In A Better World

      In a better world, Elon Musk would have never bought Twitter.  Not because he's "ruining" it; Twitter always was and remains a private company and whoever owns and controls it can do just about anything they like with it, banning or admitting whoever they prefer.  Nope, the problem is that owning Twitter magnifies him and up close, he's got the same feet of clay as anyone else.

      From a distance, you've got the super-genius financier revolutionizing cars, digging tunnels, making space travel cheap and frequent and planning to settle Mars.  That's impressive stuff, even if he makes the occasional misstep in his personal life, in an interview or in a tweet.  Up close, you've got a man whose main difference from everyone else is that he's got a lot more money.  He's pretty typical of the financial-type techbro.  We wanted Moses dressed as Tony Stark; owning Twitter dropped the veil and we saw Just Some Guy with SF dreams and a wallet fat enough to make progress towards them.

      Power may not reliably corrupt but it inevitably brings out the jerk in everyone -- and we're all jerks.  Count on it.  We can be certain that George Washington's White House staff and the secretaries and domestics serving Cincinnatus when he served Rome occasionally remarked about their boss, "What an asshole."

      Twitter was arbitrary and capricious by committee under previous ownership.  Now it's arbitrary and capricious by one man's whim.  Either way, the medium amplifies every decision.  This can be bad for business.  One of the few virtues of committees is that they generally move quite slowly and often predictably.  Advertisers, investors and users like that   An individual owner can move quickly, in surprising directions.  And even his smallest jerk moves cast an enormous shadow.

      Social media these days offers a staggeringly wide array of choices, from Right to Left to mixed to apolitical, with varying degrees of anonymity.  While you might (or might not) decry the tendency to form "silos" of similar outlook and attitude, it's certainly disconcerting to have one's silo repainted after you've become comfortable inside it, and that's what a lot of the angst over Twitter's changes is about.

      Maybe the Great Wizard is always smoke and mirrors and it's the little man behind the curtain who gets things done, frantically working the controls, looking frazzled and improvising as he goes.  I'm okay with that.