I Quit Twitter

I liked using twitter. It reminded me of the very early days of the Internet when there were still weird forums and message boards. It was a pretty entertaining and informative way to spend free time. It could be constructive, too. I interacted with smart, curious, intellectually interesting people every day for a long time and it really broadened my horizons. Unfortunately, it's starting to look like social media is a big honeypot that was engineered over the course of a number of years using the "problem-reaction-solution" formula.

In recent years, alternative media provided a platform for genuine people with a wide range of interests to share their views. But it also provided a platform for actors who were reading a script and participating in staged events to create the appearance of a problem, e.g. nativism or white nationalism, and the corresponding clash with staged freak-outs by dumb college students. The phony extremists work as a pied piper for gullible people, and also radicalized centrist opposition and create the atmosphere of a crisis, even though the whole thing is a sham and less than a tempest in a teapot.

In response to staged events social media companies are now contracting with groups like the ADL to act as the social media equivalent of the TSA. It seems probable that those groups will end up working like an extortion racket and victim exploitation business rather than neutral observers or defenders of the downtrodden, so Twitter can go jump n a lake.

The idea that public companies are fiduciaries or care about their bottom line above all seems to be refuted by Twitter, Google, and Facebook. By adopting any political posture, they drive a portion of their user base away. It's beyond weird that Twitter decided not to capitalize on its success in the 2016 Presidential election. Twitter provided a platform that kicked the ass of long established media companies with a new mode of communication. Instead of celebrating that, they called in the STASI to prevent it from happening again. Twitter doesn't even have sufficient political independence to be successful.

One of the most pressing problems we face is keeping the Internet free and open and out of the hands of the would be STASI. There's a group of people that seem intent on building an electronic gulag. If I had things my way, I'd keep noodling around with the big philosophical issues I kick around on this blog, but most of my technical expertise directly pertains to this issue, so I'll probably shift gears and work on that for a while.