We Resistance, Rebel: Say no to blocked, banned

The world’s smartest man is out there, doing the sort of stuff that the world’s smartest man does. Everybody knows he’s the world’s smartest man, because he’s the world’s richest—though maybe not anymore, but table that quibble; honestly these things are difficult to track.

Whatever his ranking, he’s possessed of a wealth inherited from the wreckage of an apartheid state that he’s now grown into a boodle as massive and indestructible as a continent, and that means he’s the smartest man in the world.

Why, you might not even be a *man,* the definition of which is something the world’s smartest man seems to have some opinions about. Where was I? Oh yeah, the world’s smartest man. He’s doing the sort of things the world’s smartest man does.

Oh! and he’s saving the world by moving it to electric—electric cars, that is. Electric luxury cars, that is. Cars priced like luxury cars, anyway. The world’s smartest man bought a pretty slick electric car company from people less smart, who created the actual technology etc.

Luxury cars are an attainable thing for everyone in the world who needs transportation, that’s for sure, and so it will definitely scale globally in ways that for example mass public transportation will not—which is the sort of thing you know if you are the world’s smartest man.

And the world’s smartest man seems particularly adept at saying things that will make the market excited in one way or another, either in a positive way or a negative way, and he seems fairly adept also at, before he says these sorts of things, doing things with his stocks.

He does things with his personal stocks that will make the effects of his statements benefit him personally, even if it doesn’t benefit for example his company or his shareholders or anybody else. It’s the sort of thing you know how to do when you are the very smartest.

Or for example he is going to build a hyperloop that will revolutionize transportation. Neato! It’s only going to cost 10 billion of our Earth dollars to build and it’s going to be like a "cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table" according to him.

It’s going to use magnetic levitation and vacuum-sealed tubes to transport people at 700 miles to their destinations. It also never worked and was never even built or even funded, but it did probably help prevent California from engaging in their planned high speed rail build.

You may only think it because you are not the world’s smartest man who happens to own a car company. Or maybe it's because he admitted to his biographer that this was exactly what he hoped would happen to the high speed rain plan, in the context of his proposed hyperloop.

So you might think that the reason for these grandiose pronouncements is to disrupt progress, rather than to enable them. If you were extremely biased against the world's smartest man, that is.

Or you might join his defenders, who say he did it because he found the high speed rail proposal, which was possible and practical and would have been attempted, unsatisfactory, in comparison to his hyperloop, which was not possible or practical, and which he was not attempting.

But then again—though I am not the world’s smartest man—I can’t help but notice something the public record makes clear, which is that saying frequently untrue bullshit in order to sabotage value and benefit himself is something the world’s smartest man seems most adept at doing.

It almost makes you think that the way you build the world’s biggest fortune is not by creating anything, but by buying it, then identifying the value of it, then figuring out where the pieces would fall if you destroyed it, and then being in that place, and then destroying it.

(by the way, I should probably remind everyone that we're about halfway through, and that at the end of this very long thread, I will post a link, which might make it impossible to RT any of it, because it is to a site the world's smartest man does NOT want you to go to)

It almost makes you think that the way you build the world’s biggest fortune is by constantly promising grandiose solutions to problems that would be devastating to the very systems that allow you to build fortunes via sabotage, so others don’t pursue more practical solutions.

He has gone and bought himself a social networking platform. It’s called Twitter and maybe you’ve heard about it. I sure have. In case you haven't, in the last 15 years or so Twitter has sort of become the de-facto gathering place for interaction on the internet.

It’s messy and was never very profitable, but it had a lot of value, and, while a lot of smart and dedicated people worked at Twitter to harness that value and enhance it and foster the environment from which it sprang, the value was not created by the owners or the developers.

The value of Twitter was created by the people who used it; by the fact that interesting and smart and funny people interacted there, and by the interesting or provocative or educational or funny things they said. Elon: “I’m going to make fighting spam on Twitter a priority.” Also Elon: “Let’s train our users to disregard security warnings by flagging whatever competitor I’m wetting myself about this week.” Evidently this new Twitter filter can be subverted entirely by setting up a 302 redirect - not only does it not block the tweet, but the Twitter card preview implementation follows the redirect and correctly displays the card

The giveaway that Elon Musk never understood twitter was when he claimed it was the leading source of outbound traffic on the web. That’s not a small error, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding. So then he bans links to substack, thinking that’ll hurt them, but it only helps. Elon Musk doesn’t ever pay for advertising so he doesn’t realize he just gave them millions of it free. Twitter being terrified of Substack is the greatest ad possible, well played all players. This is likely a false and deceptive statement, and that's unlawful. Twitter not only blocked Substack links, but also refuses to let tweets to be embedded in Substack posts. Twitter is already under an FTC consent decree and I suspect Musk is going to be in real trouble.

And then after he bought Twitter, we have all seen what it means. It means insisting on fostering a place for unrestricted free speech while banning reporters critical of him, and bringing back abusive actors who had been banned for using their hate speech to threaten and harass. It means insisting that the platform should be unbiased while currying favor from far-right extremists and propogandists and even doing their bidding in real time. It means creating a subscription model that demolishes the existing verification system, while claiming doing so creates a level playing field, even while describing the new playing field as a deeply divided hierarchy based not on value of thought, but on willingness to pay.

Anyway, Twitter. The world’s wealthiest and therefore smartest man seems to be destroying it, maybe because he’s making mistakes, or maybe because (as we know) he is the sort of person who is very adept at personally profiting from destruction of something valuable.

It is a newsletter platform (SUBSTACK), which means that it has become the sort of thing we used to call “blogs” before Twitter disrupted blogs. Twitter has for a while been one of my favorite ways of writing things, but as Twitter has declined, the newsletter has become my favorite.

You can work around this with tiny URL, but the world’s smartest man appears to be committed to fighting the menace of interaction and interconnectivity and expression on his platform, whose value derives from those things, and which he said he purchased to safeguard expression.

What happens now is that the link to [redacted], no matter how shortened, will tell you Twitter deems it a dangerous and malicious link. This probably makes people less likely to click through, but it will also, over time, make people less likely to trust Twitter’s proclamations.

This means people who promote dangerous links will find their job a lot easier on Twitter, which means more of Twitter’s value is going to fall apart. Presumably the world’s richest man has figured out where to stand in order to catch that value; he is the world’s smartest man. The reason the world's smartest man is doing all this is purposeful destruction, because he’s figured out how to personally gain from the destruction, because that’s what he appears to do.

The alternative is that he isn’t the world’s smartest man after all. He’s just another Butthead, a socially maladapted dork who likes destroying things, because destroying things is easy, and fun, and amusing to a man who can’t think of anything interesting to do or say.