Jack Dorsey

Elon Musk’s Twitter is holding a massive auction to sell its surplus office assets — and it is quite an eclectic selection. Cockburn is wowed by what the company's old guard has blown on superfluous products (the Kegerators, however, were an excellent choice). Here are some of the most interesting "assets" Twitter is liquidating. Neon Twitter Bird Light Electrical Display With a current bid of $35,500, this display tops the list for expensive lots. Ideal for anyone who wants a giant glowing bird in a booth for their living room. At ten feet tall, you may have to carve a hole in the ceiling to fit it into your home. Twitter Bird Statue Want to save a little money but still have a giant blue bird? This lot is the right fit for you!

The gradual release of the Twitter Files is impressive in its scale and its revelations about the internal workings of Twitter over the past several years. The cooperative release of information was driven by new Twitter chieftain Elon Musk, via a collection of heterodox thinkers such as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger.

Not all inventions change the world. But some do — and they do it by greatly lowering the cost of a fundamental economic input. This inevitably causes an economic revolution that brings about a new political and social order by opening previously impossible economic opportunities,  creating vast new wealth in the process. We are in the middle of such a revolution today, thanks to the microprocessor, which first came to market in 1972 and really took off with the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s. The microprocessor, a dirt-cheap computer on a chip, hugely reduced the cost of storing, retrieving and manipulating information. Computing power that cost $1,000 in the 1950s today costs a fraction of a cent.

Twitter has been quick on the draw when responding to tweets by President Trump in the last month, as he furiously and mistakenly attempts to make his case for winning an election he did not win. Within minutes, Trump’s tweets are flagged as containing disputed information regarding the election. Twitter is very invested in babysitting the President of the United States, sometimes with cause. But the tech giant’s scrutiny of spurious posts from other governments is not as close: if Twitter will not label a tweet as containing false or ‘disputed’ information, it is by default suggesting that it is accurate. This is the dilemma Jack Dorsey has created for himself in assigning his company to be the absolute arbiter of truth.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by Donald Trump regarding mail-in ballots. That raised all sorts of hell from a bombastic President, as well as more questions than answers. There are several problems with Twitter deciding to put its thumb on the scale of ‘truth’ on its social platform. The site has previously come under enormous scrutiny over widely perceived political and ideological bias. The charges against the company include its unfair and unbalanced actions in banning conservative or politically right-leaning accounts, as well as shadow-banning and limiting views and engagements on trending topics which it deems problematic.

Yesterday Twitter announced it was making some big changes, promising us a ‘whole new Twitter’. They put out the following statement on everyone’s timeline:'New features and a new look are launching soon. Bookmarks, account switching, dark mode, and so much more — before long, you’ll be able to see what’s happening even faster.'I must say after reading their proposed ‘changes’, I’m not terribly excited by this rather moribund list of ‘new features’ and so I have taken the liberty of proposing some changes that will actually benefit its user base.

For my birthday this year, I took inspiration from Jack Dorsey’s enlightening experience and answered an advert on Craigslist for a 10-day deluxe Vipassanā retreat. Here is my diary documenting the experience... I called the number on the advert and was put through to ‘Graham’. I told him I was enquiring about the advert and asked where the retreat was based. ‘Doncaster, not far from Sheffield,’ he told me, and informed me that the train tickets were not included in order to give me an enhanced poverty-stricken experience. I booked my ticket for Doncaster that very night and went to sleep in anticipation of the gloriously spiritual awakening that lay ahead.