There’s Something About You that I Can’t Stand About Me

More on the Twitter drama…

Boy do I not like George Hotz. Just a visceral level of “I can’t stand this person” I usually only reserve for the Science Fiction Writers of America. To level-set, I worked with a guy on a drilling rig who had literally murdered someone and I got along with him fine. One of my main traits is finding ways to get along with people even when they can’t get along with anyone else. For those who don’t know, George Hotz is a programming wunderkind who took on a 12 week unpaid internship at Twitter. His goal? To fix Twitter.

He left after 4 weeks.

During that time he made one architecture map, alienated seemingly all of the remaining engineers, and streamed many hours on Twitter Spaces where the main thesis seemed to be “I am much smarter than everyone else, so go fuck yourself.” Reports suggest that he succeeded only in removing a pop-up for when you browse Twitter without an account. He failed to socialize this removal with enough people at the company to keep the removal in place and his change was quickly reverted.

Who is to blame for this? Other people.

His vision for the company? Change nothing for the user but spend the next six months refactoring code to make the code-base more efficient. Gone is the tangled web of ensuring that the company is both profitable and enjoyable to its customers. Economic realities and personnel constraints can be undone with a simple snap of the fingers. If everyone can’t align to your vision and execute your changes in a perfectly spherical world with no air resistance where we can assume zero friction and instantaneous understanding, that’s their fault.

If the people you’re working with, who just saw 80% of their colleagues disappear and remained after multiple lay-offs, don’t like being trashed in public, hey, they should grow up. You’re just telling the truth. It’s their fault if they can’t take it.

I’ve worked with this kind of person before and the only salvation for any team or company is to walk them out of the door immediately. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200, just get thee gone. Yes, he’s brilliant. Yes, he knows all kinds of stuff I don’t know. Yes, in a parallel universe he saves the whole company.

And none of that matters at all because his primary motivation isn’t to save the company. He has no interest in making someone else’s life better. His primary motivation is to understand the problem well enough to know that he can solve the problem, see that he knows how to solve it better than anyone else, and then relax in a giant lazy boy chair of smugness assured once again that he’s the most brilliant person around.

All of which are things that I recognize and despise in myself. There’s a desire, endemic to my generation and its successors, to live as if the world is seen through a pane of glass. A tendency to listen to a voice that says “the world in your head is the one that really matters, not this stubborn one outside that keeps disobeying your will. As long as you feel good, then that’s all that matters.” If you know you’re correct, if you know there’s no reason your solution wouldn’t work, then you’ve already won. No need to actually go out and convince people of your solution.

Fucking bullshit.

Do that long enough and the nation crumbles around you. Liberty fades away. The structures you never grew responsible enough to maintain or expand begin to collapse and you live in an anarchy. Wasn’t someone else supposed to make sure the water keeps coming out of the faucet? Wasn’t someone else supposed to make sure the lights come on when you flip the switch? Wasn’t someone else supposed to do all your thinking for you?

And whose fault is it if all of that starts to happen?

It’s your goddamn fault, because you wanted to chill out and watch MacGyver marathons all day instead of joining your city council for four fucking hours a month to make sure that the geriatric Karen lunatics who want to “get involved” don’t run the whole entire nation into the ground. You’re too busy being smart and “right” to actually get up and burn a calorie. Moving bits is easy. Moving minds is hard.

No one at Twitter seems to have a vision of what the company should be. Elon has said it should be the American version of WeChat but that’s not a vision. That’s a tactic. No one seems to have a cut-over plan for what Twitter is today versus what it should be in the future. I am terrified that if they fail it will be a signal to every online company that free speech is a bad idea. Then you’ll have a thousand PayPals taking it upon themselves to fine people for misinformation.

Here’s how I, out of the wisdom I have gained through self-loathing, would have had these discussions with the remaining Twitter Engineers.

“I want to start off by saying thank you so much to everyone who has remained with the company. I know that probably doesn’t sound sincere because you’ve been through a real ordeal both emotionally and physically. I know you all have to be exhausted trying to make up for the work of all your colleagues who have left. Words can only come so close to touching upon something that real, but I promise you they are truly meant.

“You may have heard me criticize the company many times in the past but I want you to know that is not a criticism of your work or of you personally. I do not blame anyone for what has happened more than I blame myself. I saw what was happening, understood why it was happening, how to fix it, and did nothing. If you did not know how to fix what was happening you are no more responsible for what happened than an sick person is at fault for not knowing the cure to their own disease. None of us can be accountable for what is outside of our knowledge, so long as we keep trying. As I knew what to do and failed to act, the greatest share of accountability is therefore mine.

“This website was created for people to take pictures of what they ate for dinner and then over time it became a hot-bed for politics. You were asked to take on all the wild twists and turns of human nature as if it was an engineering problem to be solved, instead of a set of contradictions held together under tension, which only ever evolves and can only ever be managed not solved. You did the best you could along the way but it would be a lie to say that it was working. We all know policies passed out of sight of the public eye, with no public input, no representation and no challenge, were a manifestation of an Orwellian machine that no one intended to build. It simply assembled itself one step at a time, from a thousand decisions that lacked a clear solution. In the same way that no single person is a nation, no single person chose to build this machine. No single person stood before this machine and a better world and chose the machine.

“You may be wondering what the solution is to build the company and how we will solve these problems. The answer is the same as it has always been. People are born with rights. It is only up to an organization to recognize them or not. As the incongruity grows between a nation’s laws and the natural rights of the citizen, strife follows. Twitter must therefore recognize the natural rights of its users. Indeed, I believe Twitter must come to think of its users as Citizens.

“First among the rights of a Citizen is speech. We will ensure that all speech is available on our platform, barring only that which has been deemed by the nation’s courts to be illegal. People have a right to an appeal, a defense, a transparent law, and a trial by jury. It is our duty to balance these rights and find ways to manifest them into the digital world.

“My vision for Twitter is that it should be the first republic of the Internet. Yes, we will have subscribers but we will have them int he same way that a nation must have Citizens who pay taxes. Over time, we will transform Twitter into a beacon of reasoned debate and democratic will. As the future rushes toward us and AI becomes an ever greater threat to humankind, Twitter will be a place where these newfound powers can be productively channeled in ways that people want. On the sea of the singularity, Twitter will be the steering will of the ship of Democracy.

“This will be challenging. We must win over the hearts of our user base, and prove to them the value of citizenship. While we must create a platform for all points of view, we must also find nihilism, even in ourselves, and root it out. A future without hope or belief is no future worth savings. Along the way we must repair the news paradigm and create incentives for people to be honest over long periods of time instead of seeking instantaneous attention and glamour. Our attention span must become appropriate to the work ahead of us and we must do all this while remaining viable as a company.

“Here is my diagram for how the company works today. Here are some intermediate steps how we will evolve in the future. Our number one priority will be to reduce our technical debt by expanding the functionality of a few key systems so that extraneous systems can be made redundant and then discarded. Twitter’s current core functionality of serving Tweets will be significantly expanded to process payments, cast votes, provide appeal and trial by jury, and integrate with a large number of other services. In addition, we must become the primary news source and court for the internet. Our adjudication process will be built so that it can be consumed by any number of other companies. Internally, we will also use this same mechanism to filter the news according to the will of our Citizens, rate ads, and even allow Citizen generated ads. One day there will be a world where if someone sees a news story on Twitter, they will know it’s absolutely true, and have both the ability to weigh in on how to solve the problem and to actually see the solution executed.

“If you have ever felt that democracy is dying or that something has gone strangely wrong with the world, I want to give you reason to hope. If you have ever felt that no one is doing anything to set the world back to order, I want to tell you that you are wrong. Twitter will be here to confront all of these problems as they happen, and you will have a heroic part to play in bring that future into existence.”

I woke up at 3am this morning so I may be even more crazy than usual but this is how I would address the company. Also George Hotz is probably a nice person with his own set of problems and I shouldn’t be a dick to him or -sigh- even the Science Fiction Writers of America.