Maybe it’s a measure of the x-Twitter owner’s panic level that he traveled to Israel and toured a destroyed kibbutz with Netanyahu earlier this week. It might also be a sign of Netanyahu’s panic that he took the opportunity to meet the world’s most firmly platformed antisemite. Both failed to read the room, I think.
According to a report originally published on CNN, it’s not just that advertisers are leaving the former bird site after Musk’s most recent antisemitic outburst — prominent content creators associated with those brands have decamped too:
In recent days, a number of prominent media brands have not only paused their paid marketing campaigns on the embattled Elon Musk-owned social platform, but have ceased posting on it altogether, going silent on the once essential site that sought to be the world’s “digital town square.”
The flagship accounts belonging to Disney, Paramount, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN’s parent company) have not posted on the platform in roughly 10 days, following Musk’s disturbing endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, which he still has not apologized for.
None of the studios commented on the record when CNN reached out for comment. But people familiar with the social media strategies of Paramount and WBD confirmed under the condition of anonymity that it’s no coincidence: the companies have made the active decision to stop posting under certain handles on X due to concerns, including brand safety.
The blackout on X extends beyond these companies’ corporate accounts, in some cases. For instance, the most high profile accounts affiliated with Disney have gone dark on X, such as @StarWars, @Pixar, and @MarvelStudios, which were previously posting multiple times a day on the platform to their millions of followers. Instead, these brands have switched over to the Meta-owned rival Threads, where they have started actively posting.
As smart people have warned social media users for years, if you’re not paying for the service, you’re the product. The flipside is that if users stop creating free content, the platform owner has no product.
I’m sorry to hear that Threads, a platform controlled by yet another frog-faced billionaire who doesn’t give a shit about democracy, is picking up the slack. I think Bluesky’s familiar user interface and federated scheme are a better deal, but for whatever reason, they’re not ready to take full advantage of a rival service’s self-immolation. Yet. That said, anything that reduces Musk’s noxious influence is positive development:
“Every day, more brands are waking up to the reality that Twitter is dead and X is a cesspool,” Platformer’s Casey Newton said. “The global town square is now dispersed across many different platforms, and increasingly the most relevant conversations are taking place elsewhere.”
Here’s hoping Newton is right and that no one buys Musk’s rehab tour. The last thing we need coming up on a critical election year is a fash-curious edgelord with direct control of the flow of disinformation, and if Musk dispatches the golden goose himself, so much the better.
Open thread!
Baud
Newton is going to get sued in Texas.
J. Arthur Crank
It is sad that you have to be more specific when you mention a frog-faced billionaire who doesn’t give a shit about democracy. There are too many to choose from.
Baud
What happened to Spoutible? I see BJ still has accounts there. Dead in the water?
J. Arthur Crank
@Baud:
Texans don’t like being told what to do. One law is bad enough, but three laws to follow is too much. And these laws have to be followed everywhere and at all times. Talk about government overreach.
BruceFromOhio
Wherever your ex-X attentions may lie, please go find your faves and follow-like-support them, leave comments and repost. Leaving X behind will be “stickier” if the brand (or author or influencer or whatever) gets some love on a new platform, will have even less reason to return to that cesspool.
C Stars
BJ is where all the important conversations are happening now!
TaMara
For reasons, not so much because twitter is a cesspool, I dumped my oldest account (the one linked to on the right) but because an account started posting disgusting anti-drag queen videos to my account – and of course, musty-doo wasn’t going to do anything about that. I haven’t missed it at all. I do have an author account that I kept, so I can still peek in daily, though I rarely interact any longer. I am shocked/not shocked how quickly in the last few weeks twitter has become X – a desert of trolls and very little actual content any longer. It was dramatic.
I’m not sold on any of the alternatives – and while Bluesky is user-friendly, I’m bored to tears. Russian trolls were at least entertaining, but I’m finding the content on BS mostly liberals whining about … EVERYTHING. Ugh. (No offense to anyone who is on Bluesky, LOL).
Again, social media is optional, so no whining here about alternatives. I’ve been filling my time with many fun/educational things. Got a Rewiring American class later this week. Been writing more, hey and talking to actual people, IRL.
Now excuse me, I have a Great Dane demanding my attention ( I have no idea what he wants, but he’s yelling at the top of his lungs, so must be important).
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Mx4, who has probably forgotten more about how these platforms work than I will ever know, mentioned it had some security issues, so I never created an account there. Possibly they resolved it — I have no idea.
Matt McIrvin
@BruceFromOhio: One thing about Mastodon’s refusal to feed stuff to you unbidden is that it can be nontrivial to find people who you already like and who have accounts there–I’ve repeatedly had the experience of being surprised that someone who I’d love to follow is actually there.
OzarkHillbilly
and never will.
lowtechcyclist
I dumped Xitter after Elmo’s antisemitic remarks mentioned above. Haven’t been back since, and not going to go back.
I haven’t replaced it with anything. I didn’t really use it as ‘social media,’ I read a few specific persons’ Twitter feeds there, and Josh Marshall’s list of persons knowledgeable about the Ukraine war. I miss those, but can do without them.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I don’t think Spoutible is dead in the water. It has maybe 250,000 users, but threads has something like 2 million. Not sure about Post or BlueSky.
I agree with the folks who are predicting that there won’t be ONE of the alternatives that “becomes” the new twitter.
What Musk has done is awful. Twitter was a great way for elected officials and the media and businesses and actual people to get the word out.
Individuals will likely pick one, or maybe two, and everybody won’t be on the same one.
Maybe there should be a publicly-owned “public square” for the government, elected officials, media, etc. :: shrug ::
JaySinWA
The account for you on the right bar points to a Spoutable account. I think it has for some time.
brendancalling
“yet another frog-faced billionaire.”
I think that Zuck looks more like a minnow than a frog. I once saw Musk described as “shaved Cookie Monster” and that’s how I see him now.
Scout211
Scroll down and the Xitter account is there. Click it and it tells you that the account doesn’t exist.
TaMara
@JaySinWA: Under that one is the twitter account. Beneath Levenson. I should probably shoot an email to WG and have her remove it. But for now, I like folks to see my account is no longer there incase they want to send me a kindness tweet via twitter.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Content moderation is a problem for government run social media.
Old Man Shadow
No one could have predicted that letting loose a bunch of vile white supremacist, misogynist pigs would drive off decent people.
Oh, wait…
MattF
Bluesky and Mastodon pretty much satisfy my needs for social media endorphins. And ads on Xitter are all clickbait. I’ve never seen an ad there from a company that I’ve ever heard of. Guess I must be in a downrated demographic category.
Ten Bears
I think he thinks he’s gonna’ run for pretendident …
Old Man Shadow
@Ten Bears: Not that I suppose it really means anything if Republicans control enough government offices, but he would have to have the Constitution changed to do that.
JaySinWA
@Scout211:
@TaMara:
Thanks.
WaterGirl
@TaMara: Already gone!
JaySinWA
@WaterGirl: Of the three spoutable accounts on the sidebar only Tamara has recent activity. Watergirl last spouted in Feburary.
I haven’t logged in in a long time.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Old Man Shadow: I hear Condi plays golf at Stanford. [This is mostly a non-sequitur, brought on by “no one could have predicted.” It’s just my free association at work.]
[On topic] Twitter was never a golden goose. Other than that, I agree with BC.
Scout211
And in other Musk news, Thursday is a really big day for a Tesla.
Five Big Unknowns Heading Into The Tesla Cybertruck Delivery Event
Hmmm. Seems well-timed and well-planned. LOLOLOL
brantl
I can’t wait for melon husk to commit the nerd version of seppuku, where he shoves that samurai sword up his own ass, until it comes out the top of his head (or gets someone with enough hand-eye coordination to do it for him).
Betty Cracker
@brendancalling:
LOL! Me too, now.
jonas
How is Musk even keeping X afloat these days? How is he servicing the tens of billions of debt he used to buy the place? He must be cashing in Tesla stock and paying out of his own pocket or something, but a billion here a billion there — pretty soon you’re talking real money.
cain
@Baud: what did gravity do now? Is gravity woke yet?
Baud
@cain:
Gravity always brings me down.
Betty Cracker
@Mr. Bemused Senior: True, but its owner seems to think it has golden goose potential. From what I read, we’re all supposed to hand over our banking information to Shaved Cookie Monster™️, and then PROFITS!
cain
@TaMara: Lots of great content on mastodon – you just have to find it. There are a lot of boosters. But one great thing is there is a lot of palestinian content vs jewish.
My open source people are all on there and more folks are moving all the time. It’s pretty rocking on mastodon at the moment. But of course there is also more whining and tone policing.
Still missing black twitter.
JaySinWA
@Betty Cracker: I haven’t kept up with Spoutable, but I think the security issue raised was fairly quickly addressed. Spoutable and CounterSocial share a common weakness, one man band startups that don’t seem to have much of a plan for continuity and expansion. You are left to trust them individually.
The cult of the individual can degenerate into arbitrary behavior too easily.
jonas
@Scout211: From the same story:
It will almost certainly be much more expensive than a Rivian or Ford Lightning and will have almost none of the practical pickup features of either of those vehicles and they’re nowhere close to delivering a number like that. He’s really losing it…
montanareddog
I forget which “last straw” made me abandon (mostly lurking on) Xitter, but it is just coming up to one year ago. My Mastodon account says I joined Dec 04 2022. I got an account on Spoutible later, mostly to ringfence my nym, which I have never used. I put myself on the waiting list for Bluesky but was not so keen that I bothered to ask here for an invite code.
And I got my official Bluesky invite overnight. Have registered and started to follow a few, including some jackals. I shall continue on Mastodon and Bluesky and see if either offers a better community or just continue hanging around both joints
ETA: I never went for a Threads account as I don’t have a Facebook account and I ain’t putting any money or data in that MOTUDork’s pocket
Frankensteinbeck
It took much longer than we expected because A) Musk was willing to throw his own money into propping it up and B) people were really, really, really invested in staying, but everything the ‘Twitter is doomed’ crowd predicted is coming to pass.
Me, I got out of there almost immediately, because I saw that turning Twitter into this stinking sewer of bigotry was the reason Musk bought it. His first public act was to unban an account that had been banned for transphobia, and then brag about it. This is all exactly what he promised to do, but people didn’t understand because he used the jargon his asshole incel bigot fans use.
dmsilev
@Scout211:
If you have to ask about either of those, you’re not a Tesla superfan and therefore aren’t actually in the market to buy the fruit of another of Elon Musk’s increasing list of mid-life crises.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: Hah. The idea that the social media hellsite would be a fine place for financial transactions and for dating is just eye-watering.
gvg
I don’t think it’s a good idea to have only one service be the major world media company. It’s better if no one view can control it all.
Our government would have a problem with moderation running up against the first amendment, thus it will work better if done privately for this specific purpose.
Supposedly India and other countries use twitter for a bunch of things including small business transactions and getting information. I don’t think Musk cares much about the non english speaking side of Twitter, I wonder how it is working for non english countries? What’s going to happen to their needs if the whole company crashes?
Frankensteinbeck
@jonas:
His own money. Nobody has exact numbers because as a private company Twitter doesn’t have to release them, but outside estimates from financial tracking companies are it’s bleeding money like a fire hose, in the range of hundreds of millions.
teezyskeezy
@brendancalling: Ponyo-esqe, except hideous.
dmsilev
@Frankensteinbeck: And most or all of that firehose of losses are due to Musk’s decisions. Pre-purchase Twitter was break-even at worst, usually running a bit of a profit (they had a big loss in the last public quarter because of a big one-time court settlement payment). Musk (a) saddled the company with a billion dollars a year in debt service payments because of how much he overpaid for the company and (b) drove away large swaths of the revenue side of things by …being himself.
Geo Wilcox
@J. Arthur Crank: I would add the guy who brought us Bluesky in that category as well. Jack is just as nasty as all the rest of them.
JaySinWA
@montanareddog: I’m not finding your nym on Bluesky.
beckya57
The problem with Bluesky is the invite-only policy IMHO. I’d been trying to get on there for months, and signed up with Threads (reluctantly) when I couldn’t. Thanks to Anne Laurie I finally got onto Bluesky last night. For now I’ll stay on both, but will consider getting off of Threads if Bluesky works well.
cain
@Baud: I now understand the gravity of the situation.
Ruckus
I left twit a while back. Have blyski and mast accounts which I check maybe every 2-5 days, they can be moderately interesting but of course don’t have the level SFBII has destroyed at twit.
@jonas:
musky inherited most of his money and of course too much money has a tendency to earn some money just sitting there. He’s the world’s richest man because of pure luck, coming into this world into a family that has more money than it knows what to do with, not because he’s earned any of it. I imagine though that his pay at his EV company is more than $1/year. Of course his latest amazing vehicle (just ask him) looks like a 3 yr old designed it and it looks to be as useful a pickup as a 1960 Plymouth Valiant sedan.
Alison Rose
@cain:
That’s a curious way to phrase that.
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: To me, Spoutible is much less risky than something owned by a zillionaire. All of whom seem to run toward ego and authoritarianism – I have seen enough of that to not what to throw my lot in with them.
In the past week or so, 1,000 regular peeps have invested $400,000 in Spoutable.
Spoutible is owned/run by a black man, and I don’t think that’s helping, which I think is appalling.
Chris
@lowtechcyclist:
That’s all I ever used it for, which is why I never got an account – before the Great Enshittening, you used to be able to just read somebody’s account and see his latest tweets.
It’s funny, I always assumed that some day I’d break down and get my own Twitter account, because Twitter would make that impossible and I’d still want to follow Paul Krugman, John Rogers, Sarah Taber, et al. But then the Muskrat happened, and I was like “… huh. I might just make it out of here without ever getting a Twitter account after all!”
cain
Threads numbers are artificially high since they leverage their instagram accounts and/or facebook accounts. So you don’t know how many active users there are.
Of course, they’ve recently been allowing election denialism bullshit – so you know the Russians and the Chinese are all over it.
Stick to bluesky, spoutible, and mastodon. Hopefully, at some point they will connect bluesky with mastodon.
WaterGirl
@montanareddog:
who is MOTUDork?
BR
@TaMara:
The most interesting non political space in social media for me today is the people from beige.party that I follow on Mastodon. I am not on that server, but because Mastodon is federated it’s easy to follow many folks from that server because they are a hilarious weird group of folks (not that different from Balloon Juice but less political). Such as:
https://beige.party/@Alice
https://beige.party/@simplebadger27
https://beige.party/@tayfonay
Chris
@WaterGirl:
This has certainly been a great argument for why any time anything becomes this important, it should be run as a public service. But oh well.
Jay C
Agree with most of Betty’s characterizations, except for the last bit. I think Elon is going to try to keep Xitter afloat (one way or another) at least through next year’s elections: I think election-year activity is likely to be his last chance to keep the site from utter devastation (it’s only a semi-ruin now. IMO, despite Musk’s best efforts); even if said activity is likely to simply accelerate X’s death-spiral. Oh, and bolster Elon Musk’s “influencer” creds.
I don’t think it’s going to work, but then again, I don’t have an extra few billion dollars laying around….
montanareddog
@JaySinWA:
@montanareddog.bsky.social
I am flattered you tried but, tbh, I don’t expect to post much. I am predominantly a consumer, not a producer
MisterForkbeard
@TaMara: I have my (barely used) twitter account that I haven’t gotten rid of yet, but I haven’t posted in forever and I haven’t logged in to check anything in long time.
It doesn’t help that twitter is (right now) a bunch of rightwing assholes that keep getting shoved into my feed, or a bunch of anti-Biden/anti-Democratic crap related to Israel. I use threads and bluesky for the small amount of social media-ing I need.
That said, Twitter is still the best place to follow breaking news on major stories. It’s just unreliable as shit, but I don’t see that level of engagement or reporting on Threads or BS yet. So sadly, I still tune in every once in a while.
MattF
@beckya57: The big innovation on Bluesky are the feeds. There is currently a long list of possible feeds, and you can choose the ones you like. Also, the process of creating a new feed is (somewhat) automated so, unlike Mastodon, it’s not a nerds-only mechanism.
montanareddog
@WaterGirl:
Zuckerberg
Ruckus
@jonas:
He’s really losing it…
Money can buy a lot of things, it can’t buy a personality or intelligence. It can buy a piece of paper that says you have one or both of the above, but really, who believes either when it isn’t earned?
Frankensteinbeck
@Jay C:
I think Musk will try to keep Shitter running as long as he possibly can in the face of his own incompetence. He is emotionally invested, in polluting the public discourse with bigotry, in the attention he gets there, in the attention he gets for owning it, and in his decades-long dream to create X, the all-in-one life-dominating app that smarter people have forced him to abandon repeatedly while telling him it’s a stupid fucking unworkable pipe dream that would destroy the companies he ran.
dr. luba
Ukrainian Twitter still is active; that’s why I’m still there. When those accounts all move, so will I.
Hoping they migrate to Bluesky; a few have (e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/patsulanastya.bsky.social), but most haven’t yet.
Chris
@MisterForkbeard:
I’m sure I’m only the thousandth person to say this, but did it really not occur to anyone involved that they were creating something whose acronym was literally “BS?”
dr. luba
@BruceFromOhio: I have been trying to do so as best I can. And have found some former FB accounts I followed who were tossed form that platform.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@jonas:
And fugly. It’s the worst looking vehicle since the Pontiac Aztek and that’s insulting to the Pontiac Aztek.
We call it the Cylon Transport Vehicle because it looks like something that would have fit in perfectly in the original Battlestar Gallactica show.
If it’s priced in the Rivian/Lightning range, aka starting around $80K, that’s gonna be a stretch to sell 250K units a year given it’s limitations as a truck, looks, etc.
Here’s a guy with a different-than-usual take on seeing one in person:
https://twitter.com/DavidKasmanArt/status/1729223323010072915?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1729223323010072915%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=
Ken
@jonas: Read carefully. It says they’ll be producing a quarter-million Cybertrucks per year. It says nothing about selling them.
MisterForkbeard
@Chris: Could be worse. They could have called it “X”.
Ruckus
@MisterForkbeard:
My twit account is disabled and I am not spending one second trying to re-enable it. Have mast and blusky accounts but it really isn’t the same as twit had gotten to before musky spent way too much for it.
My feeling is that while different platforms will either succeed or fail on their own, it will be some time before any of them will get to where twit was before melon head, just as it was some time and effort for twit, which had no real competition or prior concept to follow. And it is likely that many, most of them will never get to the same point because competition gives too many choices.
MisterForkbeard
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: The sad thing, I actually kind of like how awful it looks. It reminds me of a truck you’d see in Starfox or other 90s polygonal games. I think I (late 30s-early 50s male techy with some money) is the target demographic here.
But the production models look like crap. If they had actual standards and it was a decent truck (and wasn’t made by Elon) I’d consider it. But it’s not and it is, so no dice.
Ruckus
@Chris:
I’m sure I’m only the thousandth person to say this, but did it really not occur to anyone involved that they were creating something whose acronym was literally “BS?”
Isn’t BS about 40% of the unspoken premise of any of these platforms?
jonas
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Pretty much. Nobody who buys this thing is going to be buying it because they want a functional pickup truck. It will be purely to say “See? I have a Cybertruck!” And possibly poor aesthetic judgment as well, but hey, de gustibus and all that.
The market for techbro vanity purchases is *not* going to be 250k a year.
Frankensteinbeck
@MisterForkbeard:
To me, this is the tragedy. The comparison to the original Cylons is incredibly apt. You can like the retro sci-fi aesthetic, but in practice a cybertruck looks like a bad 70s special effect. The full, straight metal sheets that don’t quite hang right look like cardboard painted silver. It doesn’t just look weird and impractical, it looks cheap and badly made.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@MisterForkbeard:
The pre-production model has been doing a cross-country trip the last couple of weeks which gave people an up-close look at the thing.
Which revealed the usual build qualities that have been a frequent critique of Teslas from the gitgo. Obviously it’s unknown if this first batch of what-they-claim-are production models that have hit 11 showrooms nationwide over the last week, will have the same issues.
I’ve got an old buddy who plonked down that $1000 reservation fee hoping the price wouldn’t exceed $50K (and even at that he’s gonna have a hard time selling such a purchase within his household). He thinks the design is awesome and he’s definitely not in the demographic you mention (which I agree is the target here).
But are there 250K people out there just like him? And with the money to blow on this assuming it’s not a $45K pickemuptruck? That’s the big question.
Martin
Losing Apple as an advertiser is an inflection point. They’re the largest advertiser on the platform (on many platforms) but they’re the brand that smaller companies look at to determine where it’s safe to advertise. If you don’t have the budget to hire a bunch of brand safety people – just follow Apple.
Not clear if Apple will go back. Each passing day reduces the value of returning. And the underlying problem remains – there are no moderation policies that can be offered up that would apply to the owner of the company and most followed account, who is the problem here. Twitter *is* Musk, not just because it’s his private hobbyhorse, but also because increasingly the point of Twitter is to follow Musk. So it’s nonsensical to moderate the point of the platform, and nobody on the moderation team is going to moderate the guy who will demand they be fired for doing so. So all policy proclamations to fix the problems we see are absolute bullshit, and there cannot be any solution given the structure of Twitter right now. It’s simply impossible to fix this short of selling the company or Musk deleting his account.
schrodingers_cat
@dr. luba: I am in a similar situation. As long as Twitter remains the best resource for me to get on the ground political news in India I will be on Twitter. I am also on BlueSky also.
Bill Arnold
@Betty Cracker:
Those visions of PROFITS are so bizarre.
There are few major companies that I actively distrust with personal information, and Musk’s twitter is at the top of the list. I expect that he and his henchstaff would turn over information without hesitation to the Saudi bonesaw service, or to the Russian GRU, or worse.
Still use it, but mainly in niche areas, and for Ukraine/Israel/COVID-19, and mostly to informally track the spread of toxic (or deadly) narratives, which are now entirely unrestricted.
And to monitor(/prod) its collapse as a platform for influence operations.
brendancalling
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: At least the Aztec was kind of useful what with the tent option.
I don’t think I could haul my upright bass around in the
CyberStupidtruck.Chris
@Ruckus:
Way too many people are still wowed by money, with even those who hate the rich treating them like some sort of dispassionate profit-maximizing evil robots.
When, really, the truth is that they’re petty, shitty, boring people in exactly the same way that ordinary people are when they’re bad. The average billionaire is exactly like your dickbag uncle who watches Fox News all day and keeps spewing crap about the migrants at the border and ivermectin being better than a vaccine, except that he happens to have a fortune. And he uses that fortune exactly the way your dickbag Fox-viewing uncle would, if he had one.
JaySinWA
@montanareddog: Nope, not finding your profile in search. Have you responded to email verification?
Chris
@Ruckus:
Well yeah, but actually advertising the fact is usually considered something to shy away from.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@brendancalling:
This thread with Rivian owners casting shade on the Cylon Transport Vehicle is worth reading. It also has photos of the thing carrying bikes.
I had a former work mate who owned an Aztek. It was rock solid reliable meaning she got the only ever made that wasn’t a total PieceOfShitMobile. Also too, incredible cargo hauler, very utilitarian. She could buy a year’s worth of supplies at Costco and cram it all in that thing.
https://insideevs.com/news/696378/tesla-cybertruck-bike-tailgate-pad-brake-light/
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: Mastodon’s active user base is apparently something like 1.8 million across all instances, which I guess makes it a major player among the not-Twitters, in the aggregate. But that’s down from the burst immediately after it became clear the world needed a not-Twitter, and it kind of sails under the radar.
Subsole
@J. Arthur Crank:
In retrospect, leaving the Global Commons in the hands of a bunch of NeoFeudalist Voight-Kampf washouts maybe was not a good idea.
BruceFromOhio
@Baud: Gravity: More than just a Good Idea, it’s A Law.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
I hear it a lot here. Everything you said is absolutely true, proven over and over by the actions of the politically involved ultra-rich. Like the Trump team, these aren’t evil masterminds. They’re not Lex Luther. They’re shitlords.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’m pretty sure one of the big nerd-motivations for people like Musk is that they really want to use their money and their tech empire to make the world look at least a little more like the space opera fiction they all grew up with in the late twentieth century. So the Cylon, “bad 70s special effect look” is probably completely intentional.
Ken
And another 250K next year, and the year after that, and the year after that….
Though from what some people have noted about stainless steel and road salt, maybe he’s counting on people having to replace the vehicle every three years?
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: Everything Elon Musk is interested in is somehow related to popular futurism or science fiction of the years right around 1980. I grew up with that stuff too and I recognize it. Musk has the money to try to do it all, whether it makes any sense or not.
Ken
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: What with the pictures of the bicycles not fitting into the bed, I don’t think either the Rivian or the Cybertruck would be very useful as a work truck. But then, so many pickups are moving in the direction of “four-passenger car that happens to have no lid on the trunk”.
MattF
@Ken: So, not actually a truck and not actually ‘cyber’ anything. A case where two wrongs make a very wrong.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Actually, they’re exactly like Lex Luthor, just not the way most people imagine.
The animating impulse behind everything Lex Luthor does is that for all his money and good publicity, he’s a hideously petty and insecure man. His entire Fortune 500 corporate empire and his amazing intelligence and aptitude for inventing things, despite everything they could be used for, to him are ultimately just tools that he wants to use to smash what he sees as the Popular Kid (Superman) into the dust, and in the meantime, to at least prove that he’s better and smarter and prettier than the Popular Kid. He’s basically Richard Nixon.
Which is, y’know, exactly how Musk uses Twitter: as you said above, he bought the world’s greatest social media company simply so that he could act out his personal issues against trans people.
People remember the part of Lex that’s a genius-tech-prophet-mad-scientist (which is emphatically not how people like Musk are in real life) and not the part that’s a bundle of narcissistic rage and resentment (which is exactly how people like Musk are in real life).
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
It absolutely is. I call it ‘cargo cult science fiction’. Meta, Amazon’s goofy home helper robot, there’s a cadre of the ultra-rich whose heads are so far up their ass that they think they can make their favorite science fiction into reality by waving a hand at an underling and going, “Make it so.”
The problem they keep running into is that… they can’t. They can make a mock-up that looks like their imagined science fiction world, and that’s it. The flying, autopilot car doesn’t fly and doesn’t drive itself. The home helper robot can’t actually help do anything. Nobody wants to replace the internet with virtual reality. There’s no market for it. AI got closest, but it’s not intelligent, isn’t going to be, and you can put up impressive examples of things it’s done all you want, it won’t actually do the specific things you want.
But, insulated by money and a layer of yes-men, these dipshits think they’re making the world into their favorite books and movies.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Ken:
Back when we lived in Central Misery, we often noticed that the only thing that ended up in the back of the majority of pickup trucks were empty beer cans.
Interestingly, back in Sept, I was doing some 4-wheeling camping with this same friend who wants one of these things. We were in his Chevy Colorado going up the old railroad grade outside of St Elmo to Hancock. We turned to go up the very intimidating and rough 4WD trail to the Mary Murphy mine.
Spend several days up there, we come down to where that trail meets the old grade and what do we see? A Rivian. They guy wanted to know about the trail. It seems his Rivian could be raised or lowered, thus giving him some flexibility on rough roads.
We wished him luck but both of us were of the opinion that there’s no way we’d take what was probably an $85K truck up that route.
CaseyL
I joined BlueSky thanks to an invite offered here, but it just isn’t grabbing me. I’ve been on Mastodon since last November-ish, and like it much better there. (If you’re on Mastodon, and I’m not following you there, it’s because I don’t know your Mastodon nym).
Yes, Mastodon’s tone-policing and I/P stuff are pretty bad, but those things also get a lot of pushback, and so far I’ve been able to ignore them.
And Mastodon, let us not forget, is NOT OWNED BY A BILLIONAIRE. It’s decentralized, each instance has its own owners/managers, and has thus far managed to not be a target of our wanna-be oligarch overlords. I contribute a few dollars monthly to my instance’s admin, and am perfectly happy to continue doing so.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: There’s a popular idea in science fiction and space fandom that everything that showed up in futurism of the 1960s-70s-80s was completely technically feasible, and all we lacked was the will. Often it’s couched in terms of the money or the resources being eaten up by the evil welfare state.
(There’s a left-wing version too, that it was all eaten up by the military or capitalism, and that’s why you don’t have a flying car. David Graeber is into that one.)
That some of this stuff might just not be feasible or practical, either because of the laws of physics or the laws of human behavior, or because the reason it worked that way in stories was for narrative convenience and not because anyone would really want or like it to work that way… they won’t accept that.
Marmot
@Chris:
It’s intentional, but it’s not ’70s. That’d be more sparkly or gleaming and rounded, with a long, narrow neck and bulbous front and rear ends.
I see more of an F-117 early-90s style in that piece of junk. Flat panels and weird angles.
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: Think Damnation Alley–terrible post-apocalyptic TV movie from 1977, but every kid wanted that amazing custom truck-tank-thing they built for it.
And after Star Wars the look of all the fictional spaceships got really angular.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
The more I learn about the very very rich at the top of Silicon Valley, the more convinced I get that they’re the equivalent of those aristocrats and very rich people who went gaga over occultism a hundred years and change ago.
The cultural landscape has changed a lot since then, so now their fantasies are rooted in futuristic science fiction instead of Wagnerian opera mythology.
Bill Arnold
@Frankensteinbeck:
Charles Stross’s sprawling essay on the subject, We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus, is worth reading. It is full of rabbit holes.
Sample rabbit hole:
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: 19th-/early-20th century occultism always had a pseudoscientific angle–I think the insistence that everything worked by “etheric vibrations” came from the discovery of electromagnetic waves.
Betty Cracker
@CaseyL: Mastodon might suit you better, but I do want to note that Bluesky is also decentralized and not owned by a billionaire. Here’s a TechCrunch explainer.
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I’ll give you that. It’s not too far off.
But take a look at the F-117 and see what you think.
Yeah, stuff got angular, like 60° at every opportunity! But the flat panels all glued together — that’s the stealth-fighter “cyber” wannabe look!
Snarki, child of Loki
Will the last one out of Twitster please open the windows and clear out the musk? Thx.
Montanareddog
@JaySinWA:
Strange. I have been able to follow a few folks today so I must be adequately verified. Did you perchance implement Bluesky’s idiot filter? Anyways, I have just followed you.
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
Everything does work by etheric vibrations. That the Higgs-Boson field is almost identical to aetheric fluid theory made it one of my favorite scientific discoveries. A whole field of completely bullshit 19th century speculation that had been thoroughly disproved… turned out to be about right, yeah. There’s an underlying stuff that defines space and inertia happens because of interacting with it.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: The one area where our world actually matches or outstrips all that old futurism is communication technology. It’s probably not a coincidence that most of these bros made a lot of their money there.
We even got our videophones, which for a long time was one of the outstanding failed predictions–though we don’t use them quite like in the old stories, where phones were just like in 1965 but with a video feature that was on all the time whether you wanted it or not.
Well, we don’t have Star Wars-style “holograms”–actual hologram tech stalled out sometime around the early 1980s because it’s fundamentally analog and really hard to digitize; it’s used for a few special applications and as cheap kitsch, and most of the remaining ways of making a 3D image aren’t actually that useful. But we got all the other stuff and more.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck:
Well… The key difference is that any structure existing in the modern field-theory vacuum is Lorentz invariant–has no established frame of rest with respect to it–and the old luminiferous aether wasn’t. (This has a lot of really weird consequences of its own, like inflation/dark energy.)
JaySinWA
@Montanareddog: I was able to follow people before email verification. I didn’t see the email verification until later. (It should show up as an option in settings.) I wonder if they have a delay of general visibility for new users.
I received a notification of your follow and I followed you back.
Ken
@Bill Arnold: Another example is found in the wikipedia article “Exotic baryon“:*
Apparently the qualifications for being a 21st-century futurologist aren’t that different from those for a 19th-century Russian theologian. And of course as was noted long ago, if a sentence uses “nanotechnology” (or “femtotechnology”), you can substitute the phrase “direct intervention of God” without changing the plausibility of the claims.
* I somehow got to that article while checking the background for the recent XKCD “Decay Modes“.
JaySinWA
@JaySinWA: Bluesky email verification was bolted on in October, so it probably isn’t a requirement for basic functionality.
It does confirm that your email is correctly entered, if nothing else.
Another Scott
@Geo Wilcox: Supposedly Jack has little or nothing to do with Bluesky these days. He’s supposedly backing Nostr now, but “backing” may be little more than throwing a few Bitcoin at it.
Decrypt.co.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Ken: [quoting Beldar] Let me know when Elvis gets here.
Paul in KY
@dmsilev: I am assuming I will see my first one (with a “Let’s Go Brandon” sticker) in about 3 months.
VeniceRilet
Politics twitter got me in 2015, but I’ve been on since 2009 or so. I miss the entertainment industry side of my account. Fun with the fans and my dog persona … DogJay tunes and photos. Actors,celebs,etc.
RIP when it finally goes under. Hashtag trumpruinseverything
Omg I jacked my username lol
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Wow, speaking as a physics PhD guy, Kurzweil’s idea is dumb.
Ruckus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Many of the Ford and the Chevy full sized pickups are sold as “dick” enhancers here in SoCal, and I imagine in many other areas. They may on occasion haul something more than a week’s groceries but that’s about it. I doubt the Rivian will fall into that purchasing group anytime soon. I have seen one in SoCal, with regular plates, IOW a purchased vehicle. But the Ford and Chevy trucks actually are work trucks and built and equipped as such. Just that so many are rarely if ever used that way.
Paul in KY
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Will mention it here, but the CTV isn’t even a ‘real’ truck. The bed is not decoupled from the cab (as in all working trucks) , so you can’t really put a good load in it. It’s more like a El Aztekrino (IMO).
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@jonas: Exactly! It reminds me of the Ford Ranchero in the way it looks kinda like a car, losing cargo space with car styling, whereas a TRUCK should have lots of room (as much as possible) to carry stuff. If you are buying a truck to use it like a truck, that is. I live in the country, so I see lots of trucks, and how much they can carry is pretty much the point (plus a strong engine to carry stuff up hills, etc.)
Paul in KY
@MisterForkbeard: It’s the truck that serviced those green outlined tanks you had to kill back in that arcade game from 1982 or thereabouts.
Ryan
“that it’s no coincidence: the companies have made the active decision to stop posting under certain handles on X due to concerns, including brand safety.”
I mean, when the platform was renamed X, that ought to have been a clue that a kindergartner (no offense to kindergartners) was running the site.
different-church-lady
I was paying my electric bill a few days ago, and realized we’ll truly know Musk is fucked when the utility companies drop twitter from the parade of logos on the envelopes.
different-church-lady
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: It looks like a Delorean and an El Camino had a baby.
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin:
And that is the tell. That is how you know these dorkusauri are either insane, or so cripplingly sheltered from life as to make no nevermind.
The common thread running through that particular flavor of sci fi is that it is an amazing place to tell a story, but no one with two brain cells would want to live in the world of, say, Snow Crash.
Subsole
@Chris:
That is a brilliant connection. Genuinely never occurred to me.
Gvg
@Matt McIrvin: boy you read different science fiction than I did. I don’t think any of mine thought it was just a matter of willpower. Mine almost all was much further in the future with tech far beyond current day (read made up for a good story)
I did know a real libertarian and he was into AI in the early 80’s. Wonder where he ended up. He was actually nice to people though, and I assumed he’d grow out of it.
Ron
Bluesky is also owned by a dipshit billionaire that is supporting RFK for president. You don’t have to pick your poison, you can get on Mastodon, the real alternative to the sewers.
Paul in KY
@different-church-lady: Exactly!!!
brantl
I think one of he biggest things that we can do to diminish the influence of Musk is to leave Xitter and start calling it Xitter (pronounced ‘zhitter’, like genre, and anyboy that pronounces that Jon-ra is wrong).