@DetroitDan I think it’s fair to say that state and security-state adjacent actors were “in the room” and made their pitch to Twitter, and you can dislike that. But I don’t think any fair read of what Taibbi et al unearthed could fail to note how extraordinarily independent pre-Musk Twitter was in responding to that. Mostly, they called bullshit and refused to censor. 1/
@DetroitDan The big conservative outrages — the Hunter laptop, banning Trump — may have been mistakes, but they were Twitter’s mistakes. Yes, the Hunter laptop choice was “informed” by alerts to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation, and in your view that was entirely bullshit. But the Twitter team wasn’t under state pressure, they fucked up on their own because they thought they were doing the right thing. 2/
@DetroitDan Obviously what’s “right” says something about their own ideology and worldview. I think you can make a strong case that Twitter’s misinformation policy reflected basically a professional liberal, mainstream professional class worldview (esp re COVID), and they made consequential distribution-shaping choices (from deamplifcation to takedowns) based on that. 3/
@DetroitDan But I don’t think you can fairly make the case that they just did what the US security state instructed, at least on the censorship side. They had a strong culture of resisting state censorship demands, from US and foreign government sources. (There is evidence I think they capitulated to US security state demands *not* to censor accounts they otherwise might have flagged as inauthentic, an interesting kind of case!) 4/
@DetroitDan Musk’s Twitter has flouted the establishment liberal worldview of prior Twitter on things like COVID and hate speech, so may seem refreshing to people who felt suppressed before. But on questions of state-directed censorship, Musk’s Twitter is unambiguous worse. He lets Modi’s government ban tweets globally, something prior Twitter never did. 5/
@DetroitDan I’m sure Musk’s Twitter doesn’t capitulate to any US security state requests, because he knows they are toothless, unlike India, which might block Twitter if he offends them. For all that is wrong with the US, you can publicly give the security state the finger (as long as it is not by exfiltrating classified documents), and nothing bad will happen to you. In a personal sense, as a writer, I am much more worried about Ron DeSantis than the CIA. /fin
it’s clearly very expensive to train gpt-4-ish models. but how expensive is it to run them? if openai permitted, what kind of hardware would you need to run a local gpt-4?
@paul on the internet, nobody knows if you’re an LLM.
you play innocent, like you don’t know public libraries groom readers.
@djc From the Vox story, it read to me like they were giving immunoglobins along with the vaccine. If for some reason, people had skipped the vaccine after a potential exposure until it would be too late, I can see that the immunoglobins might become a pretty urgent requirement. Once you get sick with rabies, I think your odds of surviving are very small. But if you know you've had a dangerous encounter, my understanding was that prompt vaccination would be in time.
@djc (I hadn't had the vaccine until after the bite, started the series immediately when I was bitten.)
@DetroitDan I think this is the one you’re referring to? It’s the only Taibbi Twitter files that mentions CIA, and refers to a group called Hamilton 68 that purported to identify Russian disinformation accounts. Per Taibbi’s own reporting, Twitter execs quickly caught this as bullshit and did not censor or shadow ban based on it. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105 1/
@DetroitDan Taibbi takes them to task for not publicly calling bullshit on the group, as they privately considered doing. But it seems to me mostly an example of Twitter execs resisting pressure from a security-state connected group, rather than acceding to it. /fin
@DetroitDan (i screwed up my search earlier! there are other Taibbi twitter files that mention CIA. but a bunch of it seems to fit that pattern: overzealous maybe state or kind-of state adjacent flags stuff to twitter, twitter, particularly the rather heroic yoel roth, checks it out and calls bullshit, doesn’t take it down.)
@eed3si9n small dollar donations bring a kind of populism, but i think it’s definitionally distinct from plutocracy, which refers to government by the very wealthy. a few years ago i was hopeful that small-dollar populism might be a net plus, but experience has diminished my optimism’, small dollars go disproportionately to and incentivize circus-like arousal of public passions. ad hoc self-selection of “voters” (ie donors) and reasonable forms of representation are in serious tension. 1/
@eed3si9n i’m very grateful that small dollar donations made Bernie a real contender, but again pessimistically, i think the days when a candidate as sober and serious as he is would win the small-dollar race have passed, it was an artifact of professional politics not yet having optimized itself for small dollars. now Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene will win that contest. i still probably prefer the effect of small dollars on the D side to the prior and mostly continuing 2/
@eed3si9n situation in which D insiders basically locked out the broad public. so my views remain somewhat mixed. but fundamentally, small dollar donations are like box-office receipts, they reflect a kind of enthusiasm of mostly upper middle class people unusually invested in the dramas of politics. i think they encourage comic book heroes and villians (which is which just depends on your side). 3/
@eed3si9n regardless of all of this (there are lots of nuances! i might be overly cynical!), “plutocracy” in the sense of big-dollar donors is what is behind the takeover of the judiciary, the well-organized and execute project to gerrymander and suppress, etc. there is big money for small government led by the most plutocracy-sympathetic politicians possible, and it’s done fabulous work, on its own terms. 4/
@eed3si9n maybe small-donor populism is a net virtue as a check on this, maybe its circus incentives make it a net harm. but regardless of all that, plutocracy as people mostly understand the term, rule by the influence of the very wealthy, is pretty clearly incompatible with any reasonable version of democracy. and i don’t think it possible to untether great personal wealth from outsize public influence. ergo… (thank you for sbt!) /fin
@mtsw (I guess I'm pretty interested in tilting the scales against the conversation landing at another platform monopoly. I love to follow you here!)
Some national-greatness, protectionist, left-YIMBY-ism by #RobertHockett https://roberthockett.substack.com/p/centralize-national-redevelopment
@blake No.
The billionaires are privileged in every large-scale domain, including of course manipulating government action. But the state is where they are least privileged. That's still a lot privileged! But their money can't reliably buy elections, electoral outcomes often defy funding flows, and politicians are only reliably bought while issues are obscure to public scrutiny. It's an uphill fight everywhere but the quasidemocratic state is not a futile battleground. Cynicism is foolish.
plutocracy and democracy cannot coexist. we don't need a guillotine. we just need a tax code. https://elk.zone/mas.to/@sltrib/110180784027294881
Will small businesses be squeezed between a tight labor market and a community bank credit crunch, delivering us even further into the hands of corporate overlords? Do we overestimate meaningful small biz formation by mistaking DoorDashers for Main Street moxie?
Interesting (troubling) questions at the end of this note by #MichaelGreen
In 2001 I was bitten by a street dog in Constanta, Romania. I was a foreigner, but with no fuss I was scheduled for a series of rabies shots for free.
I guess the treatment did not include the new immunoglobulin this article describes as “buying time”, but my understanding in 2001 was I had nothing to worry about since I started the shots promptly. The article does not quantify how much extra benefit the immunoglobulin is alleged to provide.
Get sick outside the US.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/7/16851134/rabies-treament-expensive-emergency-room
@DetroitDan Twitter pre-Musk struggled in a role no single company should have, unilaterally shaping the contours of the public square. Twitter post-Musk has not struggled. It has just done the whims of a toddler oligarch. I wasn’t happy with pre-Musk Twitter, but “censorship and propaganda” seems like a characterization motivated by particular disagreements. Taibbi did not cover himself in glory overstating that case.
@taber but they won’t sell us greenland.
just one bit of the excellent economics writing in this piece from @jwmason, on arguments about the futility of industrial policy due to overcapacity narrowly, and how politically we make progress in economics policy more broadly. https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-jacobin-yes-we-should-support-industrial-policy-and-the-green-new-deal/ ht @ryanlcooper
“There's an important truth to the idea that, in a world of long-lived specialized capital goods and constant or falling marginal costs, there is no tendency for market prices to reflect costs of produc-tion. Too much competition, and firms will sell at prices that don't recoup their fixed costs, and drive each other to bankruptcy. Too little competi-tion, and firms will recover their full costs and then some, while limiting socially useful output. No market process ensures that competition ends up at the goldilocks level in the middle.”
@Jonathanglick Yeah. That's no good. Hopelessness is always savvier than wise.
"Institutions" very broadly construed (not necessarily formal institutions) have to stand as a bridge between individual and collective (potentially systemic) agency. Mass protests are an institution, and I think they had effect during that period. (I am less sanguine about that institution going forward, though, for a variety of reasons.)
@Jonathanglick I think it's a potato chip kind of effect. We know they are wrong or at least we are liable to abuse them but they are satisfying somehow so often we succumb. Especially when people are so actively trying to sell them to us. When we watch Netflix, we are interested in characters and drama. Thinking structurally feels like work, it doesn't draw us like entertainment. If we let ourselves be persuaded eating potato chips is virtuous work, that's very convenient!
@Jonathanglick (I hope that calling explicit attention to its incoherence and counterproductiveness can help de-fuse them. But that's more a matter of hope than evidence!)