Eight years ago, way before Elon Musk bought the company and took the helm, I explained (somewhat crudely) how to fix Twitter. More recently, I divulged empirically how Twitter deploys an infantilism of free speech and how the truth Elon appears to seek will not come from the barking dog syndrome of people who talk a lot about the things they know so little about.
Nobody really knows what they are talking about.
John Cleese
Just because you talk about something a lot does not mean you know what you are talking about is another salient quote that comes to mind. Intelligent people know how little they know, whereas less discerning people all too frequently latch-on to a pageantry of common knowledge, the regurgitation of hindsight, to feign a new perspective on foresight. That proposition sells easily to innocent greater-fools who confound knowledge with the discovery of new normalizations of relative truth to produce the majority of mind-numbing opinions stated as fact from which Twitter derives its advertising revenue.
In fact, as I explain in Learn To Think, truth is not absolute, can be both true and untrue at the same time depending on the purview of the observer, and is subject to Einstein’s theory of relativity. None of which I have seen Elon deploy in Twitter’s algorithms. In simple terms, human truth is still stuck in a flat-world paradigm of manmade absolutism, where round-world relativity and plurality are required. The evolutionary reality of relativity innate to humanity is held hostage by the easily scalable but misguided absolutism of technology’s algorithms.
The fanfare of solipsistic absolutisms deployed by technology harms, not helps, humanity.
From what I can see, Elon deploys a “good-old” advertising scheme in which those prepared to fork over money will enjoy greater visibility. Not you are the product, as on Facebook, but the opinions of the masses pondering and latching onto aimless make-believe proven to ignore the need to strengthen human adaptability to nature’s entropy have become the product. Not merit or truth, but populism remains the driver of the conversion to advertising clicks.
I asked Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook the following question online eight years ago and never got a response:
Why Does Facebook Believe A Monoculture Fed By Advertising Is Good For The World?I pose the same question to Elon Musk about Twitter.
Without an evolutionary meritocracy established by our best understanding of nature’s truth, the centrifuge of human opinion packaged as “wisdom” subsequently promulgated by Twitter and other social media platforms will continue to dumb-down humanity into an accelerated anthropogenic cascade from which there is no return.
Not only does the opinion of 10,000 men, from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ quote, not matter; only our best understanding of nature’s gameplay matters. Do not expect fundamental change from any social media platform that ignores Einstein’s theory of relativity proven one hundred years ago. A new rendition of a flat-world, controlled by naïve technology moderators reveling in false positivity, will not yield a better rendition of a round-world that harbors us.
