jeez, I was half-joking earlier about emperor+peasants vs. the middle-class aka minor nobility but he's going pretty much on the nose with this
weird to watch the active coalition side of the 3-way emperor/lords/peasants triangle shift in real time and so baldly
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Yes, and he's inciting a class-war by exploiting the uncritical connotations of "blue check" as a populist slur. When the god-emperor validates the perception, it's no longer light trash-talk.
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Replying to @vgr
I mean, he’s literally true—blue checks function as a kind of minor title of nobility right now. They aren’t about verification—they’re about validating the opinions of specific people.
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Yes, some journalists (the prototypical blue-check) are low-integrity. But this sort of class-war Maoist rhetoric is basically painting a target on the back of anyone with a whiff of "expertise" or "credential" or "bureaucratic authority" about them.
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This is either willful demagoguery or extreme cluelessness, and I don't think Musk is clueless.
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Yep. This is looking more and more like he's running twitter to work off vast resentments and grievances, and also process major Xi-envy. As with Trump, he seems to want the kind of absolute power that only attracts pure love or hate and shuts down thought
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Replying to @vgr
The $20 bluecheck fee is not about revenue (20 x 400k = meh) it's about cheapening it to drain the ancien regime bluechecks of their power.
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Hell no. He's not an "edge lord" ultimate or otherwise, simply because he co-opts the language of the edge. He's the emperor at the center focusing the spotlight every more narrowly on himself.
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Replying to @vgr
He is the ultimate edge lord
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I'm glad plenty of people are clocking what's happening correctly. This is not innocent shit aimed at controlling bots or raising revenue. That's just the excuse. "Bots" are basically "evil foreign power" or "the devil" in this story.
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Replying to @vgr
original model:
Mao + radicalized students > middle class/CCP bureaucrats...
The Great Tweet Forward
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I've seen more than one expert/professional I respect (the terms in their regular, non-pejorative senses) announce a quiet-quit as in "I'll still be here but only to post events/papers etc."
These "lords" are half the value of this site to me at least.
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The move is not about an innocent redesign of the blue-check as a product feature. It is about the fact that a redesign is conveniently weaponizable against the broad class it's come to represent.
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Replying to @vgr
But the blue check brought this upon itself by being ostensibly about identify verification, and then not even delivering that, while being a way for Twitter to bless certain users. A badge system based purely on follower counts, or open-for-all verification, make more sense.
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If you have a credential in your handle or profile, or an obviously middle-class-expertise indicator, now is probably the time to remove it
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I never bothered to apply for the bluecheck because the feature's flaws were obvious from day 1. But that didn't stop the term from coming to refer to a broad class that includes people like me, whether or not they actually had the checkmark.
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I was hoping this wasn't true, but the signs are too unmistakeable. This is the null hypothesis (whether or not he got monarchist dreams via Yarvin or some other source, it's clear he holds them)
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Replying to @vgr
Yeah. He's very clearly taken Y*rvin to heart, and he wants to go after the cathedral.
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There is now an air of senseless destruction here. It is clear who is losing. It is not clear anyone is winning anything besides schadenfreude. I hope that changes. At least if the "peasants" make real gains beyond the pleasure of pwning the bluechecks, some good may come of this
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At a more practical level, the golden age of free reach for us in the D-list "lord" class is now over. If you don't have alternative reach mechanisms like email lists etc. you'll see real losses. Happened before on Facebook, though with much less drama, and more civilty.
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Kinda interesting that he earlier tweeted stats about how the biggest accounts (Obama etc) were ghost accounts, which means the triangle was basically lords+peasants vs. absent emperors.
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That's why this site was such a great place for activism (which is generally middle class stanning lower class causes, with various degrees of investment ranging from slacktivism and cheap signaling to much costlier ways). Sorry activists, game over. Back to plastic bracelets.
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😂 "power to the people" = "peasant with a blue checkmark" (another of my jokes, "redcheck," sounds more appropriate by the day)
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Replying to @zencyl and @elonmusk
You will be a peasant with a blue checkmark.
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I personally completely ignored the activist stuff, since I don't have any activist sensibilities at all and am entirely selfish in why I'm here. But I think it did a lot of good, even though most of the attention was on the bad-faith outrage baiting and calling out.
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The grim-funniest thing is that "shareholder value" looks *very* different if you hold both tesla stock, as opposed to just twitter.
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If you're staying on here for the time being at least, and are critical of some of what is going on, I suggest running with the "emperor" meme. The biggest hypocrisy on display right now is the monarch using words like "lord" and "peasant" without acknowledging his own status
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He's working really hard to present as just a humble messenger of the people ("chief twit" etc is shallow self-deprecation) fighting the deep state. He'd like you to forget he's the above-the-law emperor now.
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