Elon musk

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. Major platforms don’t just vanish, after all. If we’re not still posting in 2023, then I’ll buy you all a drink — a bet you poor saps won’t be able to hold me to because you won’t be able to find me on Twitter. Still, if Musk’s “decimate and innovate” plans don’t work then Twitter will decline. It might get slower and buggier and more prone to crashing. Platforms don’t have sudden deaths, but they do have slow and painful ones. Even Myspace still exists. Will Twitter follow it into online obscurity? Not soon, perhaps, but it will in the end. Nothing lasts forever. So our thoughts turn meditative. Writers sometimes comment on Twitter as if it has trapped them in a toxic relationship.

It’s been less than two weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter — and Cockburn is finding the app more chaotic than ever. The news of the tech takeover really separated the kids from the grown-ups. One by one, the haughtiest users have bravely announced their departure from the bird website. Ciao! The latest to go is the British actor Stephen Fry, who posted a picture of Scrabble letters spelling out "goodbye" to his 12.5 million followers. He’s since headed over to Mastodon. Never heard of it? Neither had Cockburn until he got his tech-savvy nieces to give him a hand. And now he can say, with authority, that it is even worse than Twitter. When signing up to Mastodon, users choose a "server," which is based on your interests. "Mindly.

“The bird is freed,” tweeted Elon Musk last Thursday, when he acquired full ownership of Twitter. The day before, he strode into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a white ceramic wash basin to impart the message that his new ownership should “sink in.” Musk has repeatedly signaled his intention to liberalize the platform by relaxing its limits on free expression. Since taking over, he's stated that Twitter protocols and account bans will remain in place pending review by an internal, ideologically diverse “content moderation council.

Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it offline. Delete it. Make it go away. What's the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It exists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the cancellation of people, for which Twitter has become uniquely known, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you'd think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or, more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology.

For many, the upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 (after a botched attempt earlier this week) undoubtedly seems the start of a new and exciting era in space exploration. Not only is the US finally planning to return to the Moon — this time to build a permanent outpost on the lunar surface — but in just a few months Elon Musk’s SpaceX will be sending its gigantic Starship, theoretically capable of carrying 100 astronauts, into Earth orbit. “Space is sexy again,” as astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter recently put it. “After the excitement of the initial Apollo missions dwindled into a subject only discussed by ultra-nerds, and the cool factor of the Space Shuttle gave way to the realization that it didn’t really do much, people generally lost interest in space.

Articles about the future and “progress” have been popping up a lot lately, with conversations revolving around the inevitable advancements in technology and automation. Where we should head next is the collective theme. To the metaverse? To outer space itself? But instead of setting our sights on colonizing Mars or creating a perfect alternate reality, we should slow our roll, focus on the here and now and consider whether the frenzied “progress” we’re in such a rush to make has demonstrated any benefit to real-life people. Manufacturing is a good place to start. Let this startling reality sink in, reported in 2017 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: Between 2000 and 2010, US manufacturing experienced a nightmare.