Thursday, July 6, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- there is no joy in Muskville


 

If you know the story up till now. this is perfect.


If not, Josh Marshall will catch you up.

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

This is all such transparent nonsense that it beggars belief that even a company as chaotic and mercurially managed as Twitter under Elon Musk would try to claim it with any kind of straight face. We don’t know the precise details of what happened under the hood at Twitter. But the big picture is pretty clear. And you don’t need to be too versed in tech to understand it at that level. Think of it this way: You have an amusement park with 10,000 visitors a day. You cut staffing and ride maintenance so you can only accommodate 5,000 visitors a day. What happens is elementary: Things start falling apart and you’re forced to limit how many people can come in the front gate. That’s your “rate limiting,” rationing tweets.

 

It should be noted that many saw this coming (and that a few did not).






For the first few days, Twitter's titular CEO was noticeably silent,



Let me get out my Niall Ferguson decoder ring.





And it wasn't even erotic.


On to politics.








Looks like it's time to reread Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism"



This is how you do it, folks.


 

The PayPal Mafia's favorite military analyst...



 

 

Not entirely sure context helps your case here.




One hell of a damning thread, mostly in Vogel's own words.


 



How to lie with...













We had a neighbor who (we learned rather suddenly) kept his ammo with his propane so I'm hard to impress, but this is pretty good.

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