Peerless stylist of his generation, a serious thinker, and somehow managed to be fun alongside all of that. I haven’t kept up with his novels since Yellow Dog, but could recommend each and every one I’d read for something, even the duds were brimming with verve and original ideas. A major loss.
Whether the acting party is a friend or an enemy distinguishes the guilty from the blameless. Anything can be rationalized post facto. It’s the bedrock principle of contemporary politics and it’s breathtaking to witness.
I’m fairly certain that I’ve yet to visit an upper middle class household without a high end gas range, albeit hooded. Surely this disproportionally affects the foodies and amateur chefs of the world.
Vibe shift is just another term for a change in elite aspirant opinion. The vibe is localized to highly trend conscious social and professional milieus. These scenes are often regarded as a cultural vanguard, but are in fact often detached from the majority of the population, and are less harbingers of broad shifts in public opinion, and more simple reporters on their own microclimates. That is all to say, the hard numbers might not materialize for some time, if at all, and not for the reasons presently stated.
Even if a vibe shift is recognized it isn’t necessarily described so.
Looking at the earliest comments that include “tiktok” on this site, the product wove its way into mentions before some article blew it up.
That said if you were on the service when the boss walk was just breaking, and experienced the product’s progression (as a user) to Old Town Road, it was obvious something big was going on—before the numbers were there.
I think I understand your larger point, but whatever corrections or amendments need to be made to the myth of Jobs, the idea that he was in any way average shouldn’t be one.
The dude basically chose to die of treatable cancer in his 50s because he just didn't like the idea of getting medical treatment. That's one of the most odd behaviors I've ever heard of.
Plenty of incredibly smart people think and do incredibly stupid things.
Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of history, inventor of the telescope, father of Newtonian mechanics, and a key figure of the Enlightenment. Yet he considered that scientific work of lesser importance, spending much of his effort studying the occult, biblical interpretation, and alchemy.
> Plenty of incredibly smart people think and do incredibly stupid things.
I mentioned this on an Elon thread and an SBF thread, and it fits here also. When people are so rich and powerful, it's often their own hubris that takes them down.
Stupid is the word I would use for discovering that you have pancreatic cancer and then believing the best course of action is to reject effective medical treatment and "cure" it with an all-carrot diet.
Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
>Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.
Or maybe our conscious and unconscious brains don't work in linear fashion like factories. Inspiration matters. It doesn't matter if what it takes to inspire one, consciously or subconsciously, is weird and doesn't make logical sense but is more poetic.
I would agree that it was stupid for Musk to buy Twitter at any price.
But 44 billion wasn't an unreasonable price at the time the amount was offered, which was immediately prior to the stock market collapse of early 2022. And most of the TSLA stock he sold to acquire Twitter was sold at near to its market peak. Effectively he swapped some overpriced TSLA for some overpriced TWTR.
That’s one of the most human and common behaviors I can think of, and one of the ones I find most humanizing about him as a person who’s so caricatured. He was this giant, right? Saw the future of so many things others couldn’t see, yeah? And his own health suffered because he couldn’t meet the present facts of it with any kind of realistic acceptance. That’s just… some guy, could be any one of my family or someone you know. He was a flawed, normal, person, with… a story which is why we’re discussing it.
In terms of him being a bully? He was pretty average a person. That’s the only point. Just a normal run of the mill jerk, maybe a bit eccentric about it, but could’ve been dozens of people I knew growing up. Whatever other life accomplishments don’t make him a remarkable jerk. Just a well known one.
There are only two sides in the culture war. Any free-thinking criticism of one side places you in or aligns you with the opposition.
“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.
Paul Krugman wrote recently that Elon Musk has “gone full MAGA.” The press will tell you what they can get away with. And right-thinking readers will uncritically accept it, for the most part. Trump was good for news traffic. My guess is that Musk is similarly good for business, judging on how many journalists seem to be on the Elon beat. I expect to read and hear a lot more of this for as long as that remains true.
> Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.
The degree to which this has occurred, across a wide range of issues, is still stunning to me.
Not really. The Bush administration accelerated the polarization of post-Cold War American public culture, which the Obama presidency failed to truly heal. It’s hard to be stunned when everything is progressing (or rather regressing) into tribalism and atomization as it has been for decades, just louder and more obnoxiously.
Hard to succeed at solving a problem when your actions seem almost perfectly tailored to exacerbate it.
I'm not going to relitigate the Obama era. Democrats seem incapable of understanding that the "clinging to guns, religion" comment, and the policies that follow from such a stance, were divisive.
Edit: Responding to the comment below because this account is rate limited:
Indeed, they did not. That entire "movement" is a stain on the GOP, and you are right to criticize them for it.
It's a great example of Trumpian nonsense Musk has never engaged in.
There is meaningful daylight between the views and actions of men like Trump, DeSantis, and Elon Musk. They are not "aligned" to the degree claimed throughout this thread. Though, I understand why it's politically convenient to state otherwise.
Musk, of course, is a typical Californian ideology tech libertarian industrialist who has now hitched his course to anti-woke culture war baiting and social media free speech pearl-clutching.
But there is something to be said about a Trumpian style to public behavior. Maybe it’s just social media demagoguery. Tactical trolling.
Musk, like other celebrity public figures on social media who make a lot of vapid grandiose statements and then flame out when challenged, are simply operating in the same style.
It’s funny you mentioned Bush, because growing up during his presidency, when terms like “reality-based community” and “truthiness” were coined, I never felt that Trump was a radically new phenomenon. He was Bush except louder - with less subtext.
I’d describe Trump and Musk as similarly adapted to the attention economy. But it is a similarity of style, as you said, and not necessarily politics.
While Bush II was far from the inventor of executive dissimulation, his administration did have a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with the truth. But truthiness was coined by Colbert, a brilliant critic of that administration, to describe things that aren’t true but feel true. It’s regrettable, but increasingly over the last five or six years, that term could be applied with similar frequency to claims made on either side of the aisle.
Bush comes from a dynasty of establishment bureaucrats, is a neocon, neoliberal and started a war under the false pretense of the presence of WMD in Iraq.
Trump is isolationist (but didn't push through his policies), didn't start a war and would probably have prevented the Ukraine war had he still been president. Yes, without further loss of territories!
There are no similarities at all. But no-more-mean-tweets is all that matters for the $250,000 per year SV chickenhawks. Others will go to war for them.
Trump, like Bush, made a lot of insane comments and deliberately cultivates a public persona that is designed to alternatively relate to (and be found endearing) his supporters, while simultaneously completely infuriating his detractors.
You may not have been around for his presidency, which is why you’re choosing to focus on substantiative policy choices rather than the public style I am talking about, but Bush was well criticized for appearing to be a brash and foolishly pugnacious figure. Not all that different from Trump, except Bush’s ranch owner shtick made him more rural coded- a cowboy. Both also liked to lambaste so-called experts and make use of anti-intellectual sentiment. They are more stylistically similar to each other than to say, Romney, McCain, Jeb Bush, or even Ted Cruz.
I was politically conscious for his presidency (and a few more before it), and you make a good point or two, but I’d take issue with this characterization of the Bush years. His presidency was dynastic. He was a member of the political establishment, and a governor of Texas. He campaigned as a compassionate conservative, “a uniter, not a divider”. He (clumsily) spoke Spanish. “Global sourcing” accelerated during his presidency and he was a proponent of free trade. He was “a guy you’d want to have a beer with,” but his populist appeal didn’t extend beyond a superficial level, being photographed in cowboy clothes clearing brush on his ranch. His administration was made up of radical Nixon-era neocons with a handful of moderates who lent it credibility (Rice and Powell particularly). 9/11 of course radically altered history and enabled their worst excesses. A costly illegitimate war, naked cronyism, and a massive curtailing of civil liberties that remains to this day. Without a doubt the most destructive presidency I’ve witnessed.
He was not at all pugnacious, although, like Trump, the outrage he inspired was partly due to his lack of presidential decorum and sophistication. He put his foot in his mouth. He was a national embarrassment. But his image was that of a born-again Christian, with an upright moral posture. Quite a distance from the verbal pugilist who made ridiculous threats to celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell.
The Democratic opposition saw his election as illegitimate—the Pat Buchanan vote, hanging chad Florida controversy. Worth remembering. Not the first and certainly not the last disputed election.
> He was “a guy you’d want to have a beer with,” but his populist appeal didn’t extend beyond a superficial level, being photographed in cowboy clothes clearing brush on his ranch.
I'd argue that it went further than that. Perhaps this was ginned up by his liberal critics, who loved to muckrake up shocking exposés like Jesus Camp and make clumsy analogies between Evangelicalism and the Taliban, but Bush's bluff, often stumbling, manner and tendency to engage in dismissing "those in the know" also encapsulated an anti-intellectualism that was intended to appeal to anti-elite, and thus populist, image.
Hell, his anti-intellectualism was written about in December 2000 [0], before his presidency had even begun! The fact that he was seen as somewhat of a dunderhead also fed into that. Despite being a dynastic scion and cabal of advisors, he also posed as a political outsider as well [1]. Perhaps in some ways, Bush's attempts to portray himself as diametrically opposite of what he was, thereby using the Big Lie technique, is something that he and Trump stylistically have in common, and is something that made libs mad in both eras.
> He was not at all pugnacious
While he might not have personally attacked critics as later presidents might have- calling anti-war critics treasonous in a more roundabout, conventional-politician way than directly- he was certainly seen as a bellicose warmonger to critics, especially by foreign observers. Though sure, perhaps this is a case where policy overshadowed personal style.
But no, I'm sure he was seen as a pugnacious to some degree, even if it was only in a ridiculous, chickenhawk, "lemme at him, chief" sort of way.
> to his lack of presidential decorum and sophistication.
As per above, burnished his populist image to a segment of the electorate. Certainly in contrast to Kerry.
There are a few responses people have found useful to misdirect and shut down conversation around this topic. Nothing burger, and the claim that it was about revenge porn, are strong signals that this is one such stock response.
It’s disappointing how the commenting postures surrounding culture war issues curtail curiosity, the spirit of inquiry more generally. A now naive-seeming but widely held assumption about the information revolution was that the instant availability of primary source material would lead to more informed public debate. It’s now apparent to me that knowing how you’re supposed to feel, and what others think, are more important— at the very least more useful— than any naive interest in trying to interpret the messy reality.
Anyone who has doubts has to look at the price. It’s free for now, and will be cheap enough when openai starts monetizing. Price wins over quality. It’s demonstrated time and time again.
Depends on the details. Skip all the boring health and safety steps, you can make very cheap skyscrapers. They might fall down in a strong wind, but they'll be cheap.
After watching lots of videos from 3rd world countries where skyscrapers are built and then tore down a few years later, I think I know exactly how this is going to go.
It does depend on the details. In special fields, like medical software, regulation might alter the market—although code even there is often revealed to be of poor quality.
But of all the examples of cheap and convenient beating quality: photography, film, music, et al, the many industries that digital technology has disrupted, newspapers are more analogous than builders. Software companies are publishers, like newspapers. And newspapers had entire building floors occupied by highly skilled mechanical typesetters, who have long been replaced. A handful of employees on a couple computers could do the job faster, more easily, and of good enough quality.
Software has already disrupted everything else, eventually it would disrupt the process of making software.
I, for one, are caught red-handed on this. It is so weird that Google's money-maker has been down, especially that I never have remembered when was the last time it was down (maybe practically never?)
