Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Another Weekend with Musk: More Chaos, Fewer Options, and an Object Lesson in the Importance of Principles

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Unpacking another weekend of drama and incoherence at Twitter, various lessons to be drawn from these public controversies, whether a Twitter collapse would be good for the media, and an apology to the L’Oreal corporate family (but not Renault/Alpine).

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I'm doing okay, Andrew. I'm a little tired, stayed up until 3 a.m. watching perhaps the greatest game that I've ever seen in my life, that being the World Cup final, which kept just an incredible sports league that I wake up to to absolute madness.

Chaos. Madness in terms of sports and also madness in terms of where I enjoy consuming my sports just Twitter. So yeah, doing good. It's quite the Monday morning here. So I was curious, how long did it take you to fall asleep after that World Cup final? Because I was like pretty jacked up on the way out of that one. I was rooting for Messi. I just sort of fell in love with Messi over the last couple of weeks and I just really wanted him to have that ending. And so the roller coaster of emotions over the course of two and a half hours there was a lot to process. And so I could not have imagined going to sleep after something

like that. I mentioned three o'clock. That's because the game ended at two or like 145. Yes, it took a while. I mean, the trophy presentation took so long that it was a nice little wind down. So that helped. So I appreciate the organizers for taking 45 minutes to present the trophy because it helped me sort of settle down and then, you know, get at least a couple hours of rest here. Hey, look, it was a nice stage that FIFA set up. It's fine that it took a solid 40 minutes to get all the pieces in place. But you mention the chaos that you woke up to.

And honestly, it started near the tail end of the World Cup final. Around 1230 Eastern, right in the middle of extra time. Everybody on the edge of their seat watching France and Argentina, rooting for Messi. We got this message from at Twitter support. By the way, should we be careful because I think we insulted France last episode. And now we're just coming out as, like, France has Mbapé and has the best language in the world, the best food in the world. They have Mbapé, that's enough. Like they don't, well, to be honest, Spain has the best food.

But if we were talking about, I mean, they have, they can win it again in 40 years. I mean, what an unbelievable for Mbapap. And like the, not to be cliche, but, you know, to have a game where you have two of the best of all time. who perform like the best of all time. And like neither can be held responsible for this loss. Like just, I mean, it really was like just like a storybook sort of game. It was unbelievable. Sorry, we need to move on.

But yeah, it was something else. I mean, look, I've been sitting here exhaling for like eight hours since that one finished. But speaking of the end of that one, near the end, Twitter support tweeted the following. Quote, we recognize that many of our users are active on. social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter. Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribal, Noster, and Post. We still allow cross

posting content from any social media platform, posting links or usernames to social media platforms not listed above are also not in violation of this policy. So Ben, we could start with that policy. And we also got this question from Larry who says, hi, Ben and Andrew, what's your take? Is this new Twitter policy of blocking links to other social media sites a tangible example of how competition is just a click away. The speed of change here is pretty shocking. And it seems like Elon just handed Google a tangible example of the argument you guys mentioned on the most recent episode.

What's your reaction to Larry's question or the policy in general here? Well, I feel like this is a little bit like podcasting about the France-Argentina game at halftime where Argentina is up to zero and looks utterly dominant. And a lot of things may change in the next little. bit. As we record, Elon Musk has just posted a Twitter poll. Should I step down as head of Twitter, I will abide by. There's also this poll. There are 4,000, 357,000 votes as we record. Yes, is winning with 57.9% of the vote, 42.1% for no. Generally with Twitter polls, once a solid lead is established, that tends to stick. Who knows what will happen with this particular poll? So I would have led

with that poll, but I just have no idea how seriously to take any of this from Musk. I mean, I'm long past throwing up my hands with this guy and particularly his Twitter account. So who the hell knows what is going to happen in the days to come? Like by the time we get past January 1st, there could be like a dozen different news cycles behind us the next time we talk about Twitter. Right. And that's been a reason to not talk about it every episode because we literally could talk about every episode. but you run the risk of it being totally different a few days later. And it's one of those things where it's not as black and white as everyone wants to make it. Now, has Elon Musk been an effective steward of Twitter as CEO?

I think that probably is pretty black and white. And the reason why it's black and white is leaving aside, setting aside all the cultural war stuff and all that. There's been a very, there's been a dramatic narrowing of Twitter's optionality over the last few weeks, right? So, you know, you go back and I am alone on the island that I think Twitter's network effect is so powerful that they could actually just charge everyone for subscriptions and actually build a business that way and not be dependent on advertisers to the extent that they are and could actually, you know, I think actually think that it's a compelling option for the service. That option's now closed, right? Like, like the Twitter's network effect may still be strong enough to keep people on, but it's really hard to see people paying for it, or at least a huge point. of the people that Musk would need to pay for it. And so maybe that was an option when he took over,

but with the massive sort of polarization that he's driven, it's hard to see that being, to the extent it was viable, and I know some people say it was never viable at all, but in a sense it was, it was much less viable than it was before. That's just like a very small example of when you're in charge of a company that is in a lot of debt, that doesn't have a great business model, that needs to figure out how to make money,

you need more optionality, not less. And to weaving aside the content of the actions to take options that constrict your optionality is just bad management. Like just from a very sort of nuts and bolts perspective. And I think that's, you know, there's a lot of people that are really eager to sort of fight the culture war,

I think, in both directions. And neither of us, I think, really want to wait into that to a great extent, but you can completely ignore that and acknowledge that this has been a total mess and is not conducive to Twitter being a viable entity or one that makes money in the long run. Well, okay, so let me ask you, is this the tech version of Michael Jordan's Republicans by Sneakers 2 line, where Elon needs to remember resistance liberals by subscriptions also and like, Keep it a big 10. If you're leading what's nominally a $45 billion company, I mean, that makes sense to me

that as a leader strategically speaking, there have been just so many unforced errors over the last month and a half. And the advertisers by like, you know, advertisers might be Republicans or liberals too, right? Like advertisers, they don't want to be in the middle of a culture war. You know, you talk about brand safety and you talk about things like being next to threats of violence or, you know, very bad tweets with bad content. et cetera, but there's just a general thing. Like, if you are a prominent advertiser on Twitter right now, you're getting lumped in

with this very binary sort of determination, right? And you see that we see this in our email. We see this in our feedback. People demanding we talk about this. And the demands are coming from both sides. And people are 100, like, you have to come down on my side. Like, why are you not even talking about this? And it's like, this is precisely why I'm not talking about this.

I mean, there's a lesson that I weren't very painfully many, many years ago. I think it was 2014 or something. Netflix was in this dispute with ISPs about bandwidth and peering fees and all this sort of stuff. And the general internet take was, of course Netflix is wrong. All the ISPs are bad. And I wrote an article saying, look, Netflix's argument is pretty self-serving here because they were trying to frame the debate as being about net neutrality. And I'm like, this isn't about net neutrality.

This is a business dispute about, like, bandwidth fees. right and right i think i'm pretty consistent it bugs me when companies reframe what they're actually talking about to try to tap into some sort of broader impulse and it's like come on guys let's be sure here so that article is fine you fast forward four or five years and the uh i can't remember is a jeep pie under trump he repeals the obama net neutrality rules which those net neutrality rules was basically saying internet companies have to be treated like the phone carriers. And my objection, I agreed with that in principle, and that actually ties into this stuff, right? Because that goes into stuff like you can't discriminate based on content. My problem is

that these, they're called Title II, they're so onerous. And there's so many things you have to deal with that I thought it was an example of regulation that's way too over the top, that actually would reduce sort of innovation. You're dealing with a sector where the needs, the bandwidth requirements, etc. are increasing. It's not like a stable equilibrium. Like it's a dynamic sort of area. And so while I agree with it in principle, I just thought Title II was the wrong way to go about it. And it shouldn't have been, from my perspective, a big deal because the internet had functioned fine without Title II productions for the first, you know, 25 years. And, you know, Obama had just put these in like three years earlier, right? And the, and this is in the context of everyone online was losing their minds, absolutely losing their minds. Do you remember this? Do you remember this?

I do. For anybody who does it. remember this. It was early in the Trump administration and almost every policy change that was proposed led to like a furor on the internet. And this particular one led to people predicting like the end of the internet. And it was a true hysteria for like several weeks in the lead up to this decision. I mean, it was a precursor of of what, well, we'll get to that more. The precursor of what it was now. But so, so in this context, I come out, I write an article saying a jeep podcast. I is right. And it was basically the arguments that article were basically the exact same arguments I had made five years earlier in the context of Netflix and ISPs. And like you say, look, there's like just, and I was about like the business aspects of it, the regulatory aspects, like the things that were actually going on, you know, again. And I was like, I was clear there. Look, I'm in favor of net neutrality as a concept. I think title two is a really bad way to sort of address it. And I went to bed because I, you know, I write through the day and I think that might have finished that one late. And I woke up to literally thousands and thousands of Twitter messages, emails, death threats.

Like say, I'm going to come to, like, no, people, I'm going to come to Taiwan, find you and your family. Like, it was, it was unbelievable. It was insane. And now, it was fine. I'm a big boy. Like, it's, that, well, number one, it actually was really hard. It was really, really difficult. Like, it was like emotionally very distrusting.

But that's fine. I got over it. But number two, what I realized is there are certain topics. that when they cross into that zone where people are going crazy about it and there's no like it's not even worth it's not worth the time to even write about it because I'm interested in being out here

in making arguments and like laying out my case going point by point like our debate about antitrust last week right like that and it's great you can disagree with me and we can have a reasonable argument with it but there's some topics when they cross the line into the culture war it's not even worth it to write about because no one is actually interested in logic or arguing about it. Again, even if I'm wrong, I'm fine with you, disagree with me,

but there's a big difference to disagree with me and like, I'm going to come kill you because like I don't even understand this topic, but I just know it's the bad team and, you know, the XYZ. And I feel like that's happened with Twitter over the last few weeks, right? It's like, what can you even say about it when it's become like the current thing to an extreme degree that everyone's on every day going crazy? crazy about. Yeah, well, and what's funny is you really just have to read the audience because there are parts of my brain that agree with like the liberal side of the argument. There are

parts of my brain that agree with positions that mostly conservatives have adopted. And so if I'm at a cocktail party, it's the trick is just gauging like what side of the debate someone's on because I agree with a lot of different thoughts on what's happened here. We need a sharp reports from Washington DC cocktail parties. Oh, man, one of these days, another vertical, just a DC gossip podcast. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the piece on net neutrality because that was the first time I ever read it. So while you fielded a thousand angry emails, I will say for my part, easily. Well, I really appreciated that perspective because it was just such a crazy time where I'm sitting there as a casual user of the internet and people are sitting there

predicting like the end of days essentially and it was so uniform across media that I was like, okay, well, I guess this is a really horrible thing that's happening here. And reading you explain why it wasn't nearly as dramatic as it seemed or was being framed was really satisfying an eye-opening, and I actually cited you on a law school exam and got an A-plus on that exam. So I was a stratakry reader from that day forward, so it could work in mysterious ways. It's actually a really interesting parallel to draw to a lot of this stuff, though, for lots of different reasons. When you talk about Twitter, for example, obviously I started out relatively optimistic about the Musk regime. Just a lot of that was just a lot of that was

by two things. Number one, I'd been very unimpressed and frustrated with Twitter's management as a company for years and years and years. So, like, there's some aspect of just someone new sounds like a great thing to me. And then number two, obviously, Ian Musk has these two massive successes in Tesla and SpaceX and, you know, just to some extent, X.com and PayPal was sort of before them. And so, hey, like, seems like a reasonable bet, right? I do think, I wrote this, I think, in a daily update. I think it actually maybe is the best take I've had about the situation, which is, there's a big difference in hardware and software. And Tesla and SpaceX are hardware companies.

And there's a certain like inherent constraint that comes from the physical world, right? Like physics is a constraint on what you can do. One of the great things about software and one of the terrible things about software is there are no constraints. Like like, why is it so hard to ship something? Because at some point, if you're a product manager or you know, a CEO, you have to say, no, we're shipping on this date because you don't wait until it's done. It's never done. Software is never, ever done. That's why you get crunch. You get down on the last minute and you're going to ship it no matter what. Because that's the only way to get stuff out the door.

But that also means you can do stuff on a whim, right? There's no constraint on your whims. And I feel like you have someone come in who probably had all sorts of crazy ideas and, you know, you want to do all sort of fanciful things. And then physics comes back and sort of hits you in the face as that's not possible, can't be done. XYZ. We have to produce these things at scale.

And that's a. ongoing constraint that's independent of any one person or any someone in management speaking up to you on Musk, right? At the end of the day, physics is sort of an unforgiving mistress, right? Like, it's going to stop you from doing things that can't be done. Right. Twitter, you don't have that. Like, we already know there, it doesn't seem like there's any real sort of feedback loop for him as far as people go. And there's no real feedback loop as far as like physical constraints.

He can tweet whatever he wants, implement whatever policies he wants, does XYZ. And I think that's a real core reason why this has not worked out, I think, is a same way to say. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's frustrating because coming into it, there was room to reimagine what Twitter is. But Musk, like, part of his role as leader of Twitter is at least partially marketing. And he has done such a terrible job at messaging basically every change. that Twitter has tried to implement over the past two months. He's been deliberately polarizing the way he's promoted the Twitter files.

And ultimately, like, that presentation makes it easier to just downplay the issues that are raised by the Twitter files. Like the potential downsides of moderation, the shifting free speech norms. Like, it's frustrating because anyone who raises those concerns now, which are perfectly reasonable issues to highlight, now gets lumped in with Musk, who's just completely off the reservation and like ruling by Twitter poll and we've all just been sort of watching it happen and look I'm sure his critics were going to call him a irresponsible crank regardless of how he handles himself on Twitter but he's lost the normies like the point for me yeah well and it's just like of the factors that Elon can control he's been so all over the place and the only

thing that's been consistent is the total incoherence or apparent incoherence of his strategy or vision. And I just wonder when we're going to hit a tipping point where this settles down. Because I can't imagine we continue living in this cycle for very much longer. Well, we'll get to his pull perhaps in a moment. But I think there's a few extra points, though, to sort of pull it about this. So I wrote a couple of weeks ago narratives, right? I'm like, what?

And I said in there, I kind of bought into the narrative of Elon Musk, you know, in these companies, which, by the way, are true narratives. Like Tesla and SpaceX are both triumphs. So you get frustrated, you know, pre-musk at people dismissing those, right? Like, oh, you get government subsidies. Well, anyone could have got those government subsidies. At the end of the day, one person got them. Why, right?

And so there's that. And then you had things like the Friday night meltdown when, oh, everyone's like, or Thursday, I guess it's Thursday, right night here. Excuse me. It's the Thursday night massacre. No, no. The Thursday night massacre is what happened this week. I'm talking about the Thursday night meltdown, which was a few weeks ago. You need to get you to get these straight where everyone's like,

goodbye and like Twitter's going to like stop operating tomorrow or like overnight. And in your, I'm sitting here's, I want to be sort of objective observer and look, I want to criticize Musk and Twitter, but it's making it awfully difficult because you guys are over here are just losing your minds about something that's, that's not going to happen.

Now, now, we have all the well actuallys. Yes, Twitter could degrade. There's probably some signals it has degraded over time. That's how large, web services fail over time and they don't fail overnight. But let's not ignore what was going on that evening.

The statement was no, Twitter is going down tonight. It's going to no longer operate, right? Which was ridiculous, right? And, you know, it's just, it's hard, it's hard to talk about. And to put a finer point on it. There were, there were emotional goodbyes being delivered throughout that night. Yeah, it was like, it's like the plane that's like plummeting and you tell the person next to you that you love them. and, you know, you had the chance to talk to me.

It was like a funeral. Right, but it's not like the plane plummeted like 30,000 feet and leveled out just over the ocean, right? The plane didn't really seem to move at all. It was just like, I don't know. So, but yeah, the Twitter file is a great example. Like, and this goes the other way. Let's back up. How can you not, just as an American or freedom loving citizen, be perturbed by

say the Hunter Biden sort of thing or in general that the FBI or whatever could email Twitter and Twitter is like jumping to like ban people right? I mean I thought actually one of those interesting things that came out was you know there's people that worked for like telecom companies where

or there was I think it was in some of the files like where they they push back right like we celebrate Apple for pushing back against the FBI in the case of the San Bernardino like shooter right? That's a guy that shot people and we celebrate Apple for resisting government pressure of all the times.

On a principal basis. Right, of all the times when government would seem to have a solid reason to sort of get access. And Twitter's over here like, oh, yes, please give us more names to ban, right? Like, it's of course bad and ridiculous. But to your point, the way Musk goes about this and the way he's like blatantly yelling himself with certain voices on Twitter that are not at all interested in the truth, that are clearly purely partisan, not only does it make it hard for that message to land.

To your point, it actually codes the message to be like reactionary or like far right wing. Like I, and that bothers me as someone who does believe in free speech, who does not want government interfering in the business of who's, who's allowed on Twitter or not. Now I, because I hold those positions,

am now coded a certain way partisan being like, So it's It's annoying. It's very annoying. Are you saying if you were, we should say for the record, if you were in charge of Twitter, you would not be ruling by 4 a.m.

Twitter poll every night. And Musk is in a special category. I mean, the tiny thing's interesting. Like all these mouthstones are happening like on the weekends, uh, which makes you like, it sounds like musk is doing his other jobs during the week.

And then sometime around Thursday night. Good. He like, he checks it on Twitter. And then, uh, Everything just, you know, because it's been pretty consistent. I know this because both the case of the Thursday meltdown and the Thursday massacre, John and I recorded dithering in the morning. And between the time when we recorded and the time we posted, there were these like meltdowns.

They're like, we're very annoyed. It's like, like, why is it always happening in this eight hour period? I think the, God knows what the landscape will look like by the time this post. Go back to the net neutrality bit, right? in retrospect, I actually think I was probably wrong about that. I think Title II is the wrong way to do this. But I am actually increasingly concerned about moderation slash censorship. And this is one valuable thing that's coming out of this as far as Musk being in charge.

Number one, everyone who was out there saying before Musk, Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want. Like, yeah, here you go. There's been some real whiplash. They're a private company. They can do what they want. Maybe it would have been useful to have a principled stance about this stuff before now. And it was pretty funny to see folks like not understanding the ban process and like these breathless tweets. You have to delete your tweet before you come back.

Like no shit, Sherlock. Like, like did you like. And so that that's been very funny. But, but then. I think the issue was the tweets they were deleting were totally inoffensive and not really grounds for banning or suspension. would be their argument. Well, why wasn't that the argument for the New York Post tweet? Or why wasn't that the argument for like the Babylon B tweet that apparently was what spurred?

Look, there's no argument for me. Both sides of this debate have now abruptly switched positions and are making each other's arguments. As long as I'm dunking on people, of course must commitment to free speech is an absolute joke and wreaks of hypocrisy, right? Now, the Elon Jet account is complicated. The guy actually did create a computer program to find Musk's private number that actually is not supposed to be public and posted it. So that's a that once was the account a little more complicated. All the reporters posting talking about the account, obviously not complicated. Obviously retributive justice.

Obviously a joke. Obviously not consistent with the First Amendment. And obviously, you know, hypocritical. But it does kill me to see these folks accusing Elon Musk of hypocrisy. well in the midst of hypocrisy, right? It's all part of the charade here. And look, we're never going to forget the Thursday night massacre. I mean, tell me,

tell me, tell you calling yourself Archibald. I mean, peak, peak journalism labeling at the Thursday night massacre because like four or five people got their Twitter accounts, man. Well, all right. So let me, let me anchor this with a specific question.

We never answered Larry's question. Well, here's the link thing. Obviously bad. But there's a few interesting angles. on this. So number one, I've been very, very skeptical of anything you're replacing Twitter, and that remains the case, no matter what. Just because I think what makes Twitter so unique is the fact that everyone's on that and actually the biggest lure of the platform is not that your friends are there, it's that your enemies are there. The core unit, the core piece of

currency on Twitter is the dunk. Like where you quote tweet someone, you make fun of them, everyone rallies with you. Like, that's like, that happened to me with the neutral thing. And it sucks. It's bad. But there's no question it's a big part of sort of like this partisanship. Like, must is I'm sure he's correct. Usage is off the chart. Sure it is. Everyone likes watching a car crash.

Yeah. Well, and we should also be clear that that culture emerged under prior leadership and I think has been really unhealthy and Twitter knew about it and encouraged. The quote tweet has been a disaster as far as civility and like a good experience on Twitter

goes. Like, and I think I think anyone that actually cared about that would have rolled it back. The problem is it drives massive engagement, right? And like, and so that this is a Twitter problem. Particularly when you're when you're a public company, it's hard to de-emphasize. Right. I mean, imagine must come in and be like, oh, you want to make this a more wholesome environment. And so we're going to undo the quote tweet.

And I can do that because I have the, you know, then we give the equations of debt and all this sort of stuff. But yes, to your point, it would be a very difficult thing to undo. So that's number one. Number two, I definitely did not appreciate the extent to which Musk would both incentivize people to leave. And then also a real sort of Barbara Streisand effect here about like, sorry, which networks do I leave to go to? Oh, the one that Twitter won't let me put links on.

I mean, like very, like who were immersed in is we've heard of Mastodon. Like how many people have a sort of like, you know, even before the last 24 hours. So not, not real skillful sort of strategic. in that regard. But then number three, there is an aspect where it's just really offensive,

I think, to people in tech in particular. And I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually the thing that triggered this poll. Like, just the very concept of banning linking is, it's just, it's not how the internet works. I think it, I think Twitter has devalued itself in a short-term reach for engagement by,

Like it's well known that Twitter's if you have a link in a tweet, it's not it's it's suppressed in the algorithm. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, they've been doing that with Facebook and Instagram for years. Okay, so, okay, there's more context here. Let me back up. So go back to when Instagram first started. You know, the hardest thing was starting a social network is how do you find your friends? Like getting the actual network. And so Instagram starts out, it's a photo filter, right?

You can take a picture and your phones were just total crap back then. I think this was like the 3G or 3GS somewhere around then. And so you take a photo, it adds this filter that makes it look somewhat presentable. And then you could post it to another network. And so that's how Instagram started. So there's a very famous essay, I think, by Chris Dixon, like, come for the tool, stay for the network. Like the idea that you build something of value that gets people using it first. But the real, where that network come from, what you could do is you could link your Twitter account to your Instagram account.

Then Instagram would just pull in all your contacts and boom. you now have your Twitter network on Instagram. And that's how Instagram bootstrapped their network. And they basically took the Twitter network and then inserted it into Instagram. And then you instantly had hundreds of people or more or less or whatever that you followed and that followed you. And so you got over that cold start problem for a network. So very famously, Twitter, you know, of course asleep behind the wheel, wakes up and bans this activity.

Now, this wasn't links in your tweets. You could still put an Instagram link in your tweet. This was an actual backend API connection where you would sign in with your Twitter account via Instagram and it would pull everything in. And a lot of people were upset about that. But at the end of the day, from a business perspective, not only the right decision, but actually something Twitter should have done earlier, right? Now, from a regulatory perspective, this is maybe something that people have talked about.

should be allowed. It should be easier to sort of pull your network with you. And actually one of these sort of great ironies of sort of competition and privacy, that intersection, is they talk about data portability, but like the GDPR, for example,

explicitly excludes taking your portability as far as your network goes. Why? Because it's a privacy violation, because your friends didn't give permission for their contacts to be pulled across. So it's a great example of number one how privacy and competition are sort of fundamentally at odds and number two how regulators can just completely not really sort of miss the point right if we want social network

competition the single best thing we can do is force this allow you to take your network with you and but no it's privacy it's like i mean the the uh you know you do to pull andrew sharp you know your name or whatever it might be and that's why all these apps try to get your phone book right they try to upload your contacts and they want to because you want a way to sort of build that network. So anyhow, from a business perspective, though, leaving aside the regulatory point, clearly the right thing for Twitter to do,

their main mistake was waiting way too long to do it. And so Instagram comes along, they bootstrap their entire thing onto this network. So this bit about not wanting to help your competitors and it being a reasonable thing to do from a strategic perspective, long history, just not in tech in general, but with Twitter specifically.

Right. So fast forward to now. It's hard to laugh. And look, it is problematic. It is problematic from a, you know, regulatory standpoint. What Twitter is proposing to do now seems brazenly anti-competitive. And, you know, it's also... Anti-competitive based on what?

One of the crappiest internet business we've ever seen? Well, I mean, I just think the principle of banning links to competitors is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. It's explicitly in violation of some European regulations. And I don't know whether it is actually grounds for any sort of FTC enforcement, but I did not think that Twitter would be this aggressive and audacious in their approach. And I can't really understand why. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's obviously a bad thing for a competitive standpoint. I'm not clear what regulations it violates.

And again, this is an ongoing dispute discussion in tech. Like Twitter already did this a decade ago, right? And so, again, this is the problem you get in these moments. this hysteria and you lose all context. Like we've literally gone through this and we went through it in a moment when what Twitter cut off was actually far more useful and productive than just stupid links. Like they could literally suck in your entire network and connect you to everyone. Which again, great for competition.

It got Instagram off the ground, right? And so, you know, you fast, you fast forward to this bit. And like the idea of banning links on the internet, number one, it's probably short-sided. and number two, it's deeply offensive, I think, to a lot of people in tech. Now, again, I'm not saying other stuff's not offensive. It's just like that's getting into like the very like, what is the internet, right? Yeah, the core ideals of what this is supposed to look like. I would just point out, this is exactly what Apple bands in the app store.

Like, in your own app, you literally cannot link to your own website that sells something in a different way. And it's just, I just think it's worth noting. that somehow this is okay? Like in here, we got to re-record. Let's put that up front. We're going to re-record the entire episode and put that Apple note up front

in the first 30 seconds before we even talk about the World Cup. Because it's really true. It's such a fevered moment. And what Twitter is doing is universally unpopular. And yet, it isn't different than what Apple has done over the last however many years, as they force all of these companies to submit to their own constraints. Right. It's not Twitter.

Twitter is controlling what happens on their app. Apple is dictating what happens in every single app in the world. On any app. Yeah. No, it's really true. And it's easy to lose sight of it as Musk becomes public enemy number one. Well, this is what I mean about why it's so difficult to even talk about. Like, like, I mean, I do feel somewhat conflict.

did talking about this because I do feel Twitter, again, as someone that loves Twitter, depends on Twitter, built my business on Twitter, spends more time on Twitter than basically anything else by far. Like when I look at my, you know, my usage report, it's very embarrassing. I don't ever want to know how much, what percentage of my day. When I get chided by my son, are you on Twitter right now? I feel, I feel bad, like a bad parent. And you should, yes.

I'm not sure this is a good thing for society. I'm not sure if we're meant to be in this super low friction environment where everyone's stuck in the same place. And this was my critique of Musk at the very beginning. He comes over that message being like, you know, I want to make the digital town square. I'm like, it's not a good thing. Are we sure? Like, and so all this, it's like, is he driving Twitter into the ground? Sure seems like it.

I do kind of like, well, maybe that's not actually the worst thing in the world. And when you say, is that a good thing? You're referring to the idea of any digital town square where everyone is connected at all times, right? Yeah. I mean, Twitter is so unique because it's so low friction. Everyone is in the same place, right? I mean, Facebook, everyone, you know, when the media complains about Facebook, I think one of my, you know, jokes slash observations because they don't use it. And so it's very easy to complain and point to the platform you don't use and ignore the one that you do.

But Facebook, like, you post and it's shown to your friends. And yes, you can do public posts. and by the way, Facebook got busted by the FTC for trying to change everyone's posts from being just their network to being public posts by default without sort of like getting user permission. But that's, I just, I mean, this is like, I'm a little more hesitant to talk about

because this is more just like personal belief and like sociology and sort of stuff. Like the, we lived for, you know, billions of years where all of the things that mattered to us, the things that impacted us were very local. We're the things that were around us. And this started to change with the advent of mass media and TV and suddenly we're much more aware of what was happening elsewhere in the world. But Twitter makes this, takes this to the extreme and it's just constant.

And you're immersed in all these things. I think about this Twitter stuff, right? It's like it's so tempting to just to marinate in it, to just be, and you're agitated and you're worked up and you're mad and you're frustrated with this side. And that's such hypocrites. And no, no, we're not hypocrites. we have the, you have to understand XYZ. And no, that's not doxing. This is doxing.

It's like, and then you step back. It's like, what actual impact does this have on my life? Why is my mood, my happiness, my focus being dictated by this stuff that doesn't matter? Like, one of the things with all those Elon podcasts is they're all immediately obsolete because it's literally changing the next day. And like, imagine Elon must resigns tomorrow and someone else is in charge would have been worth. it to lose your head for a few? I don't know. Again, this might be my own personal biases saying, and I'm not going to make this judgment for anyone else, any of my listeners. There's a lot of people that get really mad when I talk about anything on the internet potentially being bad.

But I don't think anything's black or white. I don't think the internet is inherently everything is all default good. And again, from a personal perspective, Twitter's been a massive, massive positive in my life. I've benefited arguably more than anyone on earth from Twitter. Like I grew strategically for free on the back of people who found my site tweeting about it. Like it's it's been incredible. And so I say this with, you know, so one, the linking stuff does bother me because like that's good for my business and I feel bad for new people. I was going to say also though you're credible here because look, it's it's helped you individually. and if you still have concerns about its impact on society,

I think that's a sign of how sincere it is. Does anyone feel good about our discourse over the last, you know, decades since Twitter came to prominence? Right. And what I would say is that we live in a time of near constant acrimony after the last 10 years or so. But how much, but is Twitter downstream or upstream of that? You're right that we're getting a,

to now like sharp sociology. But I would say that Twitter has an agenda setting function and has driven a lot of polarization on both sides that then leads to conflict oftentimes on Twitter. And then also it leads to more conformity at the same time as we're dealing with unprecedented acrimony. Those are interconnected. The conflict drives conformity because you get this like my tribe sort of instinct. It's like we're under attack.

And yeah, I'm not going to disagree with you about XYZ because at the end of the day, they're worse. Like, look at them. Right. You see them every day. This, like one of the greatest, and I wrote about this, I was totally wrong. This whole idea of filter bubbles. Like, the problem with Twitter is it's not a filter bubble at all. You're exposed.

Like, there were always cranks in the world. There were always people you completely disagreed with. There's that famous anecdote, like, I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon, right? Like this has been a reality, but it's a lot different when it's suddenly exposed to you on election. I was like, wow, that was interesting versus you're marinating, immersed in it, dunking on it every single minute of every single day. Yeah. Well, and your post on net neutrality is probably a great example. I don't know the specifics, but I imagine that you would not have woken up to thousands of emails, like calling you all sorts of names and threatening to fly to Taiwan.

if you hadn't posted it to Twitter, if it had just been sent to your subscription list. I don't know if that's true. Well, because the benefit from Twitter is that my users can tweet about what I wrote. And so the real benefit of Twitter for authors is not that it gives you a microphone. The whole point of you're having your own site

is you have your own megaphone. It gives all your readers a megaphone. But in that instance. They can use it. Yeah, okay. That could be what happened. And it should have been a paid post. It should not have been a public post. Like there's lots of lessons I learned from that for sure. Yeah. And, you know, it's just interesting because oftentimes it's not worth it to deviate from consensus on Twitter. And so the conversation on Twitter becomes fevered and increasingly radical in any number of ways. Because being the moderate who says, this really isn't the end of the.

the internet is not what people want to hear on Twitter. It doesn't do well on Twitter. And it will get you shouted down on Twitter. And like, that's a problem. I think arguably we're seeing what happens with Elon Musk himself, right? Like, I think Elon Musk, I don't know, who knows with Elon Musk, to be honest. But you can imagine Elon Musk being some sort of like normie centrist, right? And he loves to go on and say, I will always vote for Democrats.

Who knows what he did? But you can imagine him being under this sort of attack. Well, who's going to jump to his defense? And then the side that jumps to your defense, like, wow, you guys are good guys. You're defending me. And then that side that jumps to your offense, they start imposing their ideological conformity on you. And you see this happen with both sides. Like, we're human.

Like being under attack like that is hard. Again, I'm not asking for any sympathy. But just having gone through it, it's very difficult. It's very painful. You feel completely isolated. You're just, you're reaching out, searching for allies. and support anywhere you can get it. And then if you get it somewhere,

and then the people that give you the support are then very vocal and extreme about imposing their views on everything onto you, and you're like, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Yeah, you were right about this one thing because I know that because it impacted me, maybe you're right about these other things. And none of this is a conscious process.

It's all subconscious. Like people want to fit in. They want to have a tribe. And if your tribe says, believe XYZ, you're going to believe XYZ. And Twitter is this tribal enforcement mechanism that operates at unbelievable scale and unbelievable speed

in a way that humans have never ever had to deal with in the history of humanity. And this idea that we're evolutionary equipped to handle this to me seems farcical. Yeah, yeah, I think it's more plausible that nobody could fix Twitter and...

Well, the other thing is, a lot of us said, oh, having someone who uses Twitter run Twitter is great. Actually, no, I think that was a very That was a very bad take. Honestly, Musk is up there with the worst Twitter users on the planet as far as the way he chooses to use that product. And I said this at the very beginning. We were in beta. This was never released.

But when Musk announced that he was purchasing Twitter, I said to you, like, I don't really know this guy very well, but people seem to loathe him. and if his ownership makes Twitter so toxic that it prompts news organizations and media to reevaluate their relationship to Twitter and a bunch of people stop using it, that's probably a net positive for society. It's probably a net positive for the general credibility of the media. And it's probably the only realistic path to moving past this era of like constant acrimony and, you know, polarization. So I am hopeful in a way that this is all leading to a good place as people just sort of abandoned Twitter. But we'll see. I don't anticipate that that many people are actually going to leave. That's actually my final question for you. Well, I don't know that that news be a point. I think is actually really important. I think two things happen because, you know,

there's me like, oh, the media is always liberal, blah, blah, blah. I think that's missing. I mean, Twitter both has a, or revealing aspect, right? Like, it's very hard to fake it on Twitter, right? Like, you're going to get revealed for sort of what you are. But it has this conformity enforcing aspect. And the most extreme and loudest voices are going to drive the totems around which that conformity forms. And so, again, this, I'm not trying to be a both sides person. Because I think it's just pretty honest.

you see it on both sides, where you have this drive to extremes and this enforcement mechanism. And I do think it's been a disaster for the media because, I mean, let's be honest, the media is by and large, white-collar professionals, usually pretty well-off, that, you know, well-educated. They're going to tend left just sort of- You can say liberal, yeah. Yeah, but it's one thing to be like, it's your newsroom and you're fighting with people about what you do in X, Y, Z. It's a different thing when it's like you're in there battling the whole internet. So you have this combo of revealing what you believe, but what you believe is also changing,

and it's changing in extreme direction. And then you have the other side that is, again, on Twitter, looking to pounce on everything and highlight XYZ. I mean, I think it's very funny when, like, it's probably got a little bit of, but there's a period where it pours on Twitter. They'd be like, look, no, Twitter's just my personal account. Read this news article that is neutral and objective.

It's like, I just saw you tweeting, right? Like, I'm not going to divorce this, right? But again, it's easy to pick on the media here. Like, as someone who on this podcast, other places, I've tried to be pretty consistently pro-free speech as a principle and points of things like China, I end up where the people that like those articles and support these things tend to be on the other side.

And you get the exact same sort of pressure that goes to the opposite way. Like at the end of what's revealing about this? Two things. Sorry, I'm really going on off on this, but I haven't talked about Twitter about two things. It's fine. Number one, I think all of this is a great object lesson on why principles are hard and also why principles matter. It's almost impossible to maintain in the face of things you vehemently disagree with told on to some sort of principles.

And one of the, what we've lost, you know, I've talked about this. We've lost this idea that the first amendment was a get out of jail free card for tech executives, right? And I understand why people didn't like that and had issues with it. as far as abuse online and things like that go. But what we've lost is any sort of anchor about any of this stuff, right? Like that was actually a very useful thing to have, number one. Number two, this is a beautiful object lesson in the problem with imposing things that you think are good that entail your people being in charge, your tribe being in charge.

What happens when the other side is in charge? We're witnessing both of those problems, principles, abanding them in the cost of that right now. Yeah, well, and the only other note that I want to add is when we talk about the credibility of the media relative to their use of Twitter, I think journalism is incredibly important. And if you think journalism is important, then maintaining at least the appearance of objectivity is like a paramount aspect of the whole. I do think the media was more objective previously. The incentives were different previously.

Yeah, because the incentives you have now is the approval of your peer group, right? And if the approval of your peer group is driven by Twitter and this conformity process. And by the way, those are professional incentives because you advance within the media by impressing other people who are on Twitter. And so it doesn't necessarily matter what a group of 50,000 readers thinks, but it does matter what a group of 500 peers in media think. And maybe that's always been true. but I think Twitter has exacerbated the problem. And the more freely you're just tweeting whatever comes to mind on any given issue, the more risk there is of eroding credibility.

And I think collectively a lot of credibility has eroded over the last 10 years or so. And maybe it's not permanent. It could be a situation where you're never putting the toothpaste back in that tube. But I like to have hope that eventually will get to a saner place. collectively. Yeah, I don't think the toothpaste from the back of the tube, but I think the hope is

you have to have an internet solution. In this case, the internet solution is there's way more outlets, there's way more writers. Like, I think the rise of sort of independent writers is a great thing.

Obviously, I'm exceptionally biased in that regard. But this world, because this is all tied to business model. You had a hundred year run where newspapers were by and large funded by advertisers. And advertisers,

as Elon Musk's discovery, like to play it down the middle. They don't really want to upset either side. Now, does this, as critics would say, favor those in power, favor the status quo, favor those that already have advantages? Absolutely it does. That's intrinsic to it.

And I think it's right to point to this was a flaw in the previous model. But you can also say, look, there was real advantages to it. There was incentives that pushed against polarization, that pushed towards sort of even-handedness. And I think, because the problem, isn't just that Twitter happened. It's also that these incentives all have all gone away, right? The advertising model isn't a sustainable one.

And so unfortunately or fortunately, I think just reality, the best thing we can get to in the future is lots of voices, lots of points of views. And does that make it hard to navigate for the normal person and figure out what's true what's not? It does. But that's just, that's where I've written a lot of these articles about, like, information and like understanding how to read critically because, like, that, like, that's, That's the only way forward.

Like on the internet, we have to empower and enable individuals how to think critically, how to figure this stuff out. And a good way to start is probably getting them off Twitter. Well, totally. And, you know, it's such a noble profession. And so it's not unreasonable to say that if you're practicing that profession, there are going to be times when it's wise to exercise restraint. And this has been difficult to practice during the Twitter era.

That's why abandoning things like uncompromising commitment to free speech is such a loss. Because, like, again, you can acknowledge the issues around moderation and abuse. But you have to have an anchor. This isn't a slippery-up argument per se. It's just the reality of if you're unmoored, the powers around you, the winds, the sea, the waves are stronger than anyone is. And I put myself in this category. There's a reason I don't spend a lot of time on Twitter because it's important. for me to try to retain my own point of view, to try to retain consistency.

And I am just as worried about as anyone about the conformity machine. Yeah. Well, it's also just not productive to spend all day. Sorry, I do spend time on Twitter, but I. No, no, you don't tweet. You don't, you've almost never tweet, except from your alt account where you tweet constantly about basketball. Right.

But think about that. What do I enjoy about my alt account? I am on that count. I'm a blatant bucks fan. I troll the Boston Celtics. as often as I can, right? And I'm leaning into and embracing the fanatic experience. Where am I objective about the bucks?

Of course I'm not. Am I being sort of a jerk to sell this? Of course I am. You do claim to be objective about the bucks, though, which is particularly tiresome. No, no. I'm not objective on Twitter, but in our private conversations, you have to admit. I'm pretty objective. Okay, you can be objective.

Has there been a single post that has made you want to go try Mastodon? or post as people like screenshot their tweets or whatever I guess their toots on mastodon has there been any sort of promo that has made you curious about what these other platforms look like no not really and that's just because I've been fortunate enough to develop really strong communities like we talked about the group chat sort of thing and I'm in multiple group chaps and I do feel it's important and valuable that I'm in a few different group chats that are sort of all over the place. Like normally group chats,

more sort of like, you know, libertarian group chats, more liberal group chats, more recreational chats. Like, I think just getting immersed and talking to different people,

it does, like it's kind of like the internet solution I was talking about. Like trying to stay exposed and aware of the different waves that are going on, I think is really good and important. And I think community is important.

I think the reason why I love group chats so much is I think it's the best of the internet. It's, it's actually enabling constant sort of friendship and fellowship to use like an old church term. Without a lot of the dangers and problems that are inherent to the internet,

again, not just as far as being dunked on and abused, but being walked into conformity. You find a good group of folks that will call your BS and go back and forth. That's great and that's amazing. I think Mastodon as a concept is great. This idea of being federated and own your own server, run your own moderation. That's perfect. That's how things to do.

my skepticism is, number one, it's just there's inherent weaknesses in that as far as user experience, onboarding, things like that. There's real privacy concerns, which you should just be aware of. I don't think that should stop you, but whoever runs that server sees everything, right? Like don't, you shouldn't be doing a lot of direct messaging on Massadon, for example, right? That you should go, you know, do something else. And then, you know, sort of number, number three is, I can't remember number three is. But I like this idea of there being more dispersed.

I mean, I wrote this post several years ago, social networking 2.0, like saying this is where we're going generally. Facebook and Twitter are devolving into number one battlefields and number two, like, references or pointers to another community that's in a different place. And I think that's all healthy. So I would love Macedon to be a massive success. Yeah. Well, it has no appeal to me. And most of what I've seen of Mastodon indicates that some of the most of the most annoying. people on Twitter have just sort of transported all of their stuff to Mastodon. I don't need to be a part of it.

My enemies are all still on Twitter. These are people that I'm indifferent to that I find mildly annoying. But alas, all right, well, I texted you Sunday morning and said, I don't think we need to talk about Musk. And then all this other stuff happened with Musk and Twitter. So we are now nearing an hour. I don't want to suffocate up my chest, to be honest. Well, that was the challenge that is like, all right, so do you talk about this and make it a 10-hour podcast? Because you can't really confine any of it to five to 10 minutes because there are so many different layers. What's happened with Twitter and what might happen with Twitter. It's a wild story that, as we said earlier, changes every 12 hours.

I mean, let's see what this poll turns into for old Elon. Time will tell. Let's get to this observation from Liberty and then we'll just do an extra long episode on the next one. Because after all, you're going to have two weeks to listen to it over Christmas. So don't forget, buy gifts, buy the gift of Sharp Tech in your show notes. Oh, yes. Please do. And Liberty says Liberty RPF on Twitter, frequent emailer as well.

He says, I'm sure you guys have gotten feedback on this. But Nestle is a Swiss company. So that's a correction to Ben's Nestle shot out on the. the last episode. I thought that right after we finished and I was, I mean, number one, I was, of course, I hate, you know, it's annoying to be wrong. So that was bad. It was also funny. It took us a while to think of one. And then we thought of one that wasn't even French. Oops. Well, I mean, look, Revelo was also a miss on my part. Vidal Sassoon. The French should feel good, though, that my associations with France are clearly beauty related. So it's like a luxury. society where everyone's good looking. And again, I do think they have the best language and the best food. I don't know where you're coming from with the Spain argument there. I mean, the French food is just undefeated. Spanish food is top on the continent. Okay. Well, Paiaia is fine. It's like saying I like Mexican food. I get a taco bell. It's fine. I mean to

paella. But there's a lot more to Spanish food than paella. Anya. Okay. All right. Well, we also got other shoutouts. L'Oreal has a seriously innovative track record hiding behind those cosmetics. That was the one. I thought that when I realized that Nestle is a Swiss coming, I was thinking of Loria. Because that actually have read up a bit about them in the past. I think that is actually one of the best answers. I think L'Oreal and LVMH are the two best answers.

Okay, yes, LVMH is what I was thinking about. and then Airbus Schlumberger? I mean, Airbus is, I mean. It's a French company. We don't necessarily have to celebrate. Yeah, I mean, it's a European company that is, you know, basically set up, you know,

very downstream from the EU and, you know, to be a Boeing competitor. I mean, it's a good example of, I think, where governments can make a real impact in terms of industries that have, you know, these sort of structures that are hard to get off the ground. So it is innovative. It's innovative in a very European way.

The involvement of government is, I think, very prominent. But yes, there's certainly, you know, cleaning Boeing's, you know, Boeing's cleaning their plate. I don't know, what are they doing? Cleaning their clock. Cleaning their clock. That's what I was looking for, yes. Well, Michelin, Renault, Carrefour, and Axa, A-XA. Yeah, I think we're, because we both like Formula One, we're not quick to think of Renault.

but um well i was going to say renno uh not the greatest team in the world and they were so incompetent they had to rebrand in recent years to alpine um and they have a lot of funding so it's actually pretty difficult to understand why they continue to underperform so hopefully the rest of the french corporate sector is more successful than alpine slash reno not a lot of tech companies on this list Not a lot of, that's true. That's how the conversation began. It's been a tough week for the French, though. Our slights in the World Cup loss.

I hope you could all enjoy some time off at the Riviera and 35-hour work weeks. A lot, a lot to love about the French. In any event, as I ramble toward the end here, we do have a bunch of good questions for later in the week. Yeah, you promise remote work. So, no, let's do this. Let's do a, we'll figure it out. But we owe a follow up on the remote work stuff. We have some follow up on TSM.

And we need the fun Christmas mailbag. People were very disappointing with the Thanksgiving mailbag. I had to self-generate the group chat taxonomy question. Don't ask for too many, though. We've got good questions already. Oh, do we have good questions this time? We've got a, we've got a worst acquisitions of all time, Rushmore, as a, as a complex. I'm going to our best acquisitions.

I'm going to prep for that one. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. Ben will prep. We will be back later in the week. And everybody, you can, A, email us, email at sharp tech. dot FM.

And B, you can give the gift of Strateree by going to stretecary.com where. No, go to the link in your show notes. Oh, that's right. All right. It's all about the show notes. Not just, that's right. Honestly, honestly, that's like a key piece of passport is leveraging. show notes because we know who you are, right?

We don't know who you are specifically, but you're getting this individual feed. And that's why you can go to show notes. You can click dithering. And boom, it's in your podcast player. You didn't have to log in. You didn't have to like go to the directory. Boom,

you can add sharp china. You can add trajectory. And, uh, and so yeah, you like, you know, need some, uh, I know you're on, you're on the content side. You're not worried about the tech side. No, no. I'm, I'm not really,

some real innovation there. I feel like French. I feel French. I feel French. I feel French right now and, you know, disrespected. Slighted. Yes. Well, I'll have to hashtag be better and we'll come back later in the week and check out the show notes.

I'm putting links to stories in there every week. Lots of good follow-up reading for anybody who's interested. So Sharp Tech is all about the show notes for a variety of different reasons. And let's keep it rolling later in the week, Ben. Oh, I talk to you later.