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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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So Musk polled his followers. Asking whether he should as CEO of Twitter. They said no and he said he'd abide by their vote.

My sense is that Elon didn't really want to buy Twitter after thinking it through, this was likely his real reason behind the "Twitter are hiding the amount of fake accounts/bots" argument. When that didn't come through, he ended up with the platform anyway. But being the CEO of Twitter is little more than a highly paid janitor function. You don't have any real power and your primary function is to act as a piñata for vested and powerful interests. It's no fun.

The main challenge for him now is to not lose any money, but it appears to be a long-shot from where I stand. What are the lessons? Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak. It may be fun belittling government bureaucrats as do-nothing wordcels but the Twitter saga has conclusively proven they hold the whip hand when the chips are down.

While it may make more sense for most people to go for a STEM career over a humanities, this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant (long before the "woke" era). The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society. And that power can be leveraged even in STEM areas.

Did he even want to run twitter? Musk doesn't really seem to be the type who wants to run the mundane daily operations of a company that is established. He bought it, he made his changes and now someone else can manage employees and emails all day long while he builds rockets.

I actually don't see the woke side winning here at all. Contrary to what some people think CNN journalists having a public group chat on twitter is a small part of twitter. Football (Soccer) is huge on twitter and the La liga and Premier premier league fans seem to care less about the twitter drama. Looking at what is trending right now in Sweden, hockey and football are 4/5 things trending right now. Twitter is huge in the middle east and Japan. Music is big on twitter, porn is big on twitter, day traders use it, it is one of the best ways to follow the war in Ukraine. Even reality TV seems to do at least as well as politics on twitter.

The journalist-class thinks twitter dies without them since their filter-bubble dies without them. Thats like saying facebook is dead without your facebook group since that is most of what you see on Facebook. However, most others don't see or care about your facebook group. Youtube stopped its annual rewind because people were angry that none of the big youtubers were on it. In reality the big youtubers you follow have 0.1% of users following them and there are huge phenomena on youtube that you have never heard of.

Elon hasn̈́'t impacted the user experience of F1 fans, people who want to follow concert tours, get live updates on the oilmarket, watch stuff explode in Ukraine, find out what is happening on a Friday night in Dubai, or view their favorite tiktoker's new video. If anything transactivists are more dependent on twitter than twitter is dependent on transactivists. The woke are powerful because of their voice and their voice is mainly social media. I highly doubt the userbase will follow them to alt-twitter that is twitter from 2021.

Did he even want to run twitter?

If he didn't, why didn't he appoint someone from the start?

He wanted insight into the company and make the changes he wanted. Now that he has put twitter on the course he desires he can move on.