The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –
#TheTwitterFiles 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If I had a bank account like Elon Musk, I might very well be hanging out somewhere around Palm Beach, Florida this weekend, since it’s expected to hit 80 degrees for a high in the sun. Clearly Elon Musk is not a golfer.

Donald Trump should be in a cold, dark prison cell somewhere in New York state. Instead, he will probably hit the links at Mar-a-Lago this weekend, with Ye and some of his neo-Nazi friends, while Musk is bedded down in the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco where the high will only reach about 53 on Sunday, and it’s raining.

According to pictures floating around of him on social media, he doesn’t appear to like the sun anyway, prompting some conspiracy theorists to speculate that Musk is, in fact, a vampire. Or maybe just a bot.

Here just north of the nation’s capital, it’s hovering around freezing, but should make it up to about 44 in the afternoon. To stay warm, and not get bored to death in this slow news time coming up on Christmas as The New York Times staff walks out on strike, bringing in a giant rat named “Scabby” to keep the picket line breakers from crossing, I’m keeping my Twitter account open for now. Just to see what all the sound and fury is about. Which appears to signify mostly nothing.

Friday night, as I consumed the last of the homemade chili warmed in a new 2 quart crock pot, and searched Netflix for a movie to watch, my Twitter notifications went off. Damnit! Why can’t we get a break from sensational clickbait this time of year? I would rather be watching “A Very Murray Christmas.”

But NO! There was Matt Taibbi, the formerly promising heir to the Hunter Thompson Gonzo Journalism throne, doing the bidding of Musk (for lots of money of course) and tweeting about Hunter Biden’s laptop and some alleged dick pics. Which of course the new Republican House leadership promises to get to the bottom of — all the way to the bottom of — after being sworn in come January.

Clearly these are desperate times.

Literally as I was typing this, a sad email just arrived from the scabs at The Times, pushing the headline: “Why it’s so hard for men to make close friends.”

Really? They must have had that one in the can for awhile and only used it because they needed the fresh content. I don’t recall ever having that problem. It’s just that as you get older, they seem to keep dying off.

Meanwhile back to the Twitter Light Brigade, engaged in a losing charge to bring Trump back to his divine throne, there was @mtaibbi with a new thread. I kid you not.

The Twitter Files: THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files
THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP
Part One: October 2020-January 6th

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022

Let me say first that this is the dumbest way I’ve ever seen to publish an alleged investigative news scoop. But that’s the condition laid down by Musk. He would make the “secret Twitter files” available, but only if the story was first published in tweets.

I suppose it’s his strategy to bring traffic back to a platform that is losing followers faster than the rats jumped off the sinking Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Do you reckon Musk even knows how hard he just hit the ice? His fortune is shrinking fast.

The latest mega star to download his data and delete his account was Elton John, who made the announcement about the time Taibbi and a few of his fellow so-called journos were going through the Twitter messages from the staff of hackers and getting ready to kick off everybody’s Friday night with some tweet action.

Elton John @eltonofficial
Dec 9 – “All my life I’ve tried to use music to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world. I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.”

All my life I’ve tried to use music to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world.
 
I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.

— Elton John (@eltonofficial) December 9, 2022

Clearly these people are all hyped up on Aderall and meth. Who else would spend Friday night in San Francisco publishing old messages on Twitter?

I’m sure some of their friends over in the Google campus and in the Facebook compound on One Hacker Way were popping their pills and snorting lines and pouring the Russian vodka shots to witness the biggest event in hacking history since Steve Bannon, the Mercers and Cambridge Analytica mined the personal data on 20 million Facebook users, and used it to gin up enough fake news on Hillary Clinton’s emails to get Trump elected president in 2016.

Judging by the slack reaction, however, and the yawns on Facebook, it seems most of the country must have just been watching “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” It’s one of the dumbest Christmas movies ever made, but does have some socially redeeming content in favor of diversity and against bullying. But I couldn’t help notice that the character in the Misfits and Nitwits song looks a little like a young Donald Trump. It could be his theme song with all the social misfits and nitwits he hangs out with these days, like Ye and Nick Fuentes.

Even the Democrats who have not totally gone off on Christmas vacation seemed far more concerned about Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema going independent, or maybe they were just zoned out on the couch watching @MileyCyrus shave off @JimmyFallon’s beard on “The Tonight Show” on NBC.

But you know me. I cracked open an IPA, fired one up — and took the Twitter bait.

For an hour and a half, I read every tweet as they came in, inserting relevant comments, trying to bring some sober intelligence into the conversation. But how are you going to get people who are hyped up on speed and get their information from 144 character bits to ever click on a link and actually read a story about how to create a functioning communications system?

Part III: How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet

I can’t even get my friends on Facebook to read it. It’s obviously a little over their heads, and these days you have to give it to them in short bytes in FB comments or they simply will not acknowledge it. It’s not their fault. Their brains have been rewired by consuming Facebook posts on their phones.

The Big News

The biggest actual story to come out of this is obvious to me. Maybe no one else.

Fuck Hunter Biden’s laptop and his dick pics. What these staff conversations show is that hackers have absolutely no business being in charge of a billion dollar communications system used by millions of people all over the world. Yes, they were literally trying to fashion a moderation system on the fly to try to prevent a fascist takeover of the United States of America — with absolutely no idea that’s what they were doing or any real clue about how to do it.

Out there on the Left Coast, in LaLa Land 3,000 miles away from the real action in D.C., they still think they were just engaged in preventing a little misinformation or disinformation in tweets. Although they were being warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security to stop it.

Mind you, this was an FBI and a HSD led by Trump appointees, so before you go all off on a rant against the swamp or the deep state, consider that.

If there is a scandal story in here somewhere, it is that Trump’s own team was in on trying to get him muzzled after he came out against the 2020 election results and started leading a seditious conspiracy and inciting a violent insurrection to overthrow the United States government from within — while he was president and commander in chief!

Not one of those involved in trying to fashion this flawed moderation system had ever even heard of Ostrom’s model, named for Elinor Ostrom, an American political economist who was the first of only two women to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.”

Ostrom identified eight “design principles” of stable local common pool resource management. This research is well known in international relations circles. The Obama administration was using it to push what was called “soft” cultural power to promote democracy around the world, while ramping up sanctions against rogue states like Iran and North Korea. The United States doesn’t just have military power and economic power. We have cultural power, and it’s possible to use that to foster democracy and work to make the planet more habitable for humans in the future.

Perhaps if the founders of Twitter, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Noah Glass — along with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook — had not dropped out of college and maybe did some research on something besides how to manipulate the psychology of people to make money by typing code, we would not be in this mess.

But I followed along, waiting to see if there might be some explosive bit of actual news to hyperventilate over in this thread.

The best parts came when Taibbi shared the message from the Twitter staff when Trump had his first tweets bounced. Then came the creation of the bots to monitor him, and then the final straw — when Trump was actually banned from posting and kicked off of Twitter.

This seemed to be the climax they were building up to, as if this was a scandal of epic proportions, the very idea that Trump was the first head of state to ever be banned on a social media platform.

#LockThemUp all the Trump followers were screaming at those gay, progressive democrats hacking for Twitter, ooh, that left-wing cabal that had it in for a simple, innocent conservative Republican all along. To them, it was a full blown “witch hunt.”

My reaction?

“Bounce his dumb ass, yes!”

“Yeah, and the country rejoices!”

Yeah, and the country rejoices! https://t.co/pyWNAjxDFB

— Glynn Wilson (@GlynnWilson1) December 10, 2022

Then: “Actual moderation is born…”

It was not pretty, and should have been planned out in advance, but…

That’s the historical importance and news salience of this.

My next response: “If only they had known about Ostrom’s model.”

When they finally quit, and Taibbi said, “More is coming. Good night, all.”

I cracked another IPA, took another hit, and wrote:

“Thank Dog. They are stopping for the night. Surely we have better things to do on a Friday night.”

And then tweeted this picture of Miley.

Her and Snoop Dogg and Dolly Partin and others could save the world if they would only take my advice to produce public service music videos to make condoms cool, especially in Africa and India.

Global Population Reaches Eight Billion People: Is This Really Something to Celebrate?

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