Article
Twitter is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between April 30, 2021 and July 26, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Were he to live in an age of Facebook and Twitter”; “Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter were already blocked”; “I think Twitter is a different and unique challenge”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, America, Elon Musk.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: April 30, 2021
- Last seen: July 26, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
- Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
- Book Review: Elon Musk
- Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
- Your Book Review: Real Raw News
Related Pages
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- Twitter (4 shared issues)
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- America (3 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (3 shared issues)
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- X (3 shared issues)
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- AI (2 shared issues)
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- Ashlee Vance (2 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (2 shared issues)
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- Bill Gates (2 shared issues)
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- Boeing (2 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- COVID-19 (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The problem with the concept of carrying capacity – impossible to define or know when we’ve surpassed, until after the proverbial moment when killing one mosquito or dovekie too many plunges us into everlasting fire and brimstone – is that it seems mostly like a mood affiliation thing. Consider this: when you look out at the bird feeder hanging in your backyard (Bay Area people living in closets, use your imagination here), do you see a blissful symbiotic coexistence of the human world and nature, with humans generously giving of our growth-accumulated abundance to help the birds flourish? Or do you see a dystopian struggle where innocent creatures pushed to the brink of death by our traffic and pesticides and housecats must rely on meager scraps for survival? There isn’t really a right view here, I don’t think, just a predilection for seeing what matches your intuition and telling a story about it. Given the life story Mann depicts for Vogt, it’s not hard to see why he would lean toward the pessimistic take. From the childhood marred by a philandering father who left his family in a cloud of scandal and ruin, to the adult life spent stumbling from one bourgeois non-occupation (theater critic, bird watcher, government mole rooting out Nazis in South America) to the next, to the childlessness and divorce, Vogt seems happiest when he is away from any humans, whether tromping through pre-suburbanized Long Island, or alone with the guano-producing birds on the desolate coast of Peru. Were he to live in an age of Facebook and Twitter, he would definitely be that guy reposting memes that COVID is finally letting our planet "heal."
Inline links: mood affiliation
In Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse series, there’s an excellent metaphor for how having more smart people working on problems fails in an atmosphere of increased complexity, offered by fictional future UN government higher-up Chrisjen Avasarala: "You take part of a problem and you put it somewhere, get some people working on it, and then you get another part of the problem and get other people working on that. And pretty soon you have seven, eight, a hundred different little boxes with work going on, and no one talking to anyone because it would break security protocol." Except instead of security protocol, you could substitute any number of Moloch-y reasons, or just regular old-fashioned human tunnel vision. If there’s one thing we can take from the Prophets, it’s their focus on trying to understand complex systems holistically, Chesterton’s Fence style, instead of as piecemeal problem-boxes in a hundred siloed experts’ rooms. Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save). The Prophets may have a less than stellar track record of questioning new technologies, but I think they’re right that the Wizardly tendency to reduce complexity to a discrete number of problem-boxes can only get us so far – and, as we saw with the myriad of expert box factories talking past each other in the global COVID pandemic response, it can harm as well as help. If we’re always hotfixing as our big picture grows bigger and more complex, we’re also always creating new inadvertent problems with our hotfixes, and are in ever more danger of forgetting about that one critical problem box until it’s too late.
But Xi’s main target has been the Internet. Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter were already blocked when he took power, but he added more search engines (including Bing and DuckDuckGo), more social media (Instagram, Reddit), foreign news (eg BBC, NYT, WaPo, the Economist), and even Wikipedia. This has been bad for business (China’s Internet “ranks ninety-first in the world” and is getting worse, and foreign businesses list difficulty using the Internet as one of their top reasons for not expanding into China more), but Xi thinks it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
Definitely no. For one thing, he usually ends up in an industry by coincidence. He went into aerospace because he wanted to pull a publicity stunt with mice on Mars, tried to buy a rocket from the Russians, they were going to rip him off, and he decided to build a better rocket to spite them. He went into cars because the founders of Tesla asked him for an investment, he liked the company, and then he thought they were doing a bad job and he needed to take over. He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.
I think this level of intensity - combined with a high-even-if-not-unprecedently-high level of engineering ability - is enough to explain why he succeeds despite his flaws. Do you think Elon will succeed at X/Twitter? I lean towards yes.
On the other hand, this time Ashlee Vance himself is skeptical. He says:
Inline links: Ashlee Vance himself is skeptical
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience 2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence 3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health 4: ...About Tesla 5: ...About The Boring Company 6: ...About X/Twitter 7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan 8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures 9: Other Comments 10: Updates
I’ve heard via my personal network (which I trust more than this Ashlee Vance book) that Musk did used to drill down into engineering level decisions at SpaceX. Whether he’s actually extremely technically proficient, I don’t know. I’ve also heard this has slowed down a lot in the last few years since he’s focused on Twitter. (Note that the above is hearsay, I’ve never met the man myself or worked for any of his companies).
heliotropic on Twitter writes:
Inline links: writes
If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI,” “woke,” and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X.”
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.