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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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Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
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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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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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