waiting for bluebirds

thoughts and updates on re-catforming

el gato malo, waiting for twitter to fulfill its promises.

a lot of people have been asking and the simple fact is that, alas, i don’t know any more than you do.

elon held a vote.

he said the people had spoken and those who were not spammers and had not broken laws would be re-instated.

discussion was about “this week.”

so far, nothing has happened. there seems to be no plan or process that has been shared.

we’re all just waiting.

some are positing that elon has buckled to apple and the EU on this issue and will use “law” as an excuse (because the EU digital services act, a truly draconian pile of hot censorious big brother garbage) makes “misinformation” illegal and demands content curation and suppression to operate in the EU.

i have no special knowledge there.

but suddenly, everyone is playing nice.

apple did back down from possible threats to ban twitter from the ap store.

was it quid pro quo or tim cook realizing he was holding a serious loser of a hand?

were they ever even really made or did it just get misinterpreted/misreported/stirred up as agitprop?

dunno.

but i doubt elon can go back on this. it’s too badly off-brand and to break a promise like that so soon after making it will gut him. many have expressed doubt about the sincerity of elon’s real commitment to free speech and there is certainly a case to be made that it’s dubious, but i suspect it doesn’t matter.

this is not about ideals.

this is about branding.

consider:

whatever one believes about el musk’s ethical commitment to speech, most can probably still agree that whatever else he is, elon is two things:

1. self interested

2. a good judge of the zeitgeist and how to play it

and that’s really all we need for a free bird.

woke is dying. the levels of media suppression and manipulation have grown too blatant and damaging to ignore. no one trusts it, everyone wants an option. and this is a HUGE market opportunity. there are 1000 ways to monetize a free and fair twitter that have nothing to do with advertising. it becomes an astounding news source, search tool, financial resource, expert network, trend dashboard, polling system, and on and on.

but to trust a lot of these things, you need to trust the validity of the data. and that only works with free and fair. censorship strangles that value. and so if you bring it back, you’re going to get mired in a no future ad model again and leave the really awesome potential of twitter to go begging.

and i think musk both sees that and sees the zeitgeist and so his self interest will drive him there. he sees the opportunity to become the most trusted aggregator of media in the world. and this could be a durable advantage defended by metcalf’s law effects.

we need not trust his commitment to 1A values, merely his ability to see a market and the power of consumer sovereignty.

and the PR backlash from knuckling under on this would be savage and humiliating.

and that’s not musk’s style. i suspect that getting forced into the fold on top of losing this vast new market would be galling for him.

a fair few of us would like to get back into the arena and the debate where it’s hard to duck us.

and with luck, we will.

but going back to “twitter as was” where you self-censor because you live under and endless hammer of possible cancelation is just not that appealing.

twitter as an adjunct to substack that makes debating and engaging with views better and more thorough is incredibly appealing to me.

twitter where bad cattitude gets shadowbanned?

not so much.

i remain optimistic, but there is just no real way to know how this plays out.

and so we wait…