Anyone at all familiar with social media is familiar with the ongoing turmoil at Twitter ever since the company was acquired by peripatetic tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
I don't understand why Twitter needs more than a few hundred employees at most. They're cloud-hosted, so it's not like they need thousands of minions tending the servers in the data centers; that's someone else's problem (AWS, I think). Gab manages to run with a dozen or so, and they do it on hardware they own. Craig's List has ~50 or so people. Thousands of employees plus thousands more contractors at Twitter is an insane amount of bloat.
Bloat is the essence of Big Tech, from their software to their hardware to their headcount.
You could make the same assessment about Facebook and even Google.
One issue that seems to be a recurring theme in the modern IT environment is the constant need to futz, fix, futz the fixes, and the fix the futzes in the software, both server side and client (app) side. Over the past 30 years there has been an horrendous decline in the quality of underlying programming code, so that lean, efficient, (almost) bug-free code is quite literally a thing of the ancient past.
A lot of people toss around the statement "learn to code" to people who are facing job loss in a variety of industries. Frankly, I wish people in IT would learn to code as well--because most of them couldn't write a proper subroutine to prepare a ham and cheese sandwich if their appetite depended on it.
Never used social media. It can all burn to the ground for all I care.
Not to hijack this thread, any thoughts on the G-20/WHO 'One Health' medical bio-security framework they're setting up including 'digital Covid vaccine passports'? None of this is adding up to me but the people who warned about Agenda 2030 are proving more right than wrong.
Thanks, was wondering if there was any more to see with an account. I’ll keep watching from the browser. I’m stocking up on my popcorn. I think this going to get much more interesting.
In Australia, Elon’s technique is often used to “break union strikes.”
Is the same technique used in the US for strike breaking?
Stand strong, Elon! I'm sure there's people out there who can do this work that aren't fascist communists. (Just rolling them all into one. Just like they do us.)
If one considers the actual history of totalitarian regimes in the modern era, the phrase "fascist communist" is quickly understood to be somewhat redundant.
Fascism itself is an evolution of European socialism. Benito Mussolini, who may be fairly viewed as the first expositor of fascism, began his political ascent as part of Italy's socialist movement, but later moved away from socialism's collectivist viewpoint to arguing the primacy of the State as the ultimate possessor of legal and moral authority.
"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State.... "
Intriguingly, Mussolini's depictions of fascism intersect with Chinese Legalism, a governing and social philosophy heavily favored by Qin Shi Huang (generally considered the first emperor of a united China who ruled from 221-210BCE). Both ideologies emphasize the State as not only the font of legal but also of moral authority
Mao Zedong held Qin Shi Huang in very high regard, and incorporated much of the latter's Legalist ideas into Maoist Communism. Current Chinese President Xi Jinping's father was a fairly highly placed official in Mao's regime for a time, and Xi himself governs very much as a latter-day Mao Zedong, and his political commentaries reflect the Legalist antecedents in Maoist Communism, giving the current tenor of Chinese government quite the fascist veneer.
Socialist thought itself, of course, came to be dominated by Karl Marx in the late 19th century, after his two seminal works The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, in which he argued his theory of class struggle leading ultimately to a classless and stateless society. During the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the dominant strain of Communist/Socialist thought came to be the Lenin/Trotskyite ideology generally known as Bolshevism, which asserted the need for a "revolutionary party" to coercively lead the proletariat masses in the struggle to achieve the end goal of stateless Communism.
When most people think of Communism, it is this Bolshevist variant they have in mind.
Of course, once the revolutionary party achieves political dominance, even though stateless Communism is not achieved, the revolutionary party becomes for all intents the State, and is once again positioned as both the legal and moral arbiter of the society.
Thus, even though Mussolini envisioned Fascism as a repudiation of Socialism's collectivist ambitions, in practice Fascism, Leninist/Trotskyite Boleshevism (aka "Communism"), and Maoist/Legalist Communism all intersect at the same political juncture of making the State the primary--indeed, the sole--moral and legal arbiter for the society.
These convergent strains of totalitarian/authoritarian ideology stand in opposition to libertarianism, which posits the individual as the moral arbiter for the individual, with legal authority being ceded to government to various degrees--in extreme libertarianism, as in extreme Marxist Communism, there is no government, there is no State, and the governing ideal is political anarchy, with essentially no legal authority at all.
In a lot of his public commentary, Elon Musk at least strives to present himself as something of a libertarian, which has led him to take some admirable stances on free speech, particularly as regards the current disgrace of Big Tech Censorship. Elon himself, however, is at best an uneven libertarian, and, based on the chaotic corporate culture described by many at Tesla, his style of corporate leadership tends to be as incontinent as some of his tweeting habits.
Whether he will be the man who saves Twitter from itself or the one who puts the final nail in Twitter's coffin therefore remains very much an open question.
I don't understand why Twitter needs more than a few hundred employees at most. They're cloud-hosted, so it's not like they need thousands of minions tending the servers in the data centers; that's someone else's problem (AWS, I think). Gab manages to run with a dozen or so, and they do it on hardware they own. Craig's List has ~50 or so people. Thousands of employees plus thousands more contractors at Twitter is an insane amount of bloat.
Bloat is the essence of Big Tech, from their software to their hardware to their headcount.
You could make the same assessment about Facebook and even Google.
One issue that seems to be a recurring theme in the modern IT environment is the constant need to futz, fix, futz the fixes, and the fix the futzes in the software, both server side and client (app) side. Over the past 30 years there has been an horrendous decline in the quality of underlying programming code, so that lean, efficient, (almost) bug-free code is quite literally a thing of the ancient past.
A lot of people toss around the statement "learn to code" to people who are facing job loss in a variety of industries. Frankly, I wish people in IT would learn to code as well--because most of them couldn't write a proper subroutine to prepare a ham and cheese sandwich if their appetite depended on it.
Thnkl you...just followed you on GETTR..... :)
Meh.
Never used social media. It can all burn to the ground for all I care.
Not to hijack this thread, any thoughts on the G-20/WHO 'One Health' medical bio-security framework they're setting up including 'digital Covid vaccine passports'? None of this is adding up to me but the people who warned about Agenda 2030 are proving more right than wrong.
I just don't know how worried we should be.
I’ve never used Twitter. Is it worth setting up an account just to watch the train wreck from the inside?
Probably not. You can view most tweets without logging in. And most of the more highly triggered types generally produce more cringe than commentary.
I'm still active on Twitter but only to the extent of linking my Substack articles, in an effort to expand my readership.
Thanks, was wondering if there was any more to see with an account. I’ll keep watching from the browser. I’m stocking up on my popcorn. I think this going to get much more interesting.
In Australia, Elon’s technique is often used to “break union strikes.”
Is the same technique used in the US for strike breaking?
Stand strong, Elon! I'm sure there's people out there who can do this work that aren't fascist communists. (Just rolling them all into one. Just like they do us.)
If one considers the actual history of totalitarian regimes in the modern era, the phrase "fascist communist" is quickly understood to be somewhat redundant.
Fascism itself is an evolution of European socialism. Benito Mussolini, who may be fairly viewed as the first expositor of fascism, began his political ascent as part of Italy's socialist movement, but later moved away from socialism's collectivist viewpoint to arguing the primacy of the State as the ultimate possessor of legal and moral authority.
"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State.... "
https://docslib.org/benito-mussolini-what-is-fascism
Intriguingly, Mussolini's depictions of fascism intersect with Chinese Legalism, a governing and social philosophy heavily favored by Qin Shi Huang (generally considered the first emperor of a united China who ruled from 221-210BCE). Both ideologies emphasize the State as not only the font of legal but also of moral authority
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-legalism/#MajLegTex
Mao Zedong held Qin Shi Huang in very high regard, and incorporated much of the latter's Legalist ideas into Maoist Communism. Current Chinese President Xi Jinping's father was a fairly highly placed official in Mao's regime for a time, and Xi himself governs very much as a latter-day Mao Zedong, and his political commentaries reflect the Legalist antecedents in Maoist Communism, giving the current tenor of Chinese government quite the fascist veneer.
Socialist thought itself, of course, came to be dominated by Karl Marx in the late 19th century, after his two seminal works The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, in which he argued his theory of class struggle leading ultimately to a classless and stateless society. During the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the dominant strain of Communist/Socialist thought came to be the Lenin/Trotskyite ideology generally known as Bolshevism, which asserted the need for a "revolutionary party" to coercively lead the proletariat masses in the struggle to achieve the end goal of stateless Communism.
https://socialistrevolution.org/booklet-what-is-bolshevism/
When most people think of Communism, it is this Bolshevist variant they have in mind.
Of course, once the revolutionary party achieves political dominance, even though stateless Communism is not achieved, the revolutionary party becomes for all intents the State, and is once again positioned as both the legal and moral arbiter of the society.
Thus, even though Mussolini envisioned Fascism as a repudiation of Socialism's collectivist ambitions, in practice Fascism, Leninist/Trotskyite Boleshevism (aka "Communism"), and Maoist/Legalist Communism all intersect at the same political juncture of making the State the primary--indeed, the sole--moral and legal arbiter for the society.
These convergent strains of totalitarian/authoritarian ideology stand in opposition to libertarianism, which posits the individual as the moral arbiter for the individual, with legal authority being ceded to government to various degrees--in extreme libertarianism, as in extreme Marxist Communism, there is no government, there is no State, and the governing ideal is political anarchy, with essentially no legal authority at all.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/
In a lot of his public commentary, Elon Musk at least strives to present himself as something of a libertarian, which has led him to take some admirable stances on free speech, particularly as regards the current disgrace of Big Tech Censorship. Elon himself, however, is at best an uneven libertarian, and, based on the chaotic corporate culture described by many at Tesla, his style of corporate leadership tends to be as incontinent as some of his tweeting habits.
Whether he will be the man who saves Twitter from itself or the one who puts the final nail in Twitter's coffin therefore remains very much an open question.