.social, I'm just sticking with mastodon.social. It's a little laggy with the twitter exodus. But I've had a great experience over the 5 years, both with building a filter bubble and bursting it (at will).

And yes, you were one of the people I removed from my following when I purged, along with Owen, SteveG, Jochen, and some others. It's weird. I still have "1 follower". But it doesn't show up when I click on my followers. I assume it's a Twitter bot that gathers the data.

On 11/1/22 11:23, Steve Smith wrote:
> 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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