I don't use Twitter so I really don't care what goes on in that platform. I've always viewed it as scatological, as you can post no more than 280 characters at one time. Of course, a lot of persons have run-on tweets, like Steve Schmidt's latest rant on McCain, which stretched over 11 tweets, in which he dredged up the old story of how Mackie was in bed with the Russians. I read a 2008 article by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in The Nation that covered the exact same territory. Schmidt supposedly offered added insight, having been called in to clean up the mess during McCain's presidential run. Not that it helped as Mackie lost.
What bothers me more is how much these platforms are valued today. Elon Musk had to round up $44 billion for his hostile takeover of Twitter, most of it his own money. That's more than 160 times what Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post! Jeff's $250 million purchase was considered quite a shock at the time. This amply illustrates what most people follow these days. Little wonder our political campaigning is reduced to soundbites.
In some ways, social media is the great equalizer. Kathy Barnette is running neck and neck with Dr. Oz and David McCormick in a Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary, in which she relies entirely on social media to get her message out. This is without Trump's endorsement, mind you. She has spent less than $150,000 on her campaign, whereas Oz and McCormick have spent more than $10 million each, battering each other with television attack ads. However, Musk is looking to monetize Twitter to get more bang for his buck, so it is doubtful political campaigning will be as cheap on social media in the future.
I wouldn't have even known about Barnette's improbable run, which is proving to be an even bigger longshot than Rich Strike, had not I get PoliticusUSA news feeds on my timeline. Whether I want them or not, they appear everyday, just like ads for t-shirts and other products because I take a peak from time to time. With these new algorithms, it is apparently enough just to pause on one of these posts to register a hit, and so you get bombarded again and again with them. I suppose that is how Barnette has managed to get her name out in Pennsylvania.
It's an interesting system, and sadly one that reinforces our own biases. If you don't hide or unfollow the posts they just keep coming back like a recurring nightmare, trapped in an endless loop of information you really don't want. The same with facebook friend suggestions. I'm constantly purging names I don't know, hoping that this list will become smaller, but it just seems to spread like kudzu.
I really don't see much value in social media other than I was able to connect with old friends form high school and college that I hadn't heard from in years. I was very pleasantly surprised to get a friend request recently from an old crush in high school, who I had thought about from time to time. She had avoided social media but finally bent to peer pressure. However, she is not sure how long she will stay. Nevertheless, it was fun exchanging a few words with her on messenger.
I still prefer the traditional news media for information. I subscribe to The Guardian and NPR, as they remains free and are quite good as far as news coverage goes. I dropped the New York Times and Washington Post after the initial greatly reduced subscriptions ran out. I was really bummed I didn't get access to the crosswords during this time. You can still find any number of other free online journalistic sites like Vox and ProPublica that actually offer far more insightful investigations than does the Times or Post these days. I like The Atlantic, The New Yorker and other periodicals that provide a few free looks per month, although I have to be judicious with what I open. Plus, I have to admit I glean a lot from facebook, as I do get the interesting news feed from time to time.
This appears to be what gives these social media sites value. They become a platform for virtually anything, reaching millions upon millions of subscribers. I'm not sure what the future holds in this, as it is highly competitive with brevity and wit favored over lengthy journalism and opinion. It seems to be steering us down a dead-end corridor that gets narrower and narrower as far as actual content.
For instance, many persons seem to think Elon Musk is a self-made billionaire, some even see him as the smartest man in the world with all these irons in the fire, ranging from Tesla to The Boring Company to SpaceX, and now Twitter. He has a very impressive portfolio, to say the least, but it was for the most acquired, not created by him. Although to hear him talk you would never know that.
A little bit of sleuthing led me to discovering that Tesla was actually created by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk was one of the initial investors, as he had recently sold his stake in Paypal. A company that was initially started by Peter Thiel and a handful of techies, which Musk later signed onto. As CEO, he took Tesla public in 2010, which is now valued at over $1 trillion. He had squeezed out Eberhard and Tarpenning, although they eventually sued him to include them in the founding. There's quite a bit written on this.
Suffice it to say, Elon is not the great engineer we are led to believe, but rather a guy who knew how to acquire capital and get a company off the ground. He's also a very good pitch man. This is the same throughout the tech world. Bill Gates didn't create Microsoft. He and Paul Allen paid Tim Paterson $50,000 to work out the initial DOS program because they couldn't figure it out themselves. Tim based his work on that of Gary Kildall. Gates and Allen eventually licensed this program, made it available for any home computer and the rest as they say is history.
These guys aren't so much titans of industry as they are marketing. Same goes for Steve Jobs and a host of other techies we now revere. They don't create. At best they innovate, or more precisely turn these creations into highly coveted products like Apple that everyone has to have, focusing more on visual appeal than the nuts and bolts of a product. Not everyone succeeds. Neil Young thought he had the next great thing in his pono player, but it failed miserably. So, they deserve credit in this regard.
But, what to make of twitter and other forms of social media? They offer no intrinsic value that I can see. In fact, you might even call them a bane of our existence, as they elevate third-rate hucksters like Donald Trump to the White House, which is now what every social media politician aspires to, regardless of whether he or she has the temperament to even hold a civil service job. Worse, these CEOs become profanely rich, as do their stockholders for nothing more than a social gab site.
Now, you would think a man of Musk's background wouldn't be interested in something like this. But, no, he plunks down one-sixth of his gargantuan fortune that he has amassed in a little more than ten years, just so he can rule twitter like Mark Zuckerberg rules facebook. You can see from this article that Elon is extremely jealous of Mark's "icronclad control" of Meta, as it is now called, which has a market value of $500 billion. Elon wants to push Twitter to the same level. Musk literally sees himself as Tony Stark of Iron man fame, an image that has been extensively cultivated in social media.
Jack Dorsey, however, is firmly behind Musk's takeover, believing that it will return Twitter to the "public good." Not sure how that works, but here's what the former CEO of Twitter had to say on the subject, although his comments seem to run counter to his intents.
The irony is that the traditional news media sites like New York Times had chat rooms before facebook and twitter emerged on the scene, but they were too tightly controlled and as a result had very limited subscribers. I started out in an old New York Times reading group in 2000. Amazon and Barnes and Noble had similar reading groups. I actually hooked up with an old friend as a result of some of the book reviews I submitted to Amazon. Alas, these online superstores didn't know what they had, allowing guys like Zuckerberg and Dorsey to run with it and create the social media monster we see today.
You can literally dredge up any story, push any campaign, political or commercial, spout off on any topic, and not worry one bit about whether it is harmful or not. All sorts of new scams have emerged as a result that make the old ones seem rather nostalgic. Identity theft is rife. People find their bank accounts cleaned out overnight. If you have social media or blogging problems, you most likely will get nothing more than an AI voice on the other end of the line, if any voice at all. I don't know how many times I tried to clean this site up by reporting spam and hidden viruses, but as yet have not had any response from Blogger. Although, this site does appear to be clean now.
Any attempt to have control over social media is met with fierce public reaction. We saw the outcry when Trump was banned from Twitter. Now, Musk wants to reinstate him, calling the former president's ban a "morally bad decision." Musk doesn't believe anyone should be banned, not even the Klan. A Libertarian in the Ayn Rand mold, it seems. Apparently, Dorsey agrees, saying that this was the board's decision not his, seeming to forget all the virulent hate Trump and his MAGA creation stirred up on Twitter.
We've seen any number of phonies elevated to international cult figures like Julian Assange, thanks to Twitter. He has a fan base that thinks wikileaks represents the pinnacle of free speech, when it is really nothing more than a dump site for hacked information meant to stir up chaos and sew distrust in political systems so that the public becomes even more cynical than it already is. Look at all these poor deluded individuals protesting his extradition when this guy has openly worked for the Kremlin for the past decade. The entire aim of wikileaks was to undermine EU and US authority to the obvious gain of Russia. Assange is no hero. He is a useful idiot at best, a willing pawn at worst.
Rather than become the great "global village" that Marshall McLuhan might have imagined, social media has become a global cesspool. Rather than expand, I continually contract, cutting facebook friends each year, opting for an antiquated blogging site, and trying not to be tempted by ads, many of which literally serve as trojan horses. Not that I have anything of great value they would want to hack into.
Still, I find myself endlessly bemused at how a third-rate campaign adviser like Steve Schmidt becomes a social media voice and indeed an influencer because of his so-called "bombshells." He's just another disgruntled Republican hack, ever in search of that next pot of gold. As if resurrecting John McCain's failed presidential campaign should be of interest to anyone. Matt Lewis takes him to task in this article for the Daily Beast, pointing out that it was Schmidt who recommended Sarah Palin as VP back in 2008, which many regarded as the death knell of McCain's campaign. Nevertheless, my response to the PoliticusUSA link received a great number of angry retorts.
I content myself with the few good journalistic sources that are still available. Journalism is not dead. Thank god for that. There remain committed investigative journalists willing to take a story to its end, regardless of the threats they face. I just wish others could better differentiate between the posers and the real journalists, so that I saw less of these inflammatory news feeds on my facebook timeline and wouldn't feel obliged to respond to them.
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