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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
You know how conservatives project? Think about it as the truth, but with a small change in detail such as the guilty party renamed to an enemy scapegoat. Now rethink what you said.
Conspiracy theories that parallel real conspiracies are the best way to stop people thinking about each view on its own merits. They conflate dumb q stuff with the legitimate similar thing and then refuse to engage intellectually. This is why the internet is so noisy. They KNOW that the Streisand effect will be counterproductive so instead they spam dark strawmen and noise until you just tune out because of the difficulty to process information.
Climate activists drowned out with astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion which de-legitimizes and generates hatred towards activists and allows the passing of totalitarian laws to prevent future protests etc.
Examples
In the end you will hate all the legit groups because of the astroturfed false flag strawmen groups.
This is such a good way to word this kind of phenominon. Conspiracies as distraction.
Its also funny, because its a conspiracy about conspiracies lol
What's wrong with XR?
People who aren't going to do anything either way like to blame XR's protests for their own inaction.
I've thought long and hard about why we fail to make change and I've thought about whats best and most reasonable within my own personality, skills and weaknesses. For me, I need to refine my views and then spread awareness, while also reducing our wasted efforts because of false consciousness. Do you want to suddenly become aware that you wasted years of your life to a false idea or would you rather some annoying rando accuse you of having in a false idea, then think about it honestly and reject the false idea years earlier?
As an example. Lots of people fell victim to what you suggest.. nazi philosophy was painted as "we have the cure! just blindly follow our legit seeming propaganda" and then people acted instead of thinking.. you know what happened after. People like me were trying to deprogram nazis but then we had to run or got holocausted. Also, do you notice how National socialism has a strange... misdirection that doesn't line up with its stated name? MEGAHINT HINT. also tankies cough cough
What do you think is wrong with conservatives? They work hard for the values they haven't investigated
You are absolutely right about us needing to take action, i just worry the average person will be super counterproductive with all the noise intended to misguide us.
I would have explained in more detail before but its hard to write a small book each reply haha. I'm glad you asked. So with XR there are a ton of things I can say but I'll probably ramble, so my apologies.
XR popped up at a time when revolutionary energies especially around the idea of climate apocalype type emergencies were at a local high. They openly stated in their website or whatevs that they allow police and landlords which if you are in the know, you know. Landlords and police are some of the most primary enablers of the climate apocalypse and capitalistic evils. Then there's their method of making change, which if you watch mass media, shows that they glue their unshaved armpits to the road or paintings, in the most "hate me, hate us" type of way possible. Effective climate activism doesn't come in the form of "hate us" activism, it comes in the form of making leaflets and dropping them in a thousand mailboxes, making community groups to discuss and spread truth about our govts complicity and support of negative and increasing changes that are damming us etc etc. I could list a lot more.. ugh :(
Each step of XRs path helped them to pass law after law to reduce our legal rights to protest while also making the general population hate protest+climate activists. Imagine getting blocked from getting to work by what the idiot box calls hippies. You'd slowly hate your heroes. Unfortunately lots of unthinkers fell into the XR bandwagon, even myself to some degree before i realised they allowed cops and had expensive non representing their base(humans) matching signs and uniforms. Easiest way to spot astroturfed groups is money spent on media like signs and uniforms. Any legit group will be censored to hell and will struggle to even have a website up.
Sorry for the mess.
Well said, thanks for doing the good work of pointing this out.
See other "grassroots" movements such as the Tea Party, Moms for Liberty, TPUSA, etc for the other side of this. These groups have clear and documented funding from billionaire interest groups and conveniently allow corporate media to conflate such far right groups with progressive movements as the same level of extremism.
I think it's far more simple that humans have a tendency to fractionalize everything they're apart of than it is a projection global conspiracy.
Some animal rights activists believe humans can have beneficial, symbiotic relationships with animals, like working dogs/horses, free range chickens that are well cared for, stuff like that.
Some animal rights activists think the concept of a working dog/horse as abhorrent because animals can't actually consent to that, the power dynamic makes it unethical, and utilizing the labor of an animal for personal gain is basically just slavery for a creature with less intelligence.
These two groups are closer to each other than they are to any right person that doesn't care at all for animals, but are still so dynamically opposed that they simply couldn't operate together because their end goals are dramatically different.
I'm a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn't associate with them if I had a better option.
What you and I are saying can happen naturally as well as artificially. I'm mostly talking about how that regardless of if they are co-opting delegitimisation propaganda in origin or natural in origin, that the incorrect one gets amplified through common media in clearly suspicious and divisive ways. There certainly are a lot of differences in each group, some legit and some not. What if the different groups can have a correct subset and an incorrect subset? We are meant to discuss and reject the incorrect subset.
You know how conservatives tend to have this one cherry picked crazy example of us sometimes? Those always feel like propaganda campaigns and if you trace and investigate them more you can see they have questionable roots. An example would be the /r/antiwork mod that interviewed on television. notice how he was the worst possible example of us and went on tv after everyone said that it was a lose/lose scenario, that if they air it, you lost, and if you win they wont air it therefor you still lose.
Why does every group have a very heavily advertised and mysteriously promoted subset that betrays the movement in effect but looks valid superficially? I've seen a hundred times more about sovereign citizens than I've seen about actual anarchists talking about ideals.
This hurts :( My whole life feels dishonest because I cant find the right people to associate with in real life. I feel your pain.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn't it much more likely that they're just ... disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
I'm picking at nits here.. but
Are you really suggesting that no action has ever been malicious that seems stupid? Copying people on the internet doesn't make ~~you~~their idea right lol. I personally believe that phrase is damaging and possibly propaganda in origin, same as "absolute power corrupts absolutely"
As for the other things you said, I think you can both be correct at the same time.
Well said. Razors are guides in developing theories, not evidence. To present them as evidence is a fallacy. The above conjecture isn't better explained by stupidity, thats the whole point.
Thank you. I think this is an important nit to pick in the context of this particular discussion.
Ignoring the evidence of Musk's Twitter nonsense benefiting the same people who helped fund his Twitter buy out is something you could attribute Hanlon's razor to.
The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.
So when I ask myself "If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?"
The answer is usually "because someone gave me a lot of money"
I don't know about Spez but I don't think that's how Musk and Zuck are motivated. The money is a secondary effect of their goal of being "Great Men" in history. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square, changing the nature of discussion there (and taking as much credit for it as possible) is an end unto itself for Musk. Especially when you consider that, if he is able to both control and maintain Twitter as the main locus of online discussion, it allows him to try to reshape the wider narrative about the value and importance of his work in general.
I'm not so sure Musk is actually motivated by his own hype, I think that's part of his professional self branding that he relies on to juice the valuation of his companies. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square is a way to juice his rep further and make even more money.
I'm skeptical of ascribing immaterial motives to billionaires.
EDIT Oh! Also, I think the reason enshitification has accelerated so much recently is because of high interest rates. It's why Silicon Valley Bank imploded, after all. Companies are scrambling to be profitable after the free investor cash has dried up. It's not good enough to be maybe profitable in an undefined future, they need to be profitable now so they can justify investment. The bubble is deflating - though fortunately, it seems like it's going to be a soft landing instead of a pop.
Yeah, I also seriously doubt there's a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it's more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it's a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he'll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.
Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his "loans" to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big "lenders".
That's definitely true. I think it's also true that the people who financed it were doing so to take advantage of that to their own ends.
While I don't think there is a specific conspiracy, I do believe that the upper classes enforce class interest and still have a strong sense of class solidarity, something they worked very hard (through their hegemonic control of the media) to excise from the societies they inhabit and predate upon.
Someone like Rupert Murdoch won't necessarily take action on behalf of specific individuals, but he will fight tooth and nail for the privileges of his fellow billionaires.
I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for Money^TM^. Usually it’s Money^TM^ in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by Money^TM^ when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd Money^TM^ comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of Money^TM^ continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.
Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that
I mean, yes, but I think “sometimes” really underestimates role money plays in a capitalist world. Money is power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.
While I like both takes, I don’t think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldn’t recognize the value one centralized tool has. It would have been sufficient to control both Twitter and Reddit, moderate the hell out of topics they don’t like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isn’t really sensible.
I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any “subversive investment advice”, that might have been on Reddit.
Agreed. It's no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.
Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.
I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).
The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven't demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can't turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?
Great point, and I do think you're right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.
But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why's of that are conspiracy theories.
Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi because he was defying their army of Twitter trolls with a network of volonteers he bankrolled.