CDC, please look into it
Twitter is still working this morning despite its new owner’s best efforts to vivisect it, and despite thousands of users rushing for the exits. Elon Musk’s employees among them (Washington Post):
Hundreds of Twitter employees refused Thursday to sign a pledge to work longer hours, threatening the site’s ability to keep operating and prompting hurried debates among managers over who should be asked to return, current and former employees said.
The number of engineers tending to multiple critical systems had been reduced to two, one or even zero, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The crisis came in response to an ultimatum new owner Elon Musk issued Wednesday demanding that employees sign a pledge to work harder by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday or accept three months’ severance pay.
Another report emerged that Twitter informed its staff that the company’s offices will be temporarily closed and badge access will be restricted through Monday. This story appears to be confirmed by Alex Cohen, who was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices.
Twitter erupted both with employees bidding adieu and users heading for the exits:
Locked out his employees, did he?
God complex
“Technology is the closest thing we have to magic,” Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern and author of “Adrift: America in 100 Charts,” tells Christiane Amanpour. In an age of falling church attendance our culture has replaced its need for super-beings with technology leaders. Like Donald Trump and other rich elites, Musk, argues Galloway, has “a bit of a god complex.” He is a man who believes he can lay off half his employees, “and treat them poorly and disparage them” without consequences.
While lamenting the platform’s looming demise Thursday night, Twitter users seemed to be cheering for consequences and dumping on Musk.
Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’
“Elon Musk is the villain from Moonraker. Same private space program and weird eugenics obsession,” Twitter user @XLProfessor observes, likely responding to a story from Julia Black in Business Insider (see top of page) on “pronatalists.” They mean to save the human race by seeding the planet with their superior DNA:
Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are “pronatalists,” part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It’s a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times’ opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” It’s also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us” to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.”
“We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids,” Malcolm tells Insider.
An obsession with producing heirs is hardly a new phenomenon. Elites have used lineage to consolidate money and power for most of human history. But as couples in the developed world are increasingly putting off parenthood until later in life — or abandoning it altogether — people like the Collinses are looking for hacks to make large families feasible in a modern, secular society.
They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there’s the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The goal of elite genetic engineering is “about taking control of human evolution,” says Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist philosopher now an outspoken critic of the movement. “The longtermist view itself implies that really, people in rich countries matter more.”
Doesn’t that premise underly our entire corporatist economy? People exist to serve the economy (and its masters). The economy does not exist to serve people.
Why does the news lately feel like those “You give us three minutes and we’ll give you the world” clips from RoboCop?
Really, the CDC should study toxic narcissism. It might be transmissible. And it’s spreading.