In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Just to establish some context, I'm posting a YouTube copy of the famous TikTok video in which a new Twitter employee led us through her typical day. As it happened, this was only weeks before Musk's late October takeover, following which in a very short time he reduced the workforce from about 10,000 to about 2,500. In the process, he transformed that same headquarters environment from what was shown in the video to what a visitor said "looks like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned". If I were teaching in business school, I would use this as an example of Stein's Law, that which cannot continue must stop. If people are giving Elon Musk credit for it, that's a mistake. All Musk did was relieve Jack Dorsey and the former board of blame for what someone was going to have to do very soon no matter who was in charge. In fact, as some commentators have pointed out, it's almost as though Twitter's advertisers and investors felt some sort o...

In the 1990s, I did a lot of work-related flying, much of it on Southwest. This wasn't because I preferred it, but because the corporate travel departments put me on discount carriers. At the time, though, its corporate attitude was fun, a lot like the famous Volkswagen ad campaigns of the 1960s. For instance, While peanuts are now a snack, they once stood for how frugal the airline was: other airlines served meals while Southwest served just peanuts. Some Southwest executives felt they would need to increase their investment in inflight food. Then-CEO Herb Kelleher shot that down, “Do you know what the difference in cost is between peanuts and Snickers?” For several years, I commuted to various job assignments in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento via Southwest and even became familiar with a few of the crews. One flight attendant, who simply followed then-corporate policy of encouraging individual expression, would sing on the PA a ditty whose first line was, ...

I think the US right has lost the ability to think about UFOs, and that'a a problem. The History Channel has made a lot of money off them with Ancient Aliens , Project Blue Book , UFO Hunters , The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch , and more, but they're entertainment. I like Fringe and zombie apocalypses, too. The problem starts when people take them seriously. The fact is that there's just too much in the way of seriously believing in space aliens, starting with Fermi's Paradox , that if extraterrestrial life is so likely, we must have seen evidence of it by now. But just the other day, I ran into a piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, One WSJ editor's war on UFOs . Note the subdivision we're beginning to see on the right: The Wall Street Journal was the intellectual sponsor of supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy that underpinned Reaganism, while more recently it's been never-Trump. Hot Air, on the other hand, has been both never-Trump bu...

Pretty much at random, I ran into this video, in which Vivek Ramaswamy says pretty much what I've been saying about Elon Musk, that the US right sees him as something between a messiah and a caudillo who's going to fix everything that's wrong by fixing Twitter, which in my view can't be fixed. At about 10:30, he says "On the right, there's something about the new hunger for a Christ-like figure, and Elon Musk is the latest Christ-like savior figure for the day. I guess when you don't believe in actual Christ, you start looking for Christ substitutes instead." Jiust the other day, The New Yorker called Ramaswamy The CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc : The term “woke,” which dates back nearly a century, was initially used in Black communities to describe a raising of consciousness and has since become a catchall denoting awareness of a range of social-justice issues. In recent years, “wokeness” has also become, in conservative circles, a subject of suspicion...

I'm still trying to think through just what Twitter is -- it's not so much a product as a figment. To the left, it's a sort of totemic representation of civic harmony and correct opinion that's now under threat as Elon Musk eliminates moderation. To the right, it's a representation of everything that's wrong with the polity, which Elon Musk will correct in a grand gesture of civic good will. To shareholders of Musk's companies, this is all beside the point, except that Musk's excursion into Twitter has turned into a tar-baby distraction . CNBC reports that as Tesla shares sank eight percent on Tuesday to a new 52-week low, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to argue with investors and blame the stock downturn on macroeconomic factors rather than his focus on Twitter in recent months. Tesla shares closed on Tuesday around $138 per share, eight percent lower for the day which was largely mixed for other stocks. Long-time Tesla bull Ross Ger...

Here we are in Advent, waiting for the messiah, and some people think his name is Elon. Except that the poll he ran about whether he should step down would make even John the Baptist wonder whether he is the one. The puzzle for me contnues to be the sinecure problem: Twitter pre-Elon is said to have hired some dozens of ex-FBI agents into sinecures, except their job at Twitter was to control the narrative. But if a sinecure is a do-nothing job, how were they expected to contol the narrative? Other accounts suggest that much of the roughly 10,000 workforce pre-Musk got free meals, free red wine on tap, yoga rooms, work-from-home, pet insurance, and much more. Yet Musk laid at least half of them off, and Twitter stayed up. That says to me that it wasn't just the former G-men who got sinecures. In the video below, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School professor and prominent COVID skeptic who was shadowbanned from Twitter for "misinformation" under the old regi...

Every indication I've seen from the whole Twitter saga is that the company was some sort of hybrid between a boondoggle and a bubble. Its product isn't something easily explainable; it started with a 140 character limit that was raised to 280, which simply privileged the inarticulate and turned the whole exercise into something between a video game and Scrabble. It wasn't useful as a communications tool, because it left little room for any capable rhetoric and none at all for exposition or argument. So we have the question, " Why was Twitter filled with retired FBI guys? " The piece tries to answser, Twitter, as a company whose product is social influence more than software or stuff, has less money to throw around, but they have something that is perhaps even more valuable to the Elite™: it is a chokepoint through which most information flows, and hence is a place where The Narrative™ is fleshed out. Their protection money, so to speak, was handing ov...