by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023
(Jul. 12, 2023) — “Somoza may be a s.o.b., but he’s our s.o.b.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, on friendly dictators
The Left has a distinctive way of dealing with dictators. They have nothing against the style, just the substance. Democracy, to them, is the second-best form of government: the best is a tyranny when they’re in charge. Democracy is never more benign than the right dictatorship, and someone is never a dictator when it’s a friend they made along the way.
Remember the crew that was up in arms, crying that “billionaires should not have all this power over the public square” when Elon Musk bought Twitter? Yes, the same crew that was pretty comfortable when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post or when Bill Gates bought MSNBC…
You might have noticed these folks are now sycophantically drooling all over Mark Zuckerberg as he launches Threads, the Twitter rip-off by Meta. Who’s simping for a billionaire now? The progressive Karens, who don’t just want to talk to the manager, they want to talk to the CEO (as the Twitter Files affair uncovered).
Threads is not about a more civilised public square. For years, progressives have built Twitter into an efficient censorship machine, engineering processes and functionalities that could regulate speech with uncanny precision. Threads is the ‘build back better’ of that machine. The Left was never worried that Musk’s Twitter takeover would have led to that censorship machine being used against them. No, they were worried that no censorship machine would be used at all. And that’s why they need Threads.
Threads Will Be Treading Water in 12 Months
This is the prediction from Alex Valaitis, an influential tech analyst who writes the newsletter Big Brain Daily. He shared his views on Threads based on his experience at LinkedIn, winding down a similar product that was killed to protect the company’s core business.
Valaitis’ arguments start from the classic Venture Capital pitch question: ‘What problem are you solving?’ and the answer for Threads is all about Twitter — and nothing about Meta: the fact that Big Media and woke advertisers despise Musk’s politics (or lack thereof), and Twitter’s technical and financial challenges.
He makes an interesting point that has been eluding Musk’s critics for too long now. Twitter’s revenue is only $5 billion. Meta’s revenue is about $120 billion. Even if Threads turns out to be the ‘Twitter Killer,’ that would mean a meager 4% increase in revenue for a very risky bet by Meta (who’s still to reckon with the massive losses stemming from Zuckerberg’s metaverse fever dreams).
But that’s just the beginning. Meta decided to use Instagram to give Threads a piggyback. This strategy has generated some good fodder for the politically-aligned press to run headlines like ‘Threads is growing faster than ChatGPT.’ But that’s cheating. Something Zuckerberg excels at. And cheating in this case can have dear costs because brand extensions rarely succeed as they dilute a brand’s core identity and confuse consumers.
So Valaitis points out that by seeding Threads with its Instagram users, there’s a risk that Threads could hurt Instagram’s (Meta’s golden goose) engagement. Even a small drop-off in Instagram’s engagement could wipe out the modest revenue gains from Threads.
Threads is doomed from the beginning: it is preaching to the converted, it won’t reach out to the infidels, and, like the desperate victims in the plane crash in the Andes, it will soon have to resort to cannibalism. At that stage, Threads will be shut down to protect Instagram’s core business, Valaitis ponders.
But one has to ask oneself: is Mark Zuckerberg stupid? I believe there are a few billion reasons that is not the case. Is the Left stupid? Unconfirmed rumours have it there are 81 million reasons that is the case. So, what’s the endgame here? As is always the case with Meta, the answer is harvesting data. Specifically, text-based data to feed their AI models. As Benjamin Franklin said, when you trade your freedom for a little security…
Kill Them With Kindness
The de-gentrification of Twitter was a deadly blow to the most enlightened among us. The Intelligentsia who is clean, as they are pure and precious. They have learned how to think, so they can now contemplate what’s best for us, better than us. They want to be friends, but not with us. And Zuckerberg is pandering to the former Blue Ticks with Threads, “focussing on kindness and making this a friendly space.” To them, war is peace, slavery is freedom, and censorship is kindness.
And the Blue Ticks really believe that. That they have a divine right to censor because they won’t fall for the same traps we do. They are not easily influenced like we are. On a clear enough day, they can see tomorrow. As long as there are no plebs spoiling the view…
Therefore, censorship is justified as long as it builds a “less confrontational” public square. When you are the cultural hegemon, you don’t want dissent to ruin what you worked so hard to build, which includes the guardrails that gentrified the internet. They can’t afford outsiders to come and threaten to ruin their safe space with toxic free speech. ‘What have we become, savages?’ they ask.
And they have no interest in discussing the consequences of the Blue Tick revolt against freedom of speech. For the Polite Society, the ultimate form of free speech is allowed speech. Clearly specified within the limits of the Thinkpol manual, as issued by the multilateral bureaucracies (such as the UN and EU) and sanctioned by their paymasters on Wall Street, with their ESG guides on how to make ‘ethical profits.’
Unlike the rest of us, who go through life aimlessly trying to figure out good from bad, they know it all because they believe in that truth that has been revealed to them. We are indeed a bit disgusting to them, in our ignorance. We are chaotic, we speak out of turn, we are disrespectful of their status, and our grammar is far from ideal. The Intelligentsia deserves better than us. And that’s what Threads is promising them.
Read the rest here.