Let Them Fight, Alright

Mr. Zuckerberg's greatest PR-machine is just another pointless old billionaire.

I am watching the San Francisco Giants fade away fast in my living room thinking about Gabe Kapler landing himself a suspension and the Giant’s defence being about as reliable as a eunuch rabbit stuck at the bottom of a burrow. I remember Brandon Crawford called it a sort of Unknown Entity earlier this year. He blew a double play about five minutes ago. That’s about right.

Anyway…

You're there at the right place at the right time, you have your shot, and it either works or it doesn't. And I've had many shots.

- Shane Smith

I am more certain every day: we lived through the golden age of the internet and now it is over. Everything happens so much, and all of it that was worth paying attention to has long since passed you by. When you’re older, and young kids yell at you for bringing up the way things used to be, understand that you are actually right, and longing for the warm embrace of the pre-2015 internet is not the same thing as a doctor in 1922 telling a pregnant woman to smoke cigarettes to open up the baby’s lungs. Although I will say the funniest thing Elon Musk has done in years involves blocking Scott Galloway from his own Twitter account. May we all be so lucky to be trapped in the endless whirlpool of his email marketing anyway. Yes, democracy is dying and the internet is more fractured than ever, but sometimes billionaires making millionaire’s lives harder can be worth your time. If only for a little while; if only to slow the bleeding.

The news cycle is more fragmented now, but the key channels still exist. And Twitter’s ownership of the public square has left Everyone Who Matters talking about an on-again, off-again fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk that will not happen, but that will do more work for Zuckerberg’s public perception than over a decade of PR contracts and millions of dollars spent trying to make the Face Of The Broken Internet come across as likeable. “Don’t worry about it,’ they would have told him, “these things are all about the long game. You’re going to be rich for a long time, kid. Give a couple decades.” And they were probably right. All Zuck has to do is be the only adult billionaire in the room. How boring it must be to be rich. And yet…

Is Artificial Intelligence evil? You tell me. But we have to draw the line somewhere between a computer magically building meal plans and those recipes coming out as things like an “aromatic water mix” that is actually chlorine gas. How many brave soldiers will we lose to the AI arms race? Too many, and somehow not enough.

The internet is just some spasmodic thing, and learning how to digest it all is simple but must be done. That old idea of having a home page of the internet was never meant to last long, and now every user can determine their own path, made up of their own fragmented websites and forums and social media platforms. That’s beautiful, in a way, but repulsive in another. There is nothing new about building your own digital experience — I have been doing it for at least 20 years — but the options are varied and the quality is temperamental. Internet culture is very flexible, and most of what I know I picked up playing the game. Let’s hope the rules become clearer and our kids see the point in playing.

That’s all from me. The election is coming, America is eating itself. Momento mori — some things never change.