Academics and researchers, I'm not joking when I say now is the time to save your work/data in multiple places outside of your institution's server or Google or MS cloud.

A thumb drive. An external drive. Print out the critical documents, e.g., final drafts, copies of publications, approved grants & IRB docs, latest teaching/research statements, student evaluations, syllabi, other tenure packet items, etc.

In other words, save your work like it's 2002.

#science #AI #democracy #research #ethics

King Musk

Folks, I have kept my Twitter account for many reasons, not the least of which so I can keep up on the latest from the online Elon Musk, who has truly become an American nightmare.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, received a public school education, and they never taught us about the possibility of someone like Musk controlling the politics of our great country. But here he is and here we are, with a new challenge — how to keep King Elon from ruling us. Never mind how Trump feels about him running everything, remember the 340+ million people of the country. And our vast economic and military resources. 

We have a lot more money than Musk has, at least for now. I wonder what he wants and think that's the obvious answer. A person who is so good at accumulating wealth, having won out over Gates and Bezos et al, what frontiers remain to be gained? Does he want to turn over the wealth of the US to Putin? Doubtful. I'm pretty sure he wants it for himself. Why? No idea. Probably is no reason. But if all he wants is to go to Mars, his stated objective, maybe we should offer him that, if he'll stop trying to run our lives. 

He's just beginning now, and the ugliness that awaits us, and him, is hard to comprehend. This is a threat unlike any other this country has seen. He makes Trump look like the reality show celebrity he is, who never wanted to be president, he just wants to play one on TV. That was a relatively easy problem to deal with. Musk is going to be a lot harder.

It's tempting to say that Citizens United is what enabled Musk, but I don't think that's the case. 

He could have bought Twitter without that. And that's where his base of power is. I understand it, because I've had a very small dose of that kind of power. In the 90s, I could post something during an exclusive tech conference, from the back row of the meeting, and watch it percolate through the room until someone on stage commented on what I had written and the audience laughed and everyone turned around to look at me. Later I learned I could do that even for conferences I wasn't at. That was a glimpse of the kind of power that became possible when everyone was wired all the time and everyone was tuned into one person.

To think you can escape Musk by quitting Twitter is a dream, it just isn't true — no one cares if you're there or not, or whether or not you drive a Tesla. The damage is already done. I got that news from listening to an interview with Fetterman in the last days of the 2024 campaign, where he delivered the news that Trump was winning Pennsylvania and the reason was Musk. People are enchanted by his wealth and the way he presents himself, in a very Fetterman-ish way. He comes off as a regular guy, who happens to be a genius and unimaginably wealthy. He's like a hero from the Marvel universe. Makes his friend Thiel look pretty small.

Musk wears a funky jacket to a presentation at the NYT. He tours Congress with a child on his shoulders. He dances awkwardly, as we imagine we'd dance if we were him. But he also threatens us with sidebars about how Germany only survives if they vote the Nazis in. Some of us have clear memories of families that were destroyed by that nightmare. Our own families. We were warned about Nazis coming to power here (and not neo-Nazis, the myth that there's anything new about Nazis should be erased from our journalism once and for all) and how, when that happened, we had to fight with everything we had.

I have no idea what to do about Musk. He's not going away, and even if he did, now that he's broken through, it's obvious there will be many King Musks to follow him. Where Trump was always a bumbler (I come from the NYC borough of Queens where characters like Trump aren't that unusual) and now that he's approaching 80 the threat of Trump has a limited horizon, but Musk is a whole other matter. He's only 53, in apparently good health, feisty, and the only thing it appears he wants is our money and power over us. If he has other demands, he should make them known and maybe we can give him what he wants without having to turn everything over to him.

New word spotted:

wankpanzer
noun, Cybertruck

#language