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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".

Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”

When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.

It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.

In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:

Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.

If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]

The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.

And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".

I think Elon will have the last laugh. He's on the right side of Metcalfe's law, and from a certain viewpoint it's insane that Twitter was actually for sale at any price.

The ways he loses are

-successful swarm governance action cancels twitter entirely. This is very tough, especially in the absence of a dramatic scandal and/pr effective competitor. (Mastodon ain't it)

Or

-successful oldschool-conspiracy, eg advertiser blockade, getting Elon arrested or the company fined out of existence. This is very difficult, Elon is very rich & sufficiently connected/established that he will be quite hard to dislodge, Twitter can run on like 50 people.

Ok I'm curious, I admit to being a relatively minor Twitter user with a poor understanding of the platform, but I used to use it to check sports news and war updates. Then, a couple weeks after musk bought it, I kept getting porn on those hashtags. It happened enough that it became impossible to open in public, and within a week I deleted the app.

Idk if that is typical or Musk related related, but isn't that a failure mode? That eliminating jannies just leads to bigger piles of trash and an unlivable space? The problem with social media moderation is that your enemies are always human, The Most Dangerous Game.

I could argue that 'porn on sports hashtags' is probably failure mode 1, swarm actors deliberately trashing the joint. But I guess it's possible that this was always a problem and twitter's old mod team just handled it effectively.

In that case, failure mode 3 would be "old fashioned incompetence, making the service worse than existing incompetent competitors and squandering the absolutely massive advantage of 340 million active users."

This could happen! I'm no Musk fanboy, I think he mostly succeeds on having a good sense of when breaking the rules won't be punished. But Twitter was already wildly incompetent(1) & it dominated regardless, and despite the platform having much more powerful enemies now I think Elon probably won't screw it up as badly as would be neccessary, and nor would anyone with a modicum of business experience, regardless of their politics.

(1) one of my big takeaways from the Twitter Files has been the incredible disorganization of the company & ignorance of upper management towards major issues until it was alreasu a PR disaster.

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