Okay, I Think Elon Will Win

And a seemingly out of place note about a very dark topic as well as Chat GPT

Positive Outlook

At the risk of creating a narrative causality feedback loop of doom, whereby saying something I cause it to become comically inaccurate only a short time later: I feel like enough time has passed that the momentum to leave Twitter for an existing alternative has vanished. Even -sigh- the Science Fiction Writers of America have failed to exit the platform in significant numbers. When the dumbest and most highly motivated group of loathsome degenerates in the English speaking world, who if they ever said anything good about you it would make throw-up as if you had been exposed to a massive dose of radiation, can’t find it in their vanishingly small hearts to live on Mastodon then I don’t think anyone else will either. Other than a few people who probably, for their own mental health, just shouldn’t have been on it even the majority of complainers seem to be sticking with the product.

After Elon took a brief foray over to Apple it also seems the existential threat of Twitter being banned from the App Store has passed. Slowly, but surely, the ad revenue will trickle back in and slowly but surely a team of competent engineers will make Twitter the most human/least spammy market for such ads. There’s product leading the way even if I desperately want there to be a vision.

All of which is to say that I think Elon is going to win.

I also think we are going to win. We meaning people who want republic style governance on the internet, where people have rights and due process. I sent an email to Sriram Krishnan and surprisingly heard back within a few hours that he agreed with most of my points. I’m also pretty sure at least one billionaire has read this substack (not to be weird if you’re reading this) so that’s good. So I at least know that a couple people whose opinion matters took at least a few seconds to share a brain space with me. A sign of spring, the most recent episode of the All-In Podcast saw the hosts advocating for an update to Section 230 protections enshrining a user the right to appeal and due process into law. I’m in agreement with this as I don’t support laws which provide blanket freedom from liability with no additional responsiblity.

All of these people are in a shared orbit with Elon so it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t make its way over to Twitter eventually just via social graph. I know I’m a bit of a lunatic emailing people out of the blue and commenting all over the place, but I’ve found when I do that change eventually starts to happen. People start to pause about “it’s a private company” or “how would you even do moderation at scale” or they watch “RRR” which is a seriously great film and slowly the world becomes better.

Maybe that’s cognitive bias, and I wouldn’t say that it’s really me driving that change necessarily, but when I write very polite emails to corporations asking them to move stuff around on their website because why should I have to navigate to two screens in order to perform one use-case when it seems that both fields on either screen must be coming from the same source, there’s usually an update something like a year later. I think people generally want to do the right thing and once you can make a good case for what rightness is and what the good thing is to do to maximize rightness people slowly come around to the same view point. People need a while to percolate with an idea. I’ve requested bigger things than that, in polite emails, and I’ve seen similar happen in enough time. Maybe I’m a conspiracy theorist who thinks the President is talking to him in code via the color his tie but I’d like to think I can be a Karen for good, since I usually try to start off those messages thanking people for being great but also maybe there’s this one small thing they can do to make their company better.

What I specifically try to do in such emails, just for anyone who may want to be a Karen for the Good, is give a piece of evidence that someone in that company who can use to say “See! Our customers want this!” The odds are that there’s at least one person there who has the same or similar idea to you.

All of which is to say that while I may be a crazy person, I’d like to think I have a few good ideas. I used to just say “well, you’re nuts, so probably don’t say anything, read books and wait to die” but then I actually started being able to implement ideas in very small ways for small things and people were like “here is an award, you are pretty good at this” so I’d also like to think that means something. Also a team of developers once cried when I changed job roles and one told me that it was as if his heart sank beneath a vast ocean. So that’s pretty good. Maybe. Pretty much the only thing that ever alleviates my terror of being an incompetent fraud is building something that verifiably works and then the terror recedes for about five minutes before I tell myself I got lucky or that my success was due to other people who had to drag me along. Which is always at least partially true.

I don’t ever trust, or maybe even believe in, people who are driven to accomplish things to make themselves feel good but I do quite strongly believe in people who are motivated by psychological oddities to achieve great things just to feel normal. For instance, I want to do everything I can to help secure the future of humanity, rebuild the entire news paradigm, change a lot of the structures of government, and move some very fundamental things all so I can live my entire life without ever having to meet another person I have ever spoke with about this topic online, have my wife never raise the topic to me at all, have no real change in financial circumstances, mostly so I can browse the internet and not feel like a coward for doing nothing while the world tears itself apart. Happiness maxes out at something like 140% of normal so it’s a terrible motivator but despair is bottomless and you’ll do anything to stay away from it. I’m still keeping an eye on Twitter job postings, but my wife, who knows nothing about any of this, was very concerned I was looking and was worried about it being unstable so we’ll see how that goes. Writing this makes me feel like a shitty husband. I should work on that.

If you have anything that you can see that needs to change about the world, I’d encourage you to start trying to put it down into a flow-chart and then poking at it to see if you can make it come apart. If it doesn’t come apart at the first couple pokes you’re probably not being honest with yourself. We live in a bleak age but there are wonders if you can shirk off your feelings of embarrassment. Just make sure you are open to the idea that you still suck. I think that’s the balance I was trying to strike in the last post, but maybe did not. You have to try. You have to find the courage to push forward even when your stomach is in knots and you’re sweating thinking about how unqualified you are to be doing whatever. And you also have to accept that you might really suck because you probably do in at least some capacity. Those who have read other posts here probably know my opinion on this but it’s basically “All humans are dumb. We only measure ourselves against one another out of ego, but if you take the measuring stick of ‘what do I have to know to actually make something happen in real life’ we are all pretty stupid.” Also accept the consequences of fucking up even if your heart was in the right place. Otherwise you have what we have now where everyone is a hyper polite criminal and no one is responsible for anything because “hey, at least I wasn’t a dick about it.” I mean if I accidentally sponsored the engineering of a pandemic level virus, but rubber stamped it because I wrote my definition of gain of function to not mean functions being gained, I’d still think I deserved jail. Also I’d probably step back and think “You know, if I’m wrong about everything all the time, and my critics later turn out to be correct with a way higher batting average than me, maybe I’m not very good at my job.” *cough* Anthony Fauci *cough*

I wonder if Elon ever feels this way when he’s doing things like releasing the Twitter Files only for everyone who seems like they should care to kind of shrug. Well, I care for whatever it is worth. And I’m tired of the strange nihilistic childish “blah” that has infested the modern world where now everyone looks on the world like it’s a fucking television show.

Transparency and Leadership

Elon attended a Twitter Spaces event hosted by Eliza Bleu, who is a survivor of human trafficking and advocate for those who have suffered similar abuses. He went on to explain what Twitter is doing to ensure that this vital work is being given appropriate resources. This is exactly what I had hoped Elon would do in a variety of areas and I hope he continues to engage directly with the Twitter user base on more than just this topic.

In the past, when I had a Twitter account, (I still need to set up a new one. I know, I know, but my wife…) I sometimes spent several hours compiling evidence that someone was a child abuser only for the previous regime to ignore the request. If you think I spend a lot of words talking about democracy on the internet, I can go full blown lunatic when I think there’s a kid in danger. It was surprisingly difficult to report something as child exploitation material. You could, but you really, really had to try. I would always make the effort because I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Which is probably at least partly why I am a deeply strange person and why I feel a compulsion to do stuff when I see everyone standing around saying “Well, someone should probably do something. Not me, though.” Of all the downright evil things I’ve seen in my life, the common thread is someone standing there looking for someone else to be the hero. Or, more commonly, just sort of pretending to themselves that nothing bad is happening because if it was their life would get really complicated.

My priors are that anyone who does anything to reduce this stuff is on the side of the angels. I was already pro Elon, but now I’m the “Fuck yeah, bro” camp. I’ll even look over the weird ass tweets I think he only sends because he works a hundred and twenty hours a week where it’s a bit like one of those machine guns where the barrel gets super hot firing for years on end without the coolant system that stops it from melting.

A brief aside: a specific use-case that having distributed reporting/adjudication resolves is making it the case that no one person has to have a job where they look at child porn all day to even just to report it. Which is a bit like having your job be staring into the depths of hell.

I do admire people who can be public about their abuse history as it tends to become something that people use to annoyingly explain every single quirk of your personality. Even more annoying is when they are totally right. I am open about my abuse history only on the internet, behind pseudonyms, but would be absolutely horrified if it became attached to my real life identity. That may be in part because men have a different sort of experience being public about that sort of information, and people tend to think there’s something off or dangerous about you because of a crime that happened to you when you were a child. I’m definitely nuts but I’m really only dangerous to adults who hurt kids, which I think is a mostly normal thing except for most people it’s only lip service. I honestly think if I had to go to work every day thinking “everyone knows” I’d probably move somewhere else where nobody knew me and start my life over. Before I got married that’s more or less what I would do every so often. I’d get sick of people knowing who I am and go somewhere that nobody would bother me.

I remember a child going missing in my neighborhood for a few hours right while I was in the middle of doing therapy for my childhood abuse, and I was filling out a work-book, and my first selfish thought was “I hope they find that kid, because if a cop knocks on my door and sees this book there’s no way they won’t think I had something to do with it.” I helped go looking anyway, all the while imagining cops later saying “the sick sonofabitch couldn’t help but make himself part of the search.” By the time I had even started they were already back home. At least a part of my relief was selfish. The women I know from various support groups usually get stuck in a “poor wounded bird” category, which is dehumanizing in its own way. Even if people nod to themselves and think “increase the odds that guy is a demented psychopath who has people buried in his basement” at least they give me agency that I’m a serial murderer of my own volition.

None of that is funny, of course. I mean I will definitely try to be funny about it to put other people at ease but it’s so self-evidently bleak people prefer to just not ever even think about it. I’m mostly fine so long as I’m not under very specific kinds of strain and I don’t have bad nights very frequently anymore. Still, easier not to think about it. I think that’s why Twitter’s reporting mechanisms for it were so bad previously. It’s just a terrible thing to consider so it sort of gets edited out of people’s consideration. When most people say they want to be a good person what they mean is something like “I want to feel like a good person” or “I want people to think I’m a good person” which isn’t quite the same. I know the cool thing is to talk about how terrible people are but in my experience being actively terrible is pretty localized to a few people and most everyone else just wants to go with the flow.

I saw an Elon quote once about how success is chewing glass and staring into the void, so enormous kudos to him here. If this continues to be the engagement style I see a lot of benefits. Go get the bastards.

As an aside, one of my favorite people on the internet, Katie Herzogg —who I put in the same category in my head as people I grew up around who liked to vice signal and would definitely have a problem being told that they were one of your favorite people, but were just totally trustworthy and always tried to do the right thing always— got into a kerfuffle with Eliza Bleu that seems to boil down to miscommunication.

None of us are perfect, is where I’m going with all of this. Every single person has something holding them back, keeping them from a vision of who they were meant to be. I used to be so agoraphobic I couldn’t bear the idea of going into a Costco to get a membership without first having a membership to get into Costco to get the membership. It’s so small but I couldn’t work up the courage to do it.

You have to push. Stop playing a character who is happy all the time without ever feeling bad, or feeling bad for feeling bad. Maybe you should feel like shit sometimes. Maybe that’s totally normal. Maybe that’s the only way you can figure out where the shit is so you’d an go and clean it up.

Other Stuff

So this has taken a week and change to write because I’m super busy right now with year end activities. I usually have about half an hour to myself each day right now. Someone tried to assault Elon and probably scared the shit out of his kid by mistake and now Elon is banning some “journalists” for Doxing his location in real time. Which I get and as rules go, banning people for trying to coordinate people on your location in real time so they can do something shitty seems like a good one. The enforcement and appeals process is the only problem but if it was my kid and I was the richest man alive I’d just think “my lawyers could figure it out after I knock his fucking teeth out.”

Which is why we have things like separation of powers and due process because even thought of just loading her twitter profile may cause your eyes to bleed and make you feel like you’re getting sexually assaulted by some weird not really your uncle dude in your grandparent’s basement all over again, Taylor Lorenz and people like her are still people and you have to treat them with dignity for your own soul. There is darkness in all of us and it feels extraordinary to tell it yes, which is all the more reason we must build our relationships such that it easier to tell it no when the time comes.

Pretty sure I still support Elon on this one but he’s got to get out of Twitter King mode asap. It’s just not tenable.