Skip to content

30 posts with category “Culture”

The war in Elon’s head

Everybody’s been talking about Elon’s “go fuck yourself” moment from DealBook, and the expletive is what is making most of the headlines. From a distance it could be easy to see this as just a petulant outburst from someone upset with the financial struggles of his company, but considering what he went on to say — and has said in the past — it becomes clear that this is about something else to him.

Elon: What this advertising boycott is gonna do, it’s gonna kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. And we will document it in great detail.

Andrew: But those advertisers, I imagine, are gonna say, “We didn’t kill the company.”

Elon: Oh yeah? Tell it to Earth.

Andrew: But they’re gonna say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these things and that they were inappropriate things and that they didn’t feel comfortable on the platform.

Elon: And let’s see how Earth responds to that. We’ll both make our cases and we’ll see what the outcome is.

Andrew: What are the economics of that for you? You have enormous resources, so you can actually keep this company going for a very long time. Would you keep it going for a long time if there were no advertising?

Elon: If the company fails because of an advertiser boycott, it will fail because of an advertiser boycott. And that will be what bankrupted the company, and that’s what everybody on Earth will know. Then it’ll be gone. And it’ll be gone because of an advertiser boycott.

Andrew: But you recognize that some of those people are gonna say that they didn’t feel comfortable on the platform. And I just wonder, and ask you, and think about that for a second–

Elon: Tell it to the judge.

Andrew: But the judge is gonna be–

Elon: The judge is the public.

Something really struck me about the language he was using here. “Blackmail”? “Earth”? “We will document it in great detail”? Blackmail him to do what? What does he imagine this is about?

Of course, one way to read this is that he is shifting blame from himself to advertisers for the potential failure of X, and I’m sure that’s part of it. But he also seems to deeply believe that X is a heroic and final bulwark against creeping Orwellianism from politically correct elites.

To him, the disappearance of Twitter is a threat not just to himself or to the satisfied users of the social network, but an existential threat to “Earth.”

The way this plays out in his mind is that advertisers kill X, and because their abandonment of the platform will have been “documented in great detail,” Earth — Earth itself, not just the users of X — will retaliate. “Free speech” will die, there will be no medium left for expressing yourself without censorship, and the societal cost of this will be so great that these advertisers will themselves face extinction.

This hyperbolic view of things has been on display before, as when advertisers started expressing caution when he first took over in November 2022:

“They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.” Note that he doesn’t believe “free speech” will simply be an unfortunate casualty of the passive cowardice of advertisers fleeing X; he believes that advertisers’ fleeing X is a deliberate attempt to “destroy free speech.” They are invested in the death of X so that they can further their agenda. X is a threat to them, and they are trying to end it.

The “blackmail” he referred to at DealBook is, to his mind, blackmail to join their program of speech suppression. The elites want people to feel afraid to say certain things, and they want X and Elon on their team. By denying them this, he is martyring himself for the preservation of intellectual freedom for our entire species.

He has a messiah complex, and curiously it extends beyond his electric cars and plans to colonize Mars. Even a dumb social network is about his role in the fate of the planet.

I’m also amused by — and I haven’t seen any mention of this — the fact that Elon clearly seems to expect some kind of laughter/applause after his “go fuck yourself” line. He sees himself as a populist, and has gotten so used to being constantly fellated by his X subscribers that it shocks and confuses him when he isn’t showered with adulation for his irreverent “antics.”

One Response

Apple’s incomplete pronoun fields

In iOS 17, you are now able to add pronouns to contacts, including your own contact card. This is a good thing, but at least one important pronoun case is missing from the “English” options.

The cases included are:

  1. Subjective (“Yesterday, she went outside.”)
  2. Objective (“I went with her.”)
  3. Possessive pronoun (“The idea was hers.”)

These three cases mirror the common “she/her/hers” structure used to communicate pronouns on social platforms like Twitter and Zoom; as such, they may seem complete, but they aren’t.

The missing case is the possessive adjective: “It was her idea.”

This may seem redundant, because in the declension of feminine pronouns, the possessive adjective is the same as the objective: “her.”

But in masculine pronouns, the possessive adjective is the same as the possessive pronoun: “his” (as in, “It was his idea”).

CaseFeminineMasculine
SubjectiveSheHe
ObjectiveHerHim
Possessive pronounHersHis
Possessive adjectiveHerHis

This isn’t a problem when interacting with people — we know how to decline the common feminine and masculine pronouns, so we know which form to use for the possessive adjective.

But because the iOS 17 UI doesn’t have a field for the possessive adjective, the OS and apps that have access to these fields — which have to behave programmatically — can’t know what to use for that case.

If I’m writing an app and I want the UI to say, “Would you like to call her?” in reference to some contact of yours, I can use the objective pronoun field. But if I want the UI to say “Her birthday is coming up” (the possessive adjective), I don’t have the necessary information.

I can try to guess, based on what I know about the declension of these common pronouns. But what about uncommon ones, like Ze or Xe? Anything I want to use will have to be hard-coded.

This is not even to mention the reflexive case — “She was proud of herself” — which is entirely absent.

Leave a Comment

Peanuts holiday specials absent from broadcast TV in 2022

When it was announced in 2020 that Apple would obtain the rights to the Peanuts TV holiday specials, I was relieved to read that they agreed to allow PBS to broadcast the films over the air. Previously, A Charlie Brown Christmas had been broadcast every year by CBS (1965-2000) and ABC (2001-2019).

This year, however, it appears that that won’t be the case, based on this tweet from PBS Kids:

Regretfully, PBS does not have the rights to distribute the Peanuts specials this year. We’ll all have to watch for the Great Pumpkin in a different pumpkin patch this Halloween.

@pbskids

I suppose it’s silly of me to think that there are many people left who watch TV over the air at all anymore, or on cable. As long as you own a TV, it’s likely to be a smart TV, and likely to be able to run the Apple TV app (where the specials will air for free, even to non-subscribers, thankfully). Barring that, you likely have a smartphone, tablet, or computer where you consume all your content anyway. Practically speaking, this does not introduce a great barrier to watching the specials, even an economic one; in fact, if the specials were only available at a specific time over a legacy network, they would have a far smaller reach.

On the other hand, why am I a grown man writing about 60-year-old cartoons? Sentimentality. And aren’t the holidays largely about sentimentality and tradition to begin with? The airing of these specials at a specific time on a specific date on a specific channel at least provided the illusion that they are something we are experiencing together, simultaneously, as we have since before I was born.

What will be gone is the “eventness” of it, the specific annual televisual demarcation of the peak of Christmas season. It’s a loss.

Leave a Comment

Ryan Broderick on War (And Everything) As Content

Hard to choose what to quote from this piece, but (all emphasis mine):

The hashtag #nuclearwar is trending on Twitter right now. If you click in on it, it shows you the top content tagged #nuclearwar. If you click on one of the posts, in giant letters, Twitter asks you to “tweet your reply.” What’s your take on nuclear annihilation, the bird site wonders thoughtlessly.

and:

What is QAnon if not just a way to always have something new to create or consume during breaking news events.

and:

There are a lot of internet users who, after a decade of exposure to viral media, have had their minds so thoroughly warped by trending content that they believe that reacting to popular internet culture is […] some kind of moral duty.

and:

The internet is at a place technologically now where connectivity is not just the default, but demanded of us all.

and:

Leave a Comment

There is a surreal aspect to viewing the outbreak of war through the conveniences offered by social media, and I doubt we are ready to comprehend its consequences.

Nick Heer, “Social Media in New Wartime“

Now seems like a really good time not to be on Twitter. When things are crazy I try to limit myself to reading the paper in the morning and watching the evening news.

Leave a Comment