Twitter, failure modes, and your favorite bar

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Stumbled across this one in the wild and it pretty much put together a bunch of different disparate thoughts I’ve had about Elmo and his acquisition.

In particular:

The “liberal bias of big tech” has always been a phantasm. Silicon Valley has always had a strong libertarian bent to it, from the right-of-center Hoover think tank at Stanford University to the military/aerospace roots that long predate the 1990s dotcom boom. While many SV libertarians are socially liberal, not all are, and a few of the most prominent conservatives came out of the “PayPal Mafia”: Musk, the openly anti-democratic Peter Thiel, and VC David Sacks, who co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth with Thiel a couple of decades ago.

Personally I have experienced a considerable amount of random stuff falling into my feed when I deign to visit that app, Clown World and Libs of TikTok in particular just seem to appear unprompted and without a good reason :cry:

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Reminds me of the argument that distinguishing between good and bad billionaires is problematic. A foundational question should, instead, be posed: how do billionaires come into being in the first place?

I suppose the corresponding question for big tech is, in addition to the same one, how can single individuals (whatever their purported ideology) maintain so much unilateral control over a web space, when the space’s value is derived from the community’s mass involvement?

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