On The Fall of Twitter
aka all my bookmarks
Huh?
Well. It's November 4th. Twitter has just gone through a major round of layoffs, as have a few other companies while they can escape scrutiny.
As a former SRE, I'd just like to say: This site isn't going to burn down. That's way too calm and organized a death for a site this big which apparently just fired most of the on-call staff.
That's more like it. It's going to evaporate, not like a puddle on a hot day, but like a couple tons of steel that's just met an atomic shockwave
We're going to need high speed cameras to even see the blast as anything more than a single frame of white and then devastation as far as the eye can see.
This site is going to melt.
It's actually funny in retrospect how people have been talking about how the changes to verification and unbanning certain people is going to drive people off Twitter as they lose trust in the platform...
It's not going to last long enough for that to even matter!
This is a great example of what's going to happen. It's not going to get hacked or have servers catch fire, but something small and unexpected is going to take it down and they'll be unable to find someone to unfuck it:
Right now a disk is filling up on a server somewhere in some data center that a person who has just been laid off has been manually clearing every few days and when that disk fills up Twitter will go down.
So I'm trying to get all my useful info and links off of there before they're lost forever. Why does it always feel like I'm racing against time trying to build as things crumble? Anyway.
TODO: sort these into the relevant articles, tags, everything, organize, organize, organize all the resources
To start, this maybe isn't related specifically to twitter, but I feel it's relevant. From Dan Waterfield (@danwaterfield) here:
I would argue that this is what state collapse looks like btw. A slow inability to build new things, to look after the populace, to repair infrastructure. Essentials get more expensive. The elite retreat to enclaves and gated communities.
State becomes less and less able to respond to natural disasters.
I think that's applicable enough to the twitter situation, though I'm not sure that's what Dan was originally referencing. If/when twitter falls, there is no recourse. Under private ownership, with a lack of regulation or accountability, we can lose millions of hours of community time, thought, and effort. Just because the richest guy around wanted to meme around and buy a website, wreak havoc on the workers for a little good time.
We (see: On Uniting) need to be building and maintaining our own infrastructure, in order to prevent it from being destroyed at the whim of those at the top.
For right now I'm being a bit of a modern librarian on my silly little site. I am trying to salvage and reclaim, in this moment. But we need to build systems for the people, and we need to have been building em 20 years ago. The only time is now.
more tweets about twitter
jfc these are making me sad and anxious. I'm saving them here because I feel powerless to do anything else.
Social Media is not optional - Nov 4, 2022
From Robert Brockaway (@brockway_llc, linktree) here:
This is where I get the word out about my stuff, where I meet other writers, where I find and book podcast guests. I don't have this following anywhere else, and there's no other place to do this.
I know the cool thing to do is be glad its dying because it spites some dipshit billionaire, but this meaningfully harms my professional life in a serious way.
I quit Facebook because it strangled reach and, y'know, murdered my entire industry. That left most of my social media reach through this platform - what should it have been, TikTok, Instagram? They're not designed for writers and connecting like this. Also: Both equally evil.
Social media is not optional for a working creative these days, it factors into everything you do from podcast sales to book deals. You have to do something, and for people like me: This was it. There was and is not a meaningful alternative.
So it's weird to have this huge pit of anxiety and despair over fucking social media, but I just watched a tantrum-throwing baby drive a tank through my workplace and I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to recover from it.
One thing that's been proven time and again is that an audience is an incredibly fragile thing. This goes away and 95% of my followers -- even engaged ones, people that buy my books, will drift away too.
It's up to me to try to move that audience elsewhere before this dies, but again -- to where? This is it, and any alternative is going to see massive hemorrhage.
Losing a 90K-person platform - Nov 4, 2022
Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) who writes on substack here puts it more concisely:
Oh yeah as an underemployed writer, I'm totally fine with losing a 90K-person platform built up over thirteen years, when I am otherwise not remotely famous, why do you ask?
Unions
I posted a tweet by Anne V Clark wrt twitter and unionization in On Unions if you want to check out that related content.
Hot Potato'd - Nov 5, 2022 - (src)
From Peter, @The_Law_Boy of 5-4 Pod:
lots of frustration being directed at elon but it's also pretty weird that the twitter board just hot potato'd the company onto a dude who clearly did not actually want to own it
there's something so bleak about developing a platform for 15 years and then just cashing out as soon as you can get a 30% premium or whatever. shareholder primacy creates these moments of complete detachment from the need to actually make something useful or good
many repliers very proud of themselves for knowing the basic contours of corporate law here rather than grasping the actual point which is that corporate law is dumb
Nov 7, 2022 (src)
From (@stevekrenzel)
With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter.
With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter.
Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved them and made them relevant again (to the detriment of us all). But I digress...
I worked as a software engineer on a team with a charter to make Twitter work better for people in emerging markets (Brazil, India, Nigeria, etc...). This meant a lot of mobile work. And was mostly non-visual stuff - reducing bandwidth, memory usage, battery consumption.
Oh and app size... we fought tooth and nail to keep the app under 10MB. FB had the money to zero-rate for people in India to d/l a 100MB app, but we did not. We finally lost the 10MB battle when Twitter Video launched (iirc). After that, all discipline around app size was lost.
One of the first areas I worked on was improving the way our mobile apps uploaded logs. Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs everything users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments.
The size of logs adds up quickly.
In the app, HTTP responses were compressed, but requests weren't. Logs are highly compressible, so I wired up support to gzip HTTP requests, and tweaked our log ingestion server to handle these.
(That reduced mobile bandwidth consumption by ~40% iirc. It was absurd.)
So I became known as the mobile logs guy. And that sets the stage for why I was pulled into a Sales conversation. Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. A large telco wanted to pay us to log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them.
My plan was to aggregate signal strength by carrier / by location. I worked with Data Science to find a granularity – minimum area size and minimum distinct users per area – that would preserve anonymity even when combined with other sources of data (differential privacy).
When we sent this data to the telco they said the data was useless. They switched their request and said they want to be able to tell how many of our users are entering their competitors’ stores.
A bit sketchier, but maybe workable in a privacy respecting way?
We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want.
The subsequent request was absurd.
I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing.
The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.”
I responded with some variant of “No fucking way”.
There was no universe where I was going to help sell granular identifiable user location data.
This led to more internal meetings. Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS.
Normally they might find another engineer to do this work, but my whole team was aligned with the privacy concerns. Twitter had also just done layoffs (aside: time is a flat circle), so there were no spare engineers around.
My team wasn’t touched by layoffs, but half of them had quit anyway. Twitter was having a mass exodus.
I had done what I could, but Twitter was no longer a place to do good work. I decided to join the exodus and would pull any levers to kill this on my way out.
One random anecdote:
In the middle of this, I had gotten a new manager who, in a retention attempt I’ll never forget, said “If we filled a dump truck with money and dumped it on you, would you stay and build this?”
I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that… but no dice.
My last email written at Twitter was to Jack. To his credit, he responded quickly with something to the effect of “Let me look into that and make sure there isn’t a misunderstanding. It doesn’t seem right. We wouldn’t want to do that.”
It was in his hands now.
As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it.
I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data.
And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out, or you have to escalate and risk it back firing, but a good pocket veto is a tool to learn to wield well.
Nov 17, 2022 (src)
From climate report Kendra Pierre-Louis (@KendraWrites), who runs kendrawrites.com
The thing about Twitter's demise is that like yes I'm going to miss a ton of people but also we are going to lose a key tool for communicating about disasters in real time.
Twitter is how I knew that the Paradise Fire was bad well before any news outlets were on it. Twitter allowed people in real time to beg for rescue, during storms like Hurricane Harvey and people were. An underappreciated aspect of Twitter is that the default is public
This also means that Twitter is a tool for research. The study underpinning this story I wrote a few years back mined Twitter for its analysis. No Twitter, no study, no analysis. And it's only possible because of what I said above - default is public. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds (via nytimes.com)
It's really truly not hyperbole to say: Twitter saved lives. And if it goes away... it's going away as more of these disasters are on the rise, and government infrastructure to support people is waning. The timing couldn't be worse.
I just want to add, I know Twitter was a place for covid disinformation. But it was also an incredible source of accurate information about covid when the CDC was frankly asleep at the wheel. Twitter is how I knew to buy KF94s months before the CDC was like upgrade your mask ...
Shit... Twitter is how I knew to wear a mask while the CDC was telling us to save them for healthcare professionals.
I was IMPORTING MASKS FROM KOREA when the CDC was still like telling us to buy cloth masks from Etsy. Twitter taught me about the existence of @masknerd who opened my eyes to masks beyond the air queen. And about @projectn95
Twitter is why during the height of covid in 2020 in NYC I knew where to send the weird stash of surgical masks I had amassed in November 2019 when I had caught (what I later realized was) the flu on a reporting trip and still needed to report.
I sent my masks to healthcare workers desperately in need of PPE,including my weird ass CVS masks which were better than nothing. I sent my metrocard to a nurse who still needed to ride transit to get to work. None of this would have been possible without Twitter.
Elon
Nov 8, 2022 (src)
From Linette Lopez @lopezlinette, a Business Insider columnist.
How do I know so much about how @elonmusk does things? I spent 3 years investigating Tesla at @BusinessInsider from 2018-2021. Here are some of sloppy, dangerous, callous, things I learned:
Musk would later admit Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy during this period.
And yes, there was that time @elonmusk was a total creep to me on this app, which only convinced me I was asking good questions.
(quotetweeting elon here)
Direction Twitter's Headed - Nov 17, 2022 (src)
From Matt Binder, who hosts ScamEconomy.com and DOOMEDcast.com and makes videos at youtube.com/MattBinder and also writes at misinfo.substack.com.
the thing that will matter will be how many verified followers you have, says Elon Musk
but in the near future, you’ll only be verified if you pay $8
and Twitter’s own data shows the people who are paying are right wingers and crypto accounts
that’s where this site is headed
Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgrey): There's plenty of accounts with inauthentic audiences. See: the Atlantic and HuffPost. Millions of followers with incredibly low engagement.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk): Agreed. What will matter in the future is how many Verified followers you have.
Community, Uniting, Organizing
Rebuild Community - Oct 24, 2022 (src)
This is just a thought I like to consider, from rafael diaz (@goodfriendraf)
can’t help but feel more and more convinced that we’re so alienated from one another that we need to take on serious efforts just to rebuild community itself before we’re able to get much out of trying to organize it
Climate and Energy
Climate Collapse - Oct 22, 2022 (src)
A thread made by HeathenCommunist (@MarxistHeathen), a CPUSA member in Arizona:
Climate collapse is not one issue among many or another social ill that we need to defeat capitalism before dealing with. Before anything and everything else: it’s deadline.
Shifting our focus to it isn’t about making it the most important “issue”. It’s not an “issue”.
It’s a material condition that MUST shape the entirety of our strategy like a frame. That doesn’t mean we talk about it more than anything else. It just means it’s always on our mind when strategizing, even if we don’t say it.
What does revolution mean when it’s not just a matter of liberation but total survival?
What do scientific socialism and experimentation mean when we no longer have the time to “try again”?
What does it mean for internal contradictions among our enemy when they know this and they know that working with us to actually defeat the other camp be defeated by us would be their death sentence?
What does it mean for revolutionary strategy when asking the question of “how can we accomplish this” is an obsolete question, replaced by “how can we accomplish this in time”?
What does it mean when we can’t afford another setback? When we can’t afford another century of struggle?
What does it mean when believing revolution won’t happen in our lifetime stops being the planting of trees whose shade we will never sit under & is now accepting that our grandchildren will have no shade to sit in?
Historical socialist strategy was premised on laying the groundwork for future struggle when it could not find a way to achieve its aims.
How do we cope with the fact that we are that future generation that groundwork was laid for? That, if we can’t find a way to achieve our aims, that our only option is to keep looking until we find it?
Nuclear Power
Spent Fuel: The risky resurgence of nuclear power by Andrew Cockburn
Nov 1, 2022 (src)
Written by Michael Thomas, who writes at michaelthomaswrites.substack.com.
Recently I learned about a man who has trained 1,000+ people to block wind and solar projects.
I read through all his training materials, presentations, and seminars.
Here's what I learned about him and how his students plan to "win the war on clean energy."
The odds are pretty good you haven't heard of this man, John Droz, Jr.
He's only been interviewed by a few journalists. And when asked about his influence he always responds the same way:
"This story isn't about me."
But the story of climate action and delay in America is very much about Droz.
For most of his life, Droz was a semi-retired real estate developer. In 2011, he reinvented himself and became a "physicist."
That year, his home state of N.C. debated a bill about climate change.
Droz put together a series of presentations, some as long as 168 slides, and headed to the capital.
He had crunched the numbers and looked at the science.
According to Droz, climate change was a sham pushed by clean energy lobbyists.
Remarkably, many legislators listened to him.
Even the Washington Post listened to him. In an article about sea-level rise, they quoted the real estate developer as a "local physicist."
Droz's efforts worked. In 2012, N.C. passed a bill that prevented the state from taking action on sea-level rise.
This work got the attention of the biggest climate deniers in the country.
That year, ATI, a dark money think tank brought him on as a fellow.
At ATI, Droz developed a playbook that would eventually be used by thousands of people to stop clean energy projects.
In 2012, he organized a secret meeting and training session to share his strategy with some of the country's most influential climate deniers and activists.
For Droz, winning the war on clean energy is all about communication.
The man is obsessed with what he calls “Press relations (PR) strategy.”
Those two letters—PR—are in hundreds of documents he's produced over the last decade.
What’s the goal of this PR?
As he wrote, “Public opinion [on clean energy] must begin to change among citizens at large.”
But changing minds wasn’t all Droz was interested in.
The next line in his memo reads: “Ultimate Goal: Change policy direction based on the message.”
Droz, like many climate deniers, understood the power of offering the public and lawmakers a set of “alternative facts.”
All credible experts agree wind energy is better for the environment than fossil fuels.
Droz knew it was possible to convince people otherwise.
Clean energy projects create jobs and tax revenue. They're great for local economies.
Droz offered an alternative assessment.
At the secret meeting in 2012, he proposed an idea:
Established think tanks like Heartland, CFACT, and Cato could publish these "alternative facts."
And volunteers in communities across the U.S. could present them to local lawmakers.
Of course, these volunteers couldn't just be against clean energy.
Droz wrote about this in a later training document titled "What Not To Say."
He writes that if you're against something, "You will be painted as a denier and as a person against progress (going green)."
One of Droz' most effective students, Susan Ralston, mastered this principle.
She named her organization "Citizens for Responsible Solar."
The group has blocked huge projects across Virginia. Their main argument: Solar should be on rooftops, not rural land.
By far the most unique tactic, I saw in Droz' training materials was his suggestion that clean energy opponents never compromise.
According to Droz, the way to win "the war on clean energy" is to come out with aggressive demands and stick to them.
This approach has led his students to pass laws that literally or effectively ban clean energy in communities across the United States.
When they don't succeed at that, they file lawsuits that can drag out for years.
All around the country, clean energy opponents are using this playbook to block solar and wind farms.
Projects that could have offered substantial carbon emissions reductions in almost every state have been blocked as a result.
As for John Droz? He's reinvented himself once more.
In searching public records for his name, I came across dozens of emails to officials everywhere from Arizona to Pennsylvania about his "independent analysis of the 2020 election."
Droz is now an election security expert.
Later this week I plan to publish a story about who is funding and spreading clean energy misinformation.
Stay tuned.
And if you missed it, you can check out last week's story
Media
(src)
From Hilary Agro (@hilaryagro, linktree)
We all know that Marvel movies are military propaganda but I think it's under-discussed how they're also neoliberal propaganda for making people believe that powerful people will save us if we just let them do whatever they want
I know many people have indeed discussed this (feel free to share links) but since many people still believe Elon Musk and Bill Gates are gonna solve climate change and poverty, clearly it's still not discussed enough
Anyways none of this really matters because the fact is that capitalism is eating us alive—we're served these distractions so we don't organize to fight back.
If you're in Canada, learn about and support the CUPE wildcat strike! (via twitter.com/hilaryagro)
Ukraine
Nov 6, 2022 (src)
Hi Everyone,
My threads are sparse and spare but I wanted to talk about the current battle of Pavlovka in Donetsk Oblast, south of Donetsk
For context Pavlovka is located south southwest of a village made up of high rise buildings called Ugledar that give it a panoramic view allowing for artillery spotting all the way to Donetsk. You need to take Ugledar to properly secure the southern approach of Donetsk.
Pavlovka had been taken by the Russians in the Spring but was lost in June to a UKR counterattack shortly before the Russians completely took Lugansk Oblast.
On 31 October the Russian commanders in the region apparently saw an opportunity as the VSU withdrew a brigade from the area to plug gaps up by Artemovsk. They decided to launch an attack across the front
Following a sharp well planned bombardment, including use of TOS-1A thermobaric artillery, the first UKR defensive line was annihilated and the survivors fell back. Despite the mud progress was quick and half the village fell into Russian hands that day
By 1 November most of the village had been cleared, but the UKR held onto the northern edge of the village, assisted by rushed reserves and artillery fire directed from Ugledar
The VSU brought in a new brigade and counterattacked pushing the Russians back somewhat. The Russians however were not helpless. The DNR unit Kaskad has published footage of them using drones to fire artillery strikes on the UKR second line in Ugledar
Now here is where things get interesting and confusing. Controversy has arisen on RU TG from a letter ostensibly written to the Governor of the Primorsky Krai that complained of heavy losses, extremely bad planning and incompetent glory seeking commanders.
Specifically the letter claims General Rustem Muradov, commander of the Eastern Military District, was promised a medal if he took Pavlovka by the Chief of the General Staff, General Gerasimov and there was little planning or care shown
The letter also claims the 155th Marine Brigade has lost 300 men killed and wounded in four days fighting and HALF its vehicles. Link to the text can be found here (in Russian).
This has been seized on by Russian correspondents Alexander Sladkov and the War Gonzo team and promoted with great outrage. It has also been picked up by pro-UKR western commentators including Rob Lee.
RT (via Rob Lee, twitter.com/RALee85)
Now then here is the thing. I don't believe this letter fully. Why? Because the letter said the brigade has lost half its vehicles. Even at a minimum that would 130 vehicles. The UKR are very media conscious. We would see the evidence of this all over social media. We do not
Scanning Rob Lee and UKR Weapons Tracker I counted at most 6 vehicles from this area of the front in UKR videos over the past four days. One of which was a not badly damaged but abandoned tank in Pavlovka.
By contrast there is evidence of UKR soldiers in severe distress in this area particularly from the VSU 72nd Bde. There are videos of soldiers claiming many of their comrades are dead and they could be overrun at any moment.
As far Pavlovka itself, the aforementioned DNR unit Kaskad, shows continuous strikes on UKR units fighting in the village.
So we have no evidence of devastating Russian losses but we do have direct video evidence that this is definitely not a triumphant easy going time for the VSU. Indeed we have pleas on UKR social media about missing men from the 72nd VSU bde. What is going on here?
Well, a few things. As @BakerSevenZero has pointed out the letter singles out and calls glory seeking and incompetent two Russian Generals of North Caucasian ethnicity. Muradov and Akhmedov
We know the UKR attempt to sow ethnic division in the Russian Armed Forces, recall for instance claims from February and March that ethnic Russian commanders were throwing away the lives of their Buryat and North Caucasian troops - claims later proven false
The letter also calls out the chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Recently both Kadyrov, the Chechen President/Governor, and Prigozhin, the CEO of the Wagner PMC got General Alexander Lapin of the Central Military District sacked
These were on claims similar to those levelled against Muradov in this letter here. However those claims were vehemently denied by Lapin's own troops, the Donbass militia who served under his command, and direct video and battlefield evidence to the contrary
So what do I think? This letter is either a UKR psyop or a bit of racist nonsense from some members of the 155th Naval Infantry brigade. I tend to lean toward the former.
Whatever the case the battle of Pavlovka is definitely grim for both sides, but this latest news I think is being seized on by too many people both those who lean towards Russia and those who lean toward UKR.
Modern Movement
Nov 7, 2022 (src)
via mazal מזל (@m1vql1hdwt), editor at Unity-Struggle-Unity.
we lost like 2 generations of marxist-leninist leadership through the most vicious state repression during the last few decades and i think that goes a long way towards explaining why anarchistic/utopian misconceptions of theory and praxis prevail in our movement now
"where are our mentors? where is the old guard"
...
"oh, they're all dead."
index tags: Twitter, Backup
category tags: World History, Tweets