Remember who invented the VCR?
Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. once treated our class to an amusing tale of how, in the early days of televsion, he advocated before U.S. regulatory authorities for the 3-color cathode ray system that produced a color picture. A competing scheme featured a spinning color wheel rotating at high speed. That worked fine for an oscilloscope-sized device, he told them. But scaled up to living room size it would require a wheel five feet in diameter. He had a demonstration model, he told them, but (IIRC) was afraid it might fly apart and harm someone if he turned it on. His 3-color cathode ray scheme won the day and color TV as we know it was approved.
Who remembers Thomas Goldsmith? Remember the humble VCR? Remember who invented it? Me neither.
But we might remember Elon Musk for destroying Twitter. A meme pointedly reminds people that Elon Musk did not start Tesla either.
For all his Trumpish skill at self-promotion, the world’s richest man may be remembered for how he destroyed Twitter by turning it into a trollish cesspool.
Jelani Cobb argues at The New Yorker that without social media like Twitter, “George Floyd—along with Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor—would likely have joined the long gallery of invisible dead Black people, citizens whose bureaucratized deaths were hidden and ignored.” Nevertheless, it’s time to bail, Cobb argues:
The singular virtue of the fiasco over which Musk has presided is the possibility that the outcome will sever, at least temporarily, the American conflation of wealth with intellect. Market valuation is not proof of genius. Ahead of the forty-four-billion-dollar deal that gave Musk private control of Twitter, he proclaimed that he would “unlock” the site’s potential if given the chance. His admirers hailed his interest with glee. Musk has been marketed as a kind of can-do avatar, a magical mix of Marvel comics and Ayn Rand, despite serial evidence to the contrary, like the allegations of abusive treatment of Tesla workers.
Vowing to leave is easier than doing so, Cobb explains. But better that than help Musk remain afloat:
My decision to leave yielded a tide of farewells but also two other types of responses. The first was low-grade trolling that had the effect of validating my decision to depart. But the second was more nuanced and complicated, an argument that leaving offered a concession to the abusive, reactionary elements whose presence has become increasingly prominent since Musk took over. One person paraphrased the writer Sarah Kendzior, urging users to “never cede ground in an information war.” Those arguments are increasingly frail, though. If there is, in fact, an information war raging on Twitter, Musk is a profiteer. Twitter is what it always was: a money-making venture—just more nakedly so. And it now subsidizes a billionaire who understands free speech to be synonymous with the right to abuse others. (While claiming to champion free speech, Musk has selectively granted it, suspending accounts that are critical of him and firing employees who dissented from his view of how the company should be run.) The tech industry’s gimmick to monetize our attention has been astoundingly successful even if Twitter has habitually struggled to be profitable. In the end, Musk’s leadership of the company appears to be a cynical form of trolling—creating a welcoming environment for some of the platform’s worst actors while simultaneously hailing his new order for its inclusivity.
To the extent that people remain active on Twitter, they preserve the fragile viability of Musk’s gambit. The illusory sense of community that still lingers on the platform is one of Musk’s most significant assets. No matter which side prevails, the true victor in any war is the person selling weapons to both sides. It seems likely that this experiment will conclude with bankruptcy and Twitter falling into the hands of creditors who will have their own ideas of what it should be and whom it should serve. But at least in the interim it’s worth keeping in mind that some battles are simply not worth fighting, some battles must be fought, but none are worth fighting on terms set by those who win by having the conflict drag on endlessly. ♦
Cobb has moved to Mastodon.
One of the barriers to leaving Twitter for a new social media platform is the annoyance of having to learn the quirks of a new one. For that, VCRs were for years a handy metaphor for me. Buying a new one was always a hassle. You knew how they worked and what basic functions they were supposed to have. But now you had to puzzle out where they’d hidden those functions on your new one.
A frustrated Mastodon user on a thread last night asked, “is there an edit button here?????”
Why yes, but where’d they hide it? What you see depends on how you’re viewing Mastodon.
On smartphone, click the three dots […] in the upper right hand corner of the post; select “Open in browser” from the drop-down; click three dots again on the browser version and the Edit function is visible in the drop-down on my Android. (Can’t speak for Apple users.) You don’t need the first steps on a desktop.
You’re welcome.