Looking back on it, I think the thing that most made me despair of the adjacency with wordcel/shape-rotator bullshit last year was that it didn’t seem to move the needle on anyone’s opinion of anyone. You had all these people being like “well I don’t think it’s true that people with degrees in the humanities or social sciences have a lower class of brain and implicitly don’t merit a place in real Smart People Spaces because a Jungian quack who has arbitrarily declared himself the voice of science and logic said so, but this seems like a reasonable position that could be a real gem with a bit of amendment, and I certainly would never dream of respecting a person’s belief system less because that was a part of it.” Fuck off.
One of the things that drew me to the adjacency in the first place was that while it was mostly made up of STEM people, they had a genuine curiosity about a lot of topics outside of that collection of fields and didn’t usually fall victim to the sort of petty departmental turf wars that seem to be the bread and butter of every nerdy undergrad. It’s a shame that this seems to have waned over the years.
‘wordcell and shape rotator discourse’ seemed so obviously stupid on its face it took me like a week to realize it wasn’t some new elaborate bit everyone was doing.
u mean it wasn’t
Felt like more of a TPOT thing? But there’s an infinite appetite everywhere for pseudo objective schemes that let you split people into “cool smart people like me” and other
this?
TPOT is the designation for what was once called “post-rationalist Twitter” but has expanded in scope such that it probably needed a new name. The boundaries are (deliberately) quite fuzzy, but if you imagine a collection of people who are kinda rat-adj but also very into “vibes” and indistinct spiritualism, and also quite chummy with both blueglobe Twitter and rightoid trad Twitter, you’ve basically got the gist of it.
Well one nice thing about Twitter implementing day/night modes is it makes it clear scrolling through my Safari tags which ones I was looking at recently and which have been open for a while.
It is mildly amusing how I’ve opened a Twitter embassy in the last few months and the algorithm smoothly and gradually assimilated me to #tpot, which is basically the rat-adj part of Twitter
Also like I thought all the stuff about sliding into DMs and fefos was kinda off, [tumblr] was the one that was really a dating site right, but that was before I started using the timeline, which just feeds me a regular supply of novel women saying something clever about a topic that interests me, attached to a chance to impress or intrigue them myself which they have the option to show favor to or even draw me into their circle in response…
I actually think Elon’s not doing a terrible job with Twitter – this isn’t some master plan, no, but we’re getting an effective reset of the employee base and the site culture; it might fail whale for a while but the user base is being reminded that however it is, they need it, and brand loyalty will carry through to relaunch if it’s down for less than a full year
The real issue was that it created a groupthink so strong it captured parts of its own structure – advertisers, staff, finance – and I think whether consciously or not, the people talking about how it would fall apart were trying to speak that into existence.
Musk is really the only figure out there with deep enough pockets, including established personal relationships with funders – like, whatever Anil fucking Dash says wouldn’t come into it, and where would he even say it? – to tank the hit and power through
Also like, breaking that capture will have ripple effects on the tech economy and even national and world cultures – the groupthink was hostile to capital in significant ways – that Huge Capital might find worth the expense in its own right
People on twitter call everyone they dislike a “grifter”, but this insult has not migrated to tumblr because no one here is making any money
Which is good, by the way. There’s nothing more degrading than watching grown adults act like pissy teenagers on twitter for clicks and tv appearances. Like, writing a callout over someone clicking “like” on the wrong post is dumb; but doing that on purpose, as a calculated machiavellian career move when you’re an adult who wears a suit to work and has a child… there’s something deeply pathetic, not to mention grotesque about it.
Here we can watch the pest in its natural habitat, and pretend we don’t know that it’s spreading, rotting apart the whole adult world.
The real effect of Twitter on journalism is – well, the “spare-time bullshit, take as peer group, social-climb, brown-nose for career advancement” relationship journalists used to have with their sources? Now instead they have it with each other.
I just realized – with logographic characters, you can stuff a good paragraph worth of words into a Chinese tweet, whereas you can barely get a decent sentence in an English one. It’ll be interesting to see how that distinction plays out.
