💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 9-07.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:17:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Elon Musk threatens to sue Anti-Defamation League over lost Twitter revenue
It might just be me, but claiming you're not antisemitic, while at the same time claiming there's a shadowy organization, that just happens to be Jewish, and that's "responsible for most of our revenue loss", seems to be a bit of a contradiction. It's pretty clear what Musk is doing here. And what he's doing is, to be clear, tying the ADL to traditional antisemitic narratives about Jews, the media, money, power, and control. Even if you give him the greatest benefit of the doubt (and why would you extend that to billionaires?), unintentional antisemitism is still, well, you guessed it.
Musk has become, in some people's estimation, the most powerful antisemite in the world. And the ADL in the past few days has become the number one trending topic on the platform. Think about it: all kinds of people - boomers, octogenarians, young teens, all of 'em - are going to get antisemitic tweets boosted into their timelines. The polite ones talk about banning the ADL; the impolite ones have cartoons that would have been applauded in Hitler's Germany.
What a time we live in. Twitter-the-platform was never great, but had its benefits. But man, has it fallen hard. It's become a full-on cesspool. And it's only going to get worse.
Musk has threatened to sue the ADL, and I hope he tries. I doubt he has a leg to stand on, and I fully expect he'd lose. But even if it's unlikely that he'd actually follow through on his bombastic talk (remember the so-called cage match against Zuckerberg? When's that happening? ...oh, it's not?), I fully expect that losing would be priced in, so to speak. That doing damage, or perceived damage, and dragging it out, is the actual aim. The rich can do what they want, the ultra-rich doubly so; what would ruin any of us is like a parking ticket to them.
In related news, more and more of my peers are moving off the platform, finally. I'm seeing more familiar names elsewhere. Not all of them, but enough that this is starting to feel like a shift, that there's an understanding that the status quo isn't acceptable, even if it's easy.
I'm not sure what the final outcome is, here. Whether this is part of some actual plan or if it's just another great idea from a ketamine-addled mind. Maybe Musk runs Twitter into the ground and closes it. Maybe he looks for an escape hatch, sells to someone worse, or a dying early internet company, a la Tumblr and Yahoo. If so, most of the institutional knowledge at Twitter was gone with the layouts; if he divests, whomever buys it will take over an extremely broken system, in many ways. The software in an uncertain state, relatively few who know how it works, plus you've got a moderation crisis and all the mods were fired almost a year ago. Twitter's public moment seems to have passed, but at the same time, none of the alternatives have really taken over. It's the sort of thing I could see a company taking a flyer on.
I guess the upshot is that by buying Twitter, by being extremely online and also extremely bad at posting, Musk couldn't help but reveal himself: as weak technically, as a crafter of antisemitic narratives, as the sort of guy who personally intervenes to restore the account of someone posting screenshots of CSE. The years previous, the media gave him a free hand, allowing him to portray himself as a maverick billionaire genius who makes rockets and sweet cars and who has pretty Canadian electro-pop musicians hanging off his arm. Never mind that he didn't actually found Tesla. Never mind that he was forced out of PayPal for his obsessive focus on the wrong things (if only there were events in his past that could have predicted this current mess!), and for his poor technical acumen. No, he was always a small person with a wealthy family, a person with no friends, who loves the spotlight more than anything, and needs to be in it at all times. He's boorish, dull, and just generally...boring.
Dave Karpf: Does anyone think Twitter gets *better* from here?
As Dave Karpf puts it,
...it’s only going to get worse from here. There’s no moment coming where he turns a corner, hires competent managers, and stops ruining things. Musk’s antics this weekend weren’t the low point. They were just the latest point.
And like Dave, I'm not deleting my account outright. Like him, I care about my username not being poached (though if we're being realistic, this isn't a reasonable fear), but mostly, I've still got a morbid interest in checking in from time to time. Not on my actual timeline, because I'm not interested in any of my former mutuals who haven't made the move elsewhere, but because being logged in is mandatory to be able to actually see threads, now. And who knows when I'll need (or want) to screenshot something for posterity?
But in terms of day to day usage of the actual site, I'm done. My last tweet, in which I peace out, is from a month and a half ago; since then, I haven't thought about posting there. Having other outlets made it easier. Much easier. And now that most of the interesting people have left, chased away by principled stances or network effects or jank or whatever else, well - I'll leave the last word to Karpf:
You can’t reach an audience on X. You can’t organize on X. You can’t follow breaking news on X. The people who made Twitter fun have all given up. There’s nothing worth sticking around for anymore.