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May 2, 2022: On Musk and Twitter – with Paul Bradley Carr

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Above: Thanks to David in London for creating the graphic showing walking-related books and documentaries, from last week's comments. (Here's the raw data in .csv format.)

Today: On Elon Musk's Twitter takeover – with Paul Bradley Carr, author, 1414º

• Paul Bradley Carr's newsletter

• Paul Bradley Carr on Techtonic (Nov 15, 2021) talking about his novel 1414º

• Twitter: to the loon! (by Paul Bradley Carr, April 7, 2022): “I’m out. I hard-deleted my verified account on Tuesday morning and also the 2FA so I can’t reactivate it during the grace period even if I wanted to. I’m a recovering addict, and I know when something is dangerously unhealthy. ... How was it? Well, it took me a full six hours to hear about the Will Smith Oscar slap vs six seconds for everyone else. I had to wait until 6am every morning to find out the latest covid rates or the death toll in Ukraine. For this terrible sacrifice of immediacy, I regained HOURS of my day.”

• Elon and on (by Paul Bradley Carr, April 13, 2022): “This is a man who has made a career out of promising the earth (/Mars/the hyperloop/cave rescue pods/robot trucks) and then not quite delivering.”

• From McSweeney's, I like free speech so much I decided to buy it (by Eli Grober, Apr 26, 2022): “Hi there, I’m Elon Musk. I’m mostly known for rockets and cars, but what I really care about is free speech. I can’t get enough of it. In fact, I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it. That’s right, it turns out free speech isn’t free—it costs exactly $44 billion. That might sound like too much money for one person to be allowed to spend, but that’s only because it is. And I’ve decided free speech is worth the cost. I’m going to make sure some board full of rich guys doesn’t get to define what counts as free speech. Instead, just one rich guy will get to decide what counts as free speech: me.”

• Jack Dorsey weighs in on Elon Musk: “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” (Dorsey also linked to a Radiohead song.)

• Why NYT Book Review editor Pamela Paul left Twitter (Apr 28, 2022): “I left because I was terrible on Twitter. I may not have been the only one, but Twitter Me was petty, insecure, desperate to please, angry, narcissistic and needy.”

• Robin Sloan describes getting off Twitter: “The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.”

• Charles M. Blow on his Twitter experience (May 1, 2022): “There were clear positives. But the negatives were real and grinding. Social media is full of hate speech, bots, vitriol, attack armies, screamers and people who live for the opportunity to be angry.”

• Edward Ongweso Jr pointing out in Vice that billionaires already own all of the media and platforms: “The world’s richest man will soon own Twitter. The second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns the Washington Post. ... Two of the 10 richest men (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) own Google. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest 20 men in the world, owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. ... There are, of course, alternatives we should aspire to, and they don’t include billionaires. ... there are an abundance of proposed models (public utilities, cooperatives, protocols, etc.) but that our options, at the moment, are limited to ‘broaden[ing] our conversations about how platforms should be designed, financed, and governed.’”

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