Thread by @alexandrosM

The Elon-Gator Principle 🧵

Or, what I learned from watching @elonmusk and @drrollergator use social media at the Grandmaster level.

Both Elon and Gator come across as effortless, because they are. This doesn't mean they are not refined or purposeful. It means they're doing something else than trying to succeed at social media. Their success is coming En Passant, much like JS Mills described finding happiness:

While it can be tempting to over think what will preserve or maximize your social power, social media is reflexive, and the result of politics is more politics.

The way to exit the maze of complex interrelationships is to exit the maze of complex interrelationships.

Otherwise, how can one explain tweets like these?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1453954994546229253?t=j-TvNcq0oc1IAZE3epwEqA&s=19

And while those who hatch complex plans think they look like this:

To everyone else they look more like this:

Because complex systems are complex, for every friendship you know you might lose, you don't have the counterfactual of the friendships you didn't know you didn't make. Journos (and @SamHarrisOrg) make the same mistake when they bring up "responsibility":

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1435339589518983170?t=0cx-HCVmE8BIwvFdLdI8NQ&s=19

And while the trap of respectability is there waiting for all of us, it's song getting louder for every new level of influence one achieves:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1446209724366536710?t=0cx-HCVmE8BIwvFdLdI8NQ&s=19

Ultimately, our collective future depends on the unreasonable.

This concludes our PSA for today, we will now be resuming our regularly scheduled programming.