My history: I bought my first computer in the early 1980s. I had taken one computer class in college, where I learned to write programs in BASIC. Soon thereafter, I got a Commodore VIC-20 with 3.5K of memory and an 8K memory expander. There was no disk drive. I had a cassette tape drive. But it was real computer at a reasonable price (about $300-400, I think, which was kind of expensive at the time, but it was much much cheaper than an Apple II). Within a year or two I got a 300 baud modem. Later I got computers with more memory: Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 and Atari ST and eventually a 80386 PC. I was always very happy to get a bigger computer with a faster modem – 1200 baud, then 9600 baud, and eventually 56K baud (pretty much the maximum speed for land lines in the old days). I was even an assistant sysop on the Compuserve Commodore Programming Forum for several years (which meant I didn’t have to pay $10/hour for connection time).
I’ve been using computers and modems for about 40 years. Here’s something I learned in the old days. If someone has a Bulletin Board System (BBS) where people can leave messages and have conversations, it absolutely should be moderated. An unmoderated message board descends into complete chaos. If anyone can post anything at all, with no limits, you get a ton of porn messages and there are spam messages about how to become a millionaire. There are lots of arguments with trolls. If nobody is in charge, a message board becomes a gigantic mess.
When I was still going to local BBSes, there were people who had user names like “MachoManWithLargePenis” (or whatever). I chose the name “Dbug” because it was less typing (and it’s my name on Daily Kos). Plus, I had a favorite program that was a debugger. It would let you look at the memory of the computer in hexadecimal. If I had to type my name every time I logged in, I wanted a short user name and a short password.
--
That history was the prelude to my opinion about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Here’s what I think about that:
1) He has the money to buy Twitter and take it private. I might not like it, but I don’t see anything illegal or immoral or even shady about it. I might dislike his decision and Musk might be an asshole, but we live in a capitalist society and he’s playing by the rules. I don’t see any reason to stop him from buying Twitter.
On the other hand...
2) Elon Musk is championing “freedom of speech” and he says he’s going to remove the rules and make it a “public forum for discussion” with very few restrictions. And right-wing Republicans are cheering him on. Let’s take this apart, piece by piece.
- Billionaires have a lot of money to buy things. Rich people sometimes think the size of their bank account makes them a genius. Yeah, no. Having money from one thing doesn’t mean you’re smart in other things.
- If there are no rules at all in the new Musk Twitter, it’s gonna turn into a cesspool of crap and piss and cigarette butts floating in the toilet. If anything goes, people will stop tweeting.
- If there are rules (no pornography and no racism and no whatever), but if Trump is allowed back and if Russian bots are allowed, it might become irrelevant. Does anybody remember Myspace? That’s a website that crashed and burned.
- I suppose Musk might do something to improve Twitter. But I doubt it.