I think maybe we've got desensitised to this. But Elon Musk spends a lot of his time on Twitter promoting very straightforward white supremacy. Every day. Sure, he's a brilliant entrepreneur. But so was Henry Ford, and he created a nationwide newspaper to attack Jews.
What about that toad is brilliant?
Must weird to see your previous employer, A16z, put 400m to help him buy twitter.
Still don’t understand how people are on that platform. It’s just time to shut it down. This thinking is already perilously close to mainstream, to being normalised. We’re failing to see the significance of such utterances and, in other areas, actions. We’re being desensitised. That’s got to stop. Before it’s too late.
Les appeler “fous” ou “tarés”, c’est leur faire un cadeau. Ça individualise le problème. Ça le psychologise. Ça l’excuse presque. Ce qu’on voit là, ce n’est pas une pathologie personnelle. C’est une panique de classe dominante face à la perte de centralité. Pas une revanche contre “les autres”. Une revanche contre l’idée insupportable de ne plus être indispensables. Quand le monde ne t’admire plus, tu peux soit mûrir… soit acheter les infrastructures, tordre le récit et appeler ça une vision. Ce n’est pas de la folie. C’est une stratégie de survie d’ego devenue système. Et le vrai scandale, ce n’est pas qu’ils existent. C’est qu’on continue de les appeler des visionnaires au lieu de nommer la peur qui les drive.
The problem lies within who is seen as successful. When the 'currency' is being super rich, super powerful or super popular, it brings the worst in people: We tend to do whatever it takes to become one of those aforementioned three. I don't think shutting down platforms are the solution: You shut down one, something else will pop up, and with a vengeance. It needs a culture shift, which will take time. However, the first step towards that is to make sure that less people follow, like, applaud and talk about these worst kind of exploiters.
If the white supremacy isn't a deal-breaker, maybe backsliding into a deepfake porn site will be a final straw for more people? Wishful thinking these days.
My respect for you only grows. Thanks for putting it out there.
Thanks for saying something. Sometimes I'm sort of laughing nervously to myself like, "Is everyone seeing what I'm seeing?"
It's shocking how this is just treated as normal, and people are willing to routinely do business with a person who behaves like this. It is genuinely unbelievable, and damning that our industry treats it as unremarkable. No surprise that this led to a slippery slope where the same collaborators are now refusing to condemn him creating tools for child abuse imagery; they clearly have no moral boundaries whatsoever. Appreciate you maintaining moral clarity here and speaking up on it — far too few still do.