Your periodic reminder that VC-funded CEOs are in a situation that they have bet both their kidneys on being able to deliver a 100x return to the bone-saw wielding loan sharks who funded them.
Your “community” is worthless to them unless it delivers Kidney Money.
They cannot just “decide” to not enshittify the community you mistakenly believed was yours. No appeal to justice or fairness will work, unless accompanied by a donor kidney or two.
Let's not forget that the muskrat is in a totally different situation, however. He has PLENTY o' money to pay off the loansharks. He's enshittifying the birdsite just for funsies.
I still argue that it's performance art: he's providing an object lesson to people about why you shouldn't let important things get purchased and run by billionaires and he spent $44B to show how much he meant it.
And a bunch of people *still* haven't gotten the point.
You may well be right. If it *is* a performance, he's not broken character yet.
OK. I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But I still think that's the lesson that we should take away from the experience.
@cstross @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot
Lack of consequences also means fewer opportunities for learning
When he made a hash of running PayPal/X, they put him in an advisory position, probably positioned as a promotion; not really useful feedback for improvement
Whose learning?
I'm less concerned about the muskrat and more concerned about the rest of us: if WE will learn, we can take steps, collectively, to rein in the power of rogue billionaires and make the world a safer place. But people are incredibly resistant to learning that when they believe profit can be made by aligning themselves with the face-eating leopards.
It's sometimes hard to tell the difference.
But is it a reign of terror, or does terror come raining down upon you?
@KimSJ @cstross @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot Oddly no - I think Trump *knows* he's just a grifter, but he's *very good* at it.
Musk is what happens when you start to believe your own myths. He's far from brilliant. He's just been lucky to be rich enough to be able to afford to try stuff that most of us couldn't, and not be bothered if most of it doesn't work.
@Soyweiser @cstross @Unixbigot
I always thought McConnell was a tortoise -- not a painted turtle. 😉
(typos are always funny)
@Soyweiser @stevendbrewer @Unixbigot He's not a failed science fiction writer (take it from a successful one—I'd know!) … he's an Extropian. And that's much, much, worse.
I mean, that's a great philosophical basis for writing SF, but as a pragmatic tool for managing the here-and-now it's potentially as efficient as Stalinism at building pyramids of skulls. (Only, on Mars.)
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