[FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter

[Steve Smith]

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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