Conversation

Replying to
You and I are somewhere halfway up stands based on number of followers. If you superimpose political compass on the stadium, I for example am in 50k circle of seats, roughly at 7 PM lib-left position. Most views are like mine: non-degenerate azimuth/altitude. Elon is at ~(0,0)
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But what is sending serious alarm bells off in my head is that “free speech” in the last decade has never meant what it seems to. It is shorthand for “people I find annoying should shut up and people I like should get free *reach*” The speech/reach conflation runs really deep
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The paradox here is that I suspect most people are natural conservatives and the right of center half of the spectrum is actually 70% of the mass. But this is also the reason most people struggle with actual free speech as opposed to lofty mimetic posturing around their monarchs
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In its current form, twitter probably serves the left half of the spectrum slightly better, and therefore 30% of the population. In the thought experiment where the game rules favor the other half of the spectrum/70% of the population, I suspect the sport would kinda implode
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This is because the right half of the spectrum has odd views on “causing offense” that I think don’t scale beyond a small, homogeneous group that largely agrees anyway. And if they don’t the disagreement is so severe you rapidly get genuinely violent outcomes like war.
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Homogeneity is a barbell condition. If you have say, a bunch of 19th century European Christian white guys in wigs arguing, potential for verbal offense is pretty low, until it suddenly jumps high enough for world wars. There’s no middle ground of actual disputation.
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Left discourse only seems ultrasensitive to offense because it actually accommodates serious real diversity in a way grifty corp DEI programs pretend to. Despite its limits, twitter is basically the only place where I’ve met people from far beyond my limited circle of homogeneity
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Left discourse norms (not far left, plain shallow mediocre virtue signaling leftism without particularly deep convictions or agendas) are the only ones that have been shown capable of scaling to date. That doesn’t mean other norms can’t scale. I just don’t think Musk-norms can.
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Musk’s proposal, besides being a Meme Stock Pseudoevent from Hell that has ruined poor ’s vacation, is also an actual idea for alt-norms whose outlines are clear from his public behaviors. To his credit it is not pure reactionary fetishization of 19th c European norms
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We have to be careful not to conflate what Musk clearly wants from what the Retvrn to Powdered Wigs and Statue Heads crowd wants. There’s elements of the reactionary to what he wants… but he likes jokes, memes, shitposting, and many other things that make modern twitter
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Replying to
There is a particular risk and a general risk here. The particular risk is that Elon is not a god. He has incredible strengths and average weaknesses. I hold TSLA and would buy SpaceX in a minute if it were traded. He’s incredibly strong on that sort of stuff. But on this…
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…all the evidence suggests he’s average-weak. He’s not particularly “good” at twitter even as a user, let alone as a social platform designer. He just has extraordinary leverage for ordinary levels of shitposting skill thanks to Other Factors™ that are NOT social.
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In fact, his following is built on the spectacle of *literal rocket launches* The fact that he memes is irrelevant to the point of being a rounding error. You and I meme to grow reach. Elon launches rockets.
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The general risk is of course that whatever his unique strengths/weaknesses, he’s also a super-billionaire If you think super-billionaires simply buying up large social phenomena to “solve” them because they don’t personally like the emergent behaviors, you’re a monarchist
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… *even* if, despite all odds, he is successful with twitter (and I hope he doesn’t want to be; this has gotten serious now), it’s a bad precedent. Even if you concede that twitter is somewhere between poorly managed and mismanaged (I don’t actually), this is a way to worsen it
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First, it’s not a “problem” to be solved. It’s an ecosystem to be managed/stewarded. There’s no Mars base or EV transition end game here. Twitter’s value is in sort of continuing and evolving indefinitely like a rainforest. “Solving” it is a pure authoritarian high-modernist goal
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Second, because of its unique role as a media thing, a management mode that’s not public in some way is simply not credible. I don’t mind a strong board/leadership and activist investors. I’d just like it to stay publicly traded. I mean look at the NYT.
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In general, it is bad for liberal democracies if the actual challenge of keeping them liberal and democratic is outsourced via privatization to an eccentric individual billionaire to do illiberal and undemocratic things with.
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I do think liberal democracies and their institutions (and twitter is one, as are literal football stadiums) can get trapped in local minima, and sometimes need an external kick in pants to break out. I think things like space programs and pandemics serve that kind of function
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A monarchist believes in a very particular source for the “kick in the pants” external force liberal democracies need: identify god-emperors to elevate above the rule of law. There is a certain deep appeal to this “solution” that hooks Straussian Great-Man theists in particular.
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Me, I’m much more in the Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes camp: anti-monarchist on principle. He’s descended from a guy who assassinated the last king of Ankh-Morpork, turning it into a neoliberal shaky weak rule-of-law oligarchy that only works because the top noble Vetinari is wise.
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Elon Musk is talented, but his talents are not exactly those of Lord Vetinari, which would be the *minimum* I’d look for
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I mean if you think you need to take Twitter private to “solve” it and it’s supposedly the town square, logically you’re just delaying the actual big move: taking Congress private to “reform” liberal democracy… which is what Putin did to Russia and Trump wants to do to the US
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If you can’t fix Twitter while it’s public you can’t fix the larger problems twitter’s are a microcosm of anyway. So why bother. Let twitter remain the true microcosm of larger problems at least.
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Aside: good evidence of my “70% are natural conservatives” is actually Facebook, which is far larger and solves the scaling problem by letting people atomize into relatively homogeneous groups and messaging groups, rather than actually discoursing in one big public space.
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Also 70% is actually only reflects the US. Most of the world is 80-95% trad. Non-white countries like India are way more trad-conservative. Immigrants here are far more conservative than you might think, and tend “left” in the US mainly out of anti-majoritarian fears, not values.
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Maybe this is worth saying explicitly — ownership is a kind of speech. Public ownership is a kind of free speech that is more important than mere words.
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However nominal, the ability to own even a minuscule fraction of a company and vote with your dollars is partway to just being able to vote in an election. There’s room/need for things in all positions of the spectrum from completely privately owned things to public utilities.
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The notion of free speech in a world where everything worth anything is privately owned is sort of vacuous. It’s empty blather at best, and something that will get you thrown in a Putinesque prison at worst.
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If you give people the right to say absolutely anything they want, while taking away more and more of their right to *do* anything of consequence because all the means are in private hands, have you created a free speech utopia or an empty speech dystopia?
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I see some comments along the lines of if nobody can technically be thrown out via terms of service etc (eg trump) you get some sort of true utopia. It parallels the bitcoin maxi type argument. In practice, when the terms of service are absolutist, you get a lemon market.
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Ie, bad actors chase out the good. In economics, bad money chases out the good. The place to fight for freedom is at the level of the whole society, ie government. Any subset like Twitter that tries to larp “rule of law” through terms of service simply enables lemon markets
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Exit vs voice applies. People only fight to create healthy cultures of voice under if they can’t easily exit bad ones. The place to fight free speech battles is Congress/Supreme Court. If you lose there, what you get is an actual refugee crisis of people exiting entire societies
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If you disagree with things like privileging CDC statements over random “do your own research” advice… I mean, there’s a way to address your concern: run for office, get a bill through to reform/dismantle the CDC etc. To his credit, Trump took his grievances to the right arena.
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I’d say 70% of the actual issues this crowd is moral panicking about is just work-in-progress large scale monitoring-and tagging algorithm design, weak/understaffed due process for appeals, and a feed algorithm with weird biases that don’t map clearly to political lines
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It’s a case of an Altavista era of social waiting for a Google-level algorithmic innovation, not a shadowy woke cabal seeking Total Societal Control. If you want to solve the problems twitter is a microcosm for, run for office. If actual twitter problems, study algorithm design.
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Tldr: Elon is gonna Elon. He’s a force of nature. But you get to choose your ordinary mortal reaction and whether you want to live in a god-emperor world or one where ordinary people get to muddle through as best they can, bickering collectively.
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If your answer to every difficult question is “shut up and take my money Elon” (substitute member of your personal pantheon of Great Men and Women), well.. I guess we deserve the world we live in.
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I’ve lived almost my whole 47-year-life in a world enthralled by Great Men/Women, starting with Reagan, Thatcher and Welch. In this entire period, believing ordinary people — only capable of and desiring ordinary lives — had a right to exist was the most unspeakable sin.
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