Since I'm taking a break from my Twitter holiday and have therefore already made bad choices let's have a brief chat about the current drama.

Yes, Avery Edison had a take about Everything, Everywhere so nuclear that it is subject to a SALT treaty. No, she doesn't deserve threats One of the many, many, *many* problems with this platform is that it has no discursive brake lines. And dogpiles, even deserved ones, quickly degenerate into threats of violence and assorted bits of cruelty that vastly exceed whatever transgression they're meant to punish.

Now that Musk has banned the ElonJet account, it's a good time to revisit my 2-day old essay about how The Twitter Files is mere transparency theatre.

The Twitter Files are ideological stenography, not journalism.

wired.com/story/twitter-… Musk's capricious and idiosyncratic approach to content moderation is exactly the sort of thing that cries out for transparency. But we won't get it without a raft of lawsuits or leaks. Leaks which Musk has already threatened his staff over.

I'm not going to lie: I don't know what's going to happen next. While an indefinite shutdown of Twitter feels inconceivable... we're in pretty uncharted territory here. I can't think of another instance where a platform *this huge* suffered such a catastrophic loss of talent all at once, including the people charged with literally keeping the lights on.

Nor one where such catastrophic mismanagement slammed the ship into every iceberg at once.

What's most hilarious here is the huffing of Musk's fans in the comments whenever anyone replies "what about free speech?"

Suddenly they're *very* earnest about how free speech has limits and there may even be... *gasp* "harm" involved? All sorts of new words they're learning!

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589390597798125568

Really, the mass impersonation of Musk by verified accounts was a magnificent satirical art project that achieved its purpose: demonstrating Musk's hypocrisy, the impossibility of speech absolutism, *and* the utter foolishness of the Twitter Blue revamp.

With the utmost respect to Dr. Flowers, I can't agree with this admittedly rousing and cinematic call for us to donate our energies and our eyeballs to offsetting Musk's losses (because, realistically, that's nearly all our presence here will do, when all's said and done.)

https://twitter.com/shengokai/status/1588999803522125824

I do strongly encourage you to read his feed for some excellent thoughts on the matter; it's a perspective worth considering, certainly.

But in the end I think that a lot of people, especially right now, are already whitewashing Twitter's pre-Muskian legacy.

Once the takeover looked like a real possibility I vowed to use this site way less--and probably quit it entirely. Hence why I've been uncharacteristically quiet on here.

But I thought I should explain my reasoning a bit as I begin to pack up here. First and foremost, the "Stay and Fight" approach is futile when what's being sold to advertisers and investors is your very presence.

What you say (mostly) doesn't matter, only that you're here saying it and viewing the scroll. Social media is indifferent to your intent.

So, about the whole LaMDA affair... It should be clear to anyone reading that chat log that we're not dealing with the spark of consciousness. But it would also be a mistake to dunk on this as foolishness and leave it there. 🧵 There are a lot of ethical issues at work here. But! Any debate about whether LaMDA, or any future AI is "sapient" is to ask the wrong question. @lizhenry gives one important perspective here: bookmaniac.org/2022/06/12/com…

I wanted to comment on what we might call the 'left critique' of video game violence that's emerged recently, but before I do, let me link an old piece of mine to make clear that I've never been sanguine about sanguineous VGs: polygon.com/2014/9/24/6833… I've long criticised the fact that violence is what I called the "central idiom of progress" in many games. To kill is to advance, and it's a stubbornly embedded logic in games.

Musk's fans are likely going to be in for a rude awakening, one way or another. A "destructive to the world" standard for moderation action is still a standard, and he's essentially suggesting decreasing visibility of such tweets.🧵

https://twitter.com/b_fung/status/1524094396446224385

A common question from casual free speech absolutists, when confronted with the need for things like content moderation, is to ask "who decides?"

In this case, it seems the answer is Elon Musk. Which is hardly an equitable state of affairs.

Trump supporters were protesting outside of a Democratic state representative's home... *checks notes* ...a little over three months ago.

I know it's old hat to point out their hypocrisy and that they don't care, but this wasn't a national news story.

news5cleveland.com/news/democracy… Republicans also protested outside the homes of public health officials throughout the pandemic. nytimes.com/2020/08/10/us/…

I've tried to keep my powder dry on this because some folks I know are very invested in this narrative but:

If your message right now is "there's no hope, better flee to Canada lol" then all you are doing is your part in *ensuring* that outcome. Yes, reckless and naive pollyanna-ism is dangerous. False hope cheats you.

Hope is not a plan.

But neither is despair.

Relitigating the past is often pointless, but it can be worth it if we try to learn something.

The truth is that too many people got swept up in "Notorious RBG" fandom and overidentified with her.

She was, in fact, in a position of public trust. She *did* owe us.

https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1522360555230564352

As a private citizen, you generally don't owe the world much beyond basic decency. But if you're a politician, especially in a democracy, the whole *point* is that you serve the public. It isn't about what's "fair" for you, or what you "deserve."

Alito's draft suggests that his reasoning won't be applied to other rights, but there is zero reason that this act of judicial vandalism won't be used as precedent to destroy Griswold v. Connecticut--which protects our right to contraception and is the case Roe is built on. This draft demonstrates the real value of right wing assurances about "settled law." We should assume that any assurances about this ruling applying *only* to abortion are a nonsense.

Alright, I'll do it. Mutuals only.

https://twitter.com/aromatasemebro/status/1519675220117884934

Awakening something in you remains one of my proudest personal achievements.

This is really the point of so much right-wing agitation now: mobilising randos into a kind of privatised secret police that'll go out and attack queer people for merely existing in public.

https://twitter.com/Robbiepierce/status/1514127186214621185

The moral permission for this was granted by many actors, but among them most certainly are the centrist concern trolls who've tried to sound oh-so-reasonable as they suggested transgender people constituted some unique threat to children and teens.

Also, Thirsty Sword Lesbians' new supplement, Advanced Lovers & Lesbians, is out and I'm proud to say I contributed a new playbook (character class) and a setting to the TSL cinematic lesbiverse! I remember when @GaySpaceshipGms asked me to playtest this game with her at BigBadCon, back when it was just a few exciting Xeroxes. To not only see it come to beautiful fruition thanks to @EvilHatOfficial, but to get to be a part of drafting a whole world for it was incredible.

In lighter news I just finished this revelation of a duology by @ArkadyMartine. I've read some good sci-fi, and this is extremely good sci-fi--a political thriller about memory, the colonisation of the soul, and love.

But I have never felt quite so *seen* by a book series. The protagonist, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, is someone I related to deeply. She's someone who walks between worlds, caught between a dominant culture she can never truly be a part of, and her ancestral culture that doesn't know what to do with her.

Take your students at their word. It costs you nothing. Not a damn thing.

https://twitter.com/hcstaylor/status/1498747671745544200

The endless, us vs. them anxiety about students "getting one over" on the teachers, or lying, or making excuses... I just don't give a damn. I never did. I especially don't after 2020. Because for every student who lies, there's ten more frightened to tell you the truth.

We're in the midst of a highly febrile, horrifying situation that's pushing us perilously close to an even wider war.

In times like these it is vital to understand: the *people* of any nation are not "the enemy."

Russian *people* are not "the enemy." Yes, now is the time for courage, to stand fast for democratic values. And that means embodying them by not reducing individuals to their nationality. That's the world we want to live in on the other side of this.

Stunning ratio on this tweet, and plenty of dunks already. But it's worth pointing out that this illustrates how meaningless terms like "cancel culture" can become, and how this sort of online memery poisons serious discussions. When people derisively refer to 'terminal poster brain' or the like, they're getting at the ways in which the logics and semiotics of social media can come to seem more real than the reality they describe. And yeah, it's all bullshit and it's bad for you, folks.

One noteworthy event: right-wingers and assorted Republicans fleeing Putin's (apparently) sinking ship over the last 48 hours, suddenly switching from praising him to praising Zelensky and getting on board with the rest of the world. It's not a coincidence that many of them had been enormous Putin fans; he, and his government, have been a fountainhead for neo-fascism and a variety of ethnonationalism that really appeals to the Western far right. He's also something of a patron.