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Big Tech Twits Get Dumber and Corrupter!

Zorral

By Zorral,
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Durckad Council Member

Durckad

Posted
Posted
50 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Disturbing.

How long can we continue to engage in Elon Musk twitter-post copypasta before we either get banned for spamming or lose our minds?

The world wants to know, but I'm guessing Ran doesn't.

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Kalbear Council Member

Kalbear

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7 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

He's halved the ad revenue, genius. 

Longer article about that:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/musk-admits-advertisers-havent-returned-to-twitter-ad-revenue-down-50/

Quote

Twitter-owner Elon Musk says the company is still losing money because advertising revenue is down 50 percent.

"We're still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load. Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else," Musk wrote in a tweet on Saturday.

In another tweet yesterday, Musk said that Twitter "did not see the increase in advertising revenue that was expected in June," but that July is looking "a bit more promising."

Musk gave a much more optimistic update on cash flow and advertisers in an interview with the BBC three months ago. At that time, he said Twitter was close to being profitable and that advertisers who left after his acquisition were returning.

"We could be profitable, or to be more precise, cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well. I think almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back," Musk said in April.

As always the best bet in the world remains betting against whatever timetable Musk says.

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Zorral Council Member

Zorral

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Ted Gioia joined Threads so we don't have to.  What did he learn?  We don't want to join Threads.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-the-internet-went-to-threads?

Quote

 

.... I thought I couldn’t be shocked at invasions of privacy any more. But even I had to shake my head at the last item on the list. After agreeing to surveillance by stealth of my health and wealth, as well as location, browsing history, and the catch-all “sensitive info,” the company still had to add “Other Data” at the bottom.

Mr. Z. could have made it simpler. Just tell us we have no private information whatsoever and be done with it. ....

.... This feels more like an arrest than an invitation to join a cool new community. The only thing missing was a reminder of my right to an attorney.
But tracking what we do is no longer enough. The real goal of the new Internet is herding community members like sheep. Facebook is now the expert at this, as I recounted in my sad memoir of “ten times Mark Zuckerberg jerked me around.”

Will he really do the same thing to me on Threads? I guess I’m going to find out.

The next key point about Threads is the “Hotel California” clause—you can check it out whenever you want, but you can never leave.

The platform’s “supplemental privacy policy” makes this very clear:

You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account. ....

 

 

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kiko Council Member

kiko

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3 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh. Does anyone honestly expect any privacy in social media like ever?

EU citizens. That's why it's not (yet) available here. 

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Deadlines? What Deadlines? Council Member

Deadlines? What Deadlines?

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This whole thing just looks bad for him from top to bottom. The cringe sink stunt; alienating thousands of tech people; paying for check marks; the Desantis campaign launch; a low percentage lawsuit about a trivial amount of money (in the scheme of things) against the law firm that muscled him into buying the thing; now the ad revenue thing. 

It’s all incredibly bumbling and weak.

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Zorral Council Member

Zorral

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Due to its source there may be poo pooing going on here . . . . 

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/16/class-warfare-1-percent-technocrat/

TODAY’S CLASS WAR IS THE 1 PERCENT VERSUS THE PEOPLE JUST BELOW THEM
America’s privileged technocrats are not ready for what’s about to happen to them.

Quote

 

... Like feudal England, America has, roughly speaking, three classes. At the top are today’s great proprietors. The basis of their wealth is no longer mainly held in land but in direct ownership of their own businesses plus financial instruments including corporate stocks and bonds. The top 1 percent owns over half of U.S. corporate stock.

The people just below them are no longer attendants and retainers but technocrats. They’re the people who go to school to develop the specialized skills that are necessary to keep society running day to day: doctors, lawyers, scientists, computer programmers, engineers. (Journalists are also technocrats but among the weakest of the group.) The rest of the top 10 percent — i.e., the 9 percent — owns almost all the rest of U.S. corporate stock.

Then there’s everyone else. They’re no longer tenant farmers, but they still have to get up every day and clock in at Home Depot and Walgreens and Chipotle to cultivate the possessions of the great proprietors. This working class has the least leverage and the fewest options.

In retrospect, it’s clear America’s masters of mankind were shocked enough by World War II to dial the vile maxim back. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Even if you were the son of a National City Bank executive destined to follow in your father’s executive footsteps, you would be able to hear Roosevelt’s message after spending time facedown in the mud on Okinawa, covered in your platoonmate’s viscera.

Thus the great proprietors were willing to share quite a bit with the bottom two classes — for a while. During the three decades after the war, median wages went up hand in hand with productivity. That is, as America overall got richer, so did regular people.

But by the 1970s, the great proprietors had gotten tired of this arrangement. The generation with direct adult experience of how destabilized societies can explode into a worldwide slaughterhouse was retiring and dying. 

So the masters of mankind decided to alter the deal vis-à-vis the working class. This was such a gargantuan success, it’s amazing they pulled it off without bloodshed. If the minimum wage had continued to go up in step with productivity, it would now be not $7.25 but about $25 an hour. A recent RAND study found that if the U.S. had remained as equitable as it was in 1975 for the next 43 years through 2018, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would have earned an extra $47 trillion. Instead that money flowed in a great flood to the top.

Meanwhile, the technocratic class watched this process with equanimity. Technocrats generally identify upward, and ally themselves with the great proprietors against everyone else. There had been a proprietor-technocrat peace for a long, long time, with the technocrats having the power to garner a big slice of society’s good things for themselves. This included not just money but also prestige and control over their working lives, even as they served as junior partners in the coalition.

The explosion of new wealth in Silicon Valley had also made the boundaries between the two classes enticingly fuzzy. Bill Gates is the son of Bill Gates Sr., who was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle. Billionaire Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, is the son of an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But just as America’s masters of mankind got tired of sharing with the U.S. working class, they’ve now become fatigued with their deal with the technocrats.

Something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America.

It’s difficult to measure or define this. Like Galadriel at the start of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, you have to feel it in the water and smell it in the air. But something has clearly changed in the psychology of the people at the top of America, as Musk and Trump demonstrate every time they reach for their smartphones and start typing.

It’s partly about money. But the vile maxim is about everything, not just cash. What drives our overlords into a towering rage today is that technocrats still have some power to define reality. And the technocrats keep telling them they can’t have all their heart’s desires instantaneously.

Musk wants to live in a world of berserk ultra-right conspiracism in which all of humanity looks to him for his discoveries about The Truth. When a Twitter engineer explained to him that his engagement was down not because the algorithm was broken, but because people were losing interest in Musk, Musk fired him. Trump wanted to claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, so he just drew that on the map produced by NOAA (where Sean Parker’s father had worked) and made the head of NOAA frightened he’d lose his job. Doctors want to decide what their patients need but are losing that power to private equity.

 

 

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