Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been finalized, there’s a new sheriff in town, and the tech press is up in arms.
Musk in control of Twitter, ousts top executives, the AP screamed.
And what company doesn’t replace senior executives after an acquisition?
Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook (now Meta) has always been something of a bellwether for the Web 2.0 Age of Surveillance nee Age of Social and high time to just call it as it is.
Since Zuckerberg did help to define the last iteration, it stands to reason that he would lead us once more into the fray as we barrel towards Web 3, no?
He thinks so. He may not be building his own metaverse as originally planned, but nor is he sitting idly by. Au contraire. Instead, as Futurism noted, “the company wants to get in on the ground floor and determine its rules.”
Everyone’s waiting for the outcome of whether or not Elon Musk will eventually own Twitter. He’s purportedly walking away from the deal, claiming that Twitter users are primarily bots, and the company isn’t offering any hard evidence to prove otherwise. In fact, as TruthTent reported, “Twitter’s bot check sample size was only 100 users, Musk reveals.”
Then again, he didn’t do his due diligence before making the offer…
The stock price is way down, which employees are blaming on Musk, even though the market is way down in general, but if ‘users’ are primarily AI-generated bots, well, that does affect whether or not advertisers and marketers will pay a premium to the platform, so it may well be Musk’s fault for pointing that out, and further depressing the stock price.
We have entered a new era of tech. Web 3.0, including blockchain/the distributed web, cryptocurrency, the metaverse, 5G and before too long, quantum computing (The Need, Promise, and Reality of Quantum Computing), which will certainly be a huge game-changer.
After all the loss of privacy we’d experienced during Web 2.0h???, as we now like to call it, as capturing all our personal data was supposedly all in the name of selling us yet another pair of, say, sneakers. Oh, and connecting the world through social, too, as it was the social web after all, no matter how anti-social it became over time. But considering how much more the next era in tech is promising – and let’s not forget robotics, connected glasses, eg the upcoming Apple Glasses, the Internet of Things, AI, Smart Cities, Smart Agriculture, et al are also in the mix – what a wonderful era of promise awaits us! We’re finally going to get it all right and in fact, to help you prepare, head’s up: “To succeed in the future, you MUST learn web3, @Mishadavinci tweeted. These 7 world-changing concepts get you up to speed.”
The line is a reference to a comedic variety show hosted by Drew Carey, Whose Line Is It, Anyway?, which was basically an homage to the absurd.
Enter Meta, the Company Formerly Known as Facebook, which some wags have referred to as Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to escape his many problems in the physical world. Not the least of which is his loss of a younger audience, and every advertiser knows that it’s best to get them when they’re young. Even Instagram can’t seem to hold on to those younger eyeballs. In Meta, kids can strap on their headsets (and CFKAF is betting that they will) and enter their own virtual worlds – with friends too, if they choose. Although it won’t be the Oculus headset, since FB is killing off the brand, which means, btw, as Techcrunch pointed out, that it took Zuck roughly 15 seconds to tell his first lie: “Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either.”
“Mr. Zuckerberg painted a picture of the metaverse as a clean, well-lit virtual world, entered with virtual and augmented reality hardware at first and more advanced body sensors (or neural implants?) later on, in which people can play virtual games, attend virtual concerts, go shopping for virtual goods, collect virtual art, hang out with each other’s virtual avatars and attend virtual work meetings,” wrote The New York Times.
Elon Musk is now worth $230 billion—as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, and he has even surpassed Jeff Bezos. But, hey, a billion here, a billion there, why quibble? What was not mentioned in the CNBC piece is Elon Musk’s secret? Taxpayer money. His two companies that helped him to achieve that status – Tesla and SpaceX – “together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support (subsidies),” according to the LA Times.
Considering that it’s lawmakers who decide who gets what, many of them have coincidentally done quite well picking stocks, even though we know that insider trading is illegal – at least for the rest of us. Still, congress is required to disclose their stock transactions. According to NPR, the “STOCK Act is a law that was passed and signed in 2012, (that) requires more disclosures by federal lawmakers when they trade, they purchase, they sell stocks. It also criminalizes trading on inside information.”
Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus – all Facebook-owned properties – all went offline Monday, and odd that the outage came the day/morning after the “60 Minutes” interview with former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“The documents, first reported in a series of (Wall Street) Journal stories, revealed that the company’s executives understood the negative impacts of Instagram among younger users and that Facebook’s algorithm enabled the spread of misinformation, among other things,” CNBC reported.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Haugen said, among other things, that Facebook is “tearing our societies apart and is causing ethnic violence around the world.”
It may be summer, but we well know that tech – and rust – never rest. Last week, “Former President Donald Trump, who has been banned from most major social media platforms, announced a class-action lawsuit against tech giants Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, along with their respective CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai,” Yahoo reported. “…In court documents, Mr. Trump’s legal team argued that the tech firms amounted to state actors and thus the First Amendment applied to them. Legal experts said similar arguments had repeatedly failed in the courts before,” said the New York Times.
But Palace Intrigue noted a while back that in April, 2012, “Barack Obama himself admitted that the government helped Google and Facebook get off the ground. The government was present at the beginning when both companies were created.”
The lockdowns have certainly had a huge impact on the online world. First, Zoom mushroomed from out of nowhere, and when Zoom fatigue seemed to be setting in, there was Clubhouse, taking over the zeitgeist and becoming, as the Daily Caller noted (in Here’s What We Know About Clubhouse, The New App That’s Dominating Social Media), the fifth most popular social media app on the Apple store, trailing behind only Facebook, Messenger, Discord, and WhatsApp.
Not to be outdone, Facebook is launching several new audio-only features, including “Soundbites…and an audio-only version of Rooms (called Audio Rooms – think Clubhouse).” as The Sun reports.
Esther Dyson used to hold a high level, invitation-only conference each year in Scottsdale, AZ called PC Forum. The dates were always carved in stone on our calendar. The conference was acquired, but one of the last ones under Dyson’s auspices was at the dawn of the Age of Social, and the theme was Users in Charge. That was over a decade ago, and truth be told, Dyson is and always has been something of an optimist.
This past week, both Twitter and Facebook came under fire for censoring a NY Post article that they (baselessly) claimed was based on ‘hacked material.’
Once again, Senate to Subpoena Twitter CEO Over Blocking of Disputed Biden Articles, the Wall Street Journal (et al) reported.