Narrative Causality is a Bitch

Literally the next goddamn day

I feel really badly for Elon Musk as a person, right now.

I remember the first time I met a high-level executive. My hands were sweating. My stomach was gurgling. All I could think about was all the things I had ever failed to do right in my life. I had spent several weeks preparing for the meeting, working out intensely to burn off the stress each night, imagining how I would rally to the defense of my project and my team, and still I was pretty sure he was going to fire me. I only hoped I could keep a professional composure as he showed me to the door.

He was really nice.

He just wanted to make sure that I actually knew what I was talking about, had thought through all the problems and wasn’t brushing things off, and was aware of the level of regulatory scrutiny involved in my work-set. He was thrilled I had solved the problem as well as I had, complimented me on the presentation, and was excited to see my product actually help customers.

What I came away from that experience knowing is that the stereotype of the evil corporate executive, who I had always expected to be smoking a cigar and maybe tapping the ashes out on an orphan, was actually just a regular person. A person in a position of consequence and responsibility, but ultimately the same as everyone else. I also started to look at people complaining about the world a lot differently too. Sometimes a frustrated sense of telling people that they’re smart and they should go out and make a difference. Sometimes a disgusted sense that someone is a coward who just doesn’t want to ever be responsible for anything for fear of failure.

Rare is the critic who actually has burned the calorie to think of an executable change to make whatever you’re doing better.

That meeting honestly changed my experience of the entire world. Through sheer tyranny of will I had become responsible for several million dollars of tech budget with barely over a year in an officer role. After many challenges I had proven myself to be the person best capable of guiding the decisions on how it was spent. People looked up to me but I still knew… I was just a guy.

There’s not a lever somewhere called “Fix the World” and people aren’t pulling it to be evil. It’s not that simple. As crazy as the world can be… everyone is trying their best.

You may thinking I’m stroking my own ego here, but I’m not. I wouldn’t say my self-esteem is any higher now than it was before. What I mostly feel now and felt then was relief that I could point to something and say that I built it and that it works.

In a certain sense it was easy. I knew what I was doing because I had thought through all the steps beforehand. I’d also been able to repeatedly test that knowledge in a rigorous environment. My mental map of the space I had to work in was more complete than anyone else’s. I could outmaneuver anyone there, even if they were smarter than me, at least for a while.

I feel like Elon bought Twitter because he wanted to make the world a better place. Twitter was an Orwellian censorious shit-hole. He could do something to intervene and so he did it. You may have a more cynical evil view of the situation than that but ask yourself… what other possible motivation could he have to throw himself in front of a dumpster fire? You think he wanted to make money so he spent an insane multiple of the market value to make the purchase? Right as the entire economy is heading into a recession that is going to take his other holdings and get him margin-called?

No. Don’t be cynical.

He did it because he wanted to make the world a better place… but he didn’t really have a precise plan for how he was going to make the changes needed. And I think on some level he was seduced by the idea of revenge. People who ran Twitter did a lot of shitty things. They did it with a nice smile and a good customer service voice but it was nightmare shit. Surely everyone would agree if, for instance, you banned Kathy Griffin for pretending to cut off the presidents head. That would be fair?

The law can’t be made retroactive. They call it ex post facto in the constitution. There’s also double jeopardy and statue of limitations. All of those are things humans found one at a time and all of them are technologies you need to keep people being able to cooperate together at scale. That’s what I mean when I say on here that it’s not enough to implement a republic one right at a time, you need to have the whole set in one go because they amplify and also limit each other to produce order.

Elon completely failed to sell the message of what he wanted in a way that even his enemies would believe, not because he couldn’t but because he’s got to be exhausted. I think he wants over ninety percent of what I want. I know some of you read this and think “Nah, it’s about the money! He’s just greedy!” To which I say, he could have made a lot of money in a lot of ways that were safer than starting an electric car company. He could have taken a lot fewer risks than trying to make a reusable rocket, which only nations had ever attempted previously, and all failed. If you’ve never actually built anything I just can’t stress to you how hard it is to get stuff like this done. It’s miraculous that he pulled it off.

Then he reached out for Twitter and… goddamnit, we all love to fight in this country. And we all like to see a giant fall. It’s disgusting.

We don’t want to feel a second of sympathy or grace for a guy when his little kid gets the shit scared out of him by some psycho antifa stalker. Sure, he overreacted. Streisand effect. Whatever. Imagine picking up your terrified little kid, crying his eyes out, and not seeing red for a few minutes. Imagine holding your little kid while they’re shaking and saying “Nah, not gonna do anything about this. It would be bad optics.”

He shouldn’t have been in a position to make that kind of unilateral decision in the first place, but it’s not like he’d had time to set up the system architecture to work any other way. You don’t think you’d be good and pissed off if that happened to you?

I grew up in a mill town. If someone did that to my kid, I’d knock all of his teeth out. I’d put my hands around his neck and start squeezing until there was no reason to keep squeezing or someone pulled me off. Not saying that would be the right thing to do, or the smart thing to do, but it’s what would happen. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

This is also why we divide power and root out conflicts of interest. This is why a dispassionate jury has to adjudicate decisions on how someone will be punished. This is why people have to be able to mount a defense and exercise their rights at trial. No matter who you are, no matter how civilized or well controlled, there is some pressure under which you will snap. You are human. If someone pokes the right button you will make the rash choice, every time that particular button is pushed.

What’s the most tired and brain-fired you’ve ever been?

For me it was working on the giant project I described above. I would have dreams about sending emails to Legal and following up in an IM to get an approval. Then I’d wake up and do that in real life. I had people pinging me from India at three o’clock in the morning asking for just a few minutes to chat. It was only that bad for a few months.

Elon works something like a hundred hours a week. That’s not sustainable. It’s just not. Your brain starts to melt down when you have that sustained level of effort. He’s been doing that for years. You could work sixty hours a week your whole life and be fine. You could even flirt up to the 100 hour a week level for a few months at a time. Might not have a lot of fun and your wife might yell at you, but you’d have a wife and you’d have a life.

Elon literally doesn’t have a life outside of work from every report I’ve ever read. Oh, I mean sometimes he’s not working but it feels more like he has the occasional psychotic episode to relax. The way people on Deadliest Catch go nuts while they’re throwing crab pots into the ocean. Just has a whole mini marriage that he fits in between product releases. I think Twitter was his one way to try to interact with the world as a person and he tried to turn it around for that reason and just… man I wish I could give the guy a hug.

I know he’s the richest man in the world or whatever but why do we have to be so goddamn inhuman to each other? He was trying to help. He put up a lot of his money… like a lot a lot. Structured almost explosively if any of his companies fail. He put his neck out on the line to try to save free speech.

There’s stuff about Elon I don’t think anyone could fix probably because he’s too stubborn to think he actually needs to rest, or that it is occasionally better for work to proceed at a jog rather than a sprint, but… what kind of fascist with their heart in the wrong place puts up a vote on whether or not they should still be in charge?

It’s a hell of a thing to put your head into a guillotine thinking the crowd will save you, only to see the blade drop and realize the same crowd that shows up to crown you as king shows up to your execution.

I hope this is reverse reverse Narrative Causality and Elon wins his vote tomorrow. And also that he takes a vacation and spend some time with his kids. And just tries to generate more emotional distance between himself and Twitter.