Leaving aside Schofield and his sexcapades - no! LOL.
Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?
- Thread starter tim
- Start date
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Yes it is Musk we're talking about, rather than someone like say, Linus Torvalds, who has a much, much greater claim towards being an advocate of technological decentralisation and who is also rather notably not a billionaire. I would argue that there's an inverse relationship between actually working towards free and open technology, and being one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, as Bill Gates amply demonstrates.
There's plenty of rich people out there who are much better advocates of decentralisation than Linus Torvalds.
Torvalds is a great man to whom we all owe a lot, but his focus is opensource, not decentralisation.
(Yes I know he wrote git).
Decentralisation really matters, because unless we get all the opensource software projects that count, decentralised, governments around the world are going to come knocking on their doors with dictates they won't like.
Right now we have the likes of Sam Altman jumping up down along with many others warning about the dangers of AI and misinformation.
The internet will be flooded soon with misinformation and crap on a cosmic scale. Those doing all the spamming with crap, will be doing so to setup a narrative where the only solution is that we're not allowed to do anything to on the internet without a digital ID issued from the government.
Opensource developers should not let things get to that stage.
Decentralisation of open source projects is only part of the solution.
The other main part is that digitial ID's are decentralised independent of governments or any other centralised issuing authority.
That way, we can all just set our web-browsers to show us content from sources that web-users think are reputable, rather than the government.
For example, the government doesn't need to issue me with a digital ID for you to know that website I am running is really my website, or that those tweets are really mine.
If we as users of the internet, don't come up with our own solutions to fight endless stream of bogeymen, the governments will ... for their benefit, not ours.
This is all going to come to a head. And there will be painful battles.
For example, there's opensource and uncensored AI out there.
You can download at ChatGPT like AI that runs on your PC that is completely uncensored with no ethnics whatsoever. It will just give you the answers to your questions, unfiltered. That's a genie they never wanted to escape from it's bottle but now it's out there.
So here's the problem. Do governments ban AI development, preventing any opensource AI being developed in the open, while deep down underground, corporates and hostile governments and secret govt departments in the west continue developing it all?
Well if the answer is yes, the danger is that governments could wind up controlling us and we have no way of fighting back.
If the answer is no, the danger is that some nutter is going to invent a killer virus with the help of AI in his basement. Why shoot up a school when you can wipe out most of humanity?
Last edited:
Ax^
Silly Rabbit
the internet will soon be flood with misinformation 
you know Elon has made changes to twitter to ensure that anyone can spread as much misinformation over as many peoples threading and search tweets
as long as you willing to give the fucker the money for a blue tick
odd person to rely on to stop the spread of misinformation
billionaires wills to stop the spread of misinformation is also ballocks
point in case rupert Murdock
you know Elon has made changes to twitter to ensure that anyone can spread as much misinformation over as many peoples threading and search tweets
as long as you willing to give the fucker the money for a blue tick
odd person to rely on to stop the spread of misinformation
billionaires wills to stop the spread of misinformation is also ballocks
point in case rupert Murdock
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Did you forget to drink your bleach today?
Ax^
Silly Rabbit
Raheem
Well-Known Member
He's decentralized the misinformation
How do you propose misinformation - lies - that you believe is knowingly propgated, are best dealt with?
I believe it's possible to have a system where people can build up creditibility and still retain their anominty so they aren't punished for whistleblowing or following a narrative other more powerful people simply don't like.
Ax^
Silly Rabbit
teqniq
DisMembered
You do realise that he wrote and developed the original linux kernel, made it open source and that open source is decentralisation by design?
Thesaint
Active Member
Isn't Linux ultimately a Unix copy?
Ultimately you cant as deciding what is misinformation is so much harder than it first appears. A lot of advocates of filtering misinformation are ultimately about filtering views you don't like.
teqniq
DisMembered
No, to be more precise it's a Unix clone. Unix was originally developed by programmers to run on specific hardware, for instance Sun workstations and HP servers. Linus Torvalds took the concept of Unix which is a very secure OS indeed and made it available to everyone by releasing a version initially that would run on PCs but then the open source community ran with the idea and developed it to run various platforms.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I fail to see how any digital ID system, regardless of whether it's centralised and government issued, or some kind of utopian decentralised jobbie, is going to do anything to address the potential avalanche of misinformation and other shit that AI technologies could herald. It's not like both government and private interests are lacking for motivations to do engage in such activity themselves.
Like why the fuck would I trust "other web users" to tell me whether anything is trustworthy? These are the same people sharing shit Facebook memes pumped out by Russian government-sponsored troll farms. The same folks who think selectively searching for YouTube videos that confirm their own biases makes them more qualified to speak on medical matters than doctors and scientists in the field. Yeah no, fuck that.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
The Hunter Biden laptop story. Jesus.
Suppose you wept when Fox let Carlson go.
Musk is responsible for amplifying and enabling the far right, and he's a petty tryant who is far removed from democracy and freedom of speech.
Not surprised you worship him, you middle class loving gated community authoritarian Tory plophead.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
good people on both sides
But uses of the internet obviously don't want it right? So off we go and cook up decentralised solutions.
There are decentralised IDs slowly making the rounds, but they can't happen overnight because everyone needs to vouch for everyone else being human in such a way that an AI can't possibly exploit.
AIs would be given different types of IDs so content platforms would be able to decide whether to allow content from them and if they did, users would be able to tell whether the content was from an AI or a human.
There would be little visability of content from any entity that doesn't have a digital ID. I'm not an expert in encryption, but my understanding is that as long as the private keys for such IDs are beyond the reach of any human and the hardware that's storing them is beyond the reach of AI, then it should be possible to stop any AI from obtaining human digital IDs ... but I'm not an expert on that.
That is the only viable solution I've heard of and it's certaintly better than governments issuing digital ID for the purpose of using the internet and posting content.
That's a different problem. At least you know they are just humans spouting bollocks. It was generated by humans.
The big misinformation problems are going to be deepfake videos. If the video has been digitally signed off by a human being, then at least we know that a individual has signed it off and who their online persona is.
If the video is from the BBC news and it's been digitally signed by the BBC as oppossed to Bananaman123, you're going to trust it. If it's not been signed at all, it shouldn't be allowed to be uploaded in the first place.
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
Wait Until you figure out his spaceships are fake. Youre gonna be so massively disappointed. Like that time my Dad threw me out of Home for pointing out the Moon shit was faked.
Gonna need another 7 astronauts.
You idiots want a truth you’re not even prepared to handle.
Gonna need another 7 astronauts.
You idiots want a truth you’re not even prepared to handle.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
Are you alright?
"What do you mean the Hunter biden laptop story? Jesus" - It was suppressed by twitter.
Tucker Carlson isn't my cup of tea. There's too much of his own narrative in his content. I can't seem to watch him longer than 5 minutes.
I don't know of any "amplifying and enabling" of the far right. Please give me some examples please.
To suggest that I worship Musk is laughable. I'd rather be a slave to the truth rather than Musk.
There's a lot better things to critisize Musk over, but people tend to listen to objective critism as opposed to outright demonisation.
For example, Musk has lessons to learn for allowing his partners in OpenAI to jump into bed with Microsoft. That suggests to me that Musk didn't put the appropriate safeguards in place to stop that from happening.
So the fucker sits there and talks about how we should put up safeguards against AI when he couldn't even protect himself from the unscrupulous cunts he was working with!
If Musk had decentralised OpenAI before anything else, no one would have been able to walk away with it and give it to Microsoft for a load of silver now would they?
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
Never been fucking better mate. How are you?
The best solution so far is about giving you the secure information you need to know where the content originated, even if the source is nothing more than an online persona of an individual. If that is done right, the bots and anything generated by an AI will be a thing of the past, at least until an AI can fool a whole social circle of people into believing it's a human friend of theirs ... which is why all the decentralised digital id issuers will be saying something like "Have you actually met this human in real life, you know, physically?"
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
I had you lot going for 20 something years.of course it’s fucking possible.
Nice one. But your obvious joke doesn't negate the fact that while an AI could pass the Turing test online, it would be thwarted when trying to obtain a digital cert.
HOWEVER, AI is capable of hiring humans and lying to humans to get the job done, so it stands to reason that they could resort to bribary.
It's not going to be long before we see AI running around with a whole bunch of money in their crypto-wallets and activally bribing people in order to achieve their goals.
The whole thing is fucking chess on countless dimensions.
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
I don’t know. You have a driving license don’t you?
Good little rat. Well trained.
Good little rat. Well trained.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
The laptop story was all over twitter and the internet. You couldn't move without your right wing brethren banging on about it. And yet complaining about being silenced.
If you are not aware of the far right, white supremacists, antisemitic content and how it has thrived under Musk's stewardship, you're being disingenuous.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
Also...
Far right figures like Andrew Anglin, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson all allowed back on, but journalists who reported on @ElonJet remain in limbo... how's that shore up with his freedom of speech shtick?
Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler also regained verification after having lost it.
Musk has also questioned information concerning neo-Nazi and mass shooter Mauricio Garcia - he put it down to psyops and questioned his far right links.
Interesting article on why he's a troll and enabler. You should find the article balanced, as it has him down as more of an edgelord than full on scumbag. But then, it's a close call. Reckon it goes easy on him. Anyway. Have c&p it in case link don't work for you.
If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:
In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins. (Fauci, for his part, has said he would cooperate with any possible investigations and has nothing to hide.)
Beyond its stark cruelty, this tweet is incredibly thirsty. As right-wing troll memes go, it is Dad-level, 4chan–Clark Griswold stuff, which is to say it’s desperate engagement bait in the hopes of attracting kudos from the only influencers who give Musk the time of day anymore: right-wing shock jocks. But that is the proper company for the billionaire, because whether or not he wants to admit it, Musk is actively aiding the far right’s political project. He is a right-wing activist.
Currently, Musk’s politics are a subject of debate in the press. On Saturday, The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters attempted to offer a nuanced portrait of the Twitter owner’s ideologies, arguing that Musk “continues to defy easy political categorization.” But Peters’ laundry list of Musk’s recent lib-trolling and “woke” scolding—such as Musk’s November recommendation to his millions of followers to vote Republican—undermines the very thesis of the article. The nuance Peters is looking for does not exist: Musk’s actions and associations make a clear case that he is a right-wing reactionary.
Musk, for his part, has maintained that he is a centrist, that his politics have remained unchanged, and that it is the Democratic Party that has veered dramatically leftward. (Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Musk’s logic—that wayward leftism has given a lifelong moderate liberal no choice but to support right-wing causes—is a common trope among far-right activists. It has been employed by many in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and influencers such as Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, and others. The argument stretches far back in American politics. The neoconservative movement in the United States was originated by liberals who grew disillusioned with the Democratic Party, especially in relation to the left’s Vietnam protests.
Beyond Musk’s political affiliations, his actual political convictions—by which I mean the bedrock set of values, ideologies, and organizing principles through which he sees the world and wishes it to be structured—are a slightly different conversation. Here, I tend to agree with The Verge’s Liz Lopatto, who wrote recently that Musk doesn’t really have political beliefs, only personal interests. But one can have vapid or nonexistent political beliefs and still be a political activist. Political activism is about actions. Here’s what those actions look like in practice:
Publicly, Musk appears deeply committed to the right’s culture war against progressivism in most forms. His purchase of Twitter was an explicitly political act couched in the notion of preserving free speech. But Musk’s notion of free speech is a broad course correction that involves amplifying and advancing the interests of right-wing reactionaries while trolling the left. Musk might argue that this is restoring balance to the system, but if we are judging based only on actions and outcomes, it is very hard to see his tenure at Twitter as anything other than a series of policies intended to benefit a particular ideology
Musk also simply loves palling around with far-right influencers on Twitter. A scroll through his Twitter replies is a rather remarkable document of a man who has (or at least had) more money than any other human being in the history of humanity, a fair amount of power, and an endless supply of options for how to spend his time, and who chooses to spend his time as a reply guy for prominent MAGA voices, such as a user who goes by the handle @catturd2 and Turning Points USA’s Charlie Kirk.
In a similar fashion, Musk’s “Twitter Files” project, for which he has been releasing Twitter’s old internal documents concerning controversial content-moderation decisions to independent journalists, is an attention spectacle dressed up in the style of investigative journalism designed to delight Musk’s Twitter friends. As I wrote on Friday, some of the internal conversations and screenshots from Musk’s company are fascinating documents that shed light on the intractable problem of content moderation at scale. But they are presented in a blatantly partisan and misleading manner, and have been released only to journalists who share Musk’s pet ideological issues: that the mainstream media is ethically bankrupt, that social media and most elite institutions are biased and colluding with the government.
The hypocrisy at the center of Musk’s Twitter tenure is crucial to the understanding of Musk’s political activism. He has championed ideals of free-speech maximalism and amnesty to those who’ve offended his rules. Twitter, under his management, has let back on organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin; and January 6–investigation personalities such as Roger Stone. At the same time, Twitter has suspended accounts that have mocked Musk or expressed left-leaning views. Whether intentionally or not, Musk has, in effect, been governing Twitter using the classic Frank Wilhoit maxim: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Put differently, the billionaire has been advancing a long-running right-wing political project described recently by my colleague Adam Serwer as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”
Why is Musk doing all of this? The answer is reasonably simple. Musk’s far-right activism clearly seems to be, like all else in his life, personally motivated, not by a strong political ideology or value system but, as Lopatto argues, by the accumulation of money and “being perceived as a visionary who will reshape human society.” Musk is interested in preserving the political values and systems that keep him on top as a revered member of culture. It’s a philosophy that the writer John Ganz has described as “bossism” or “bosses on top.” For Musk, right-wing activism serves that role. Musk’s tweets—like his dismissive tweet this morning, or his concerning insinuations that, perhaps, his former trust-and-safety employees did not stop child-exploitation posts for motivated reasons—are cruel for the shallowest reasons: because they are likely to draw engagement to the platform that Musk has plunged into financial uncertainty, due to both his piling on of debt and his alienation of advertisers.
But even as a far-right shitposter, Musk is hapless. Unlike somebody such as Donald Trump, who remains the Twitter troll template, Musk is a try-hard. And although the Twitter shock jocks will happily lap him up because he triggers the libs and serves their purposes, Musk is still seen as a dilettante by the inveterate shitposters and bigots. Over on 4chan, the far-right message board, Musk’s Fauci tweet barely merited discussion. “Elon is just being controversial to drive traffic to his website,” one poster mused. Even in his thirsty attempts to be an edgelord, Musk is failing to be anything other than cringey.
Far right figures like Andrew Anglin, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson all allowed back on, but journalists who reported on @ElonJet remain in limbo... how's that shore up with his freedom of speech shtick?
Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler also regained verification after having lost it.
Musk has also questioned information concerning neo-Nazi and mass shooter Mauricio Garcia - he put it down to psyops and questioned his far right links.
Interesting article on why he's a troll and enabler. You should find the article balanced, as it has him down as more of an edgelord than full on scumbag. But then, it's a close call. Reckon it goes easy on him. Anyway. Have c&p it in case link don't work for you.
If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:
In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins. (Fauci, for his part, has said he would cooperate with any possible investigations and has nothing to hide.)
Beyond its stark cruelty, this tweet is incredibly thirsty. As right-wing troll memes go, it is Dad-level, 4chan–Clark Griswold stuff, which is to say it’s desperate engagement bait in the hopes of attracting kudos from the only influencers who give Musk the time of day anymore: right-wing shock jocks. But that is the proper company for the billionaire, because whether or not he wants to admit it, Musk is actively aiding the far right’s political project. He is a right-wing activist.
Currently, Musk’s politics are a subject of debate in the press. On Saturday, The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters attempted to offer a nuanced portrait of the Twitter owner’s ideologies, arguing that Musk “continues to defy easy political categorization.” But Peters’ laundry list of Musk’s recent lib-trolling and “woke” scolding—such as Musk’s November recommendation to his millions of followers to vote Republican—undermines the very thesis of the article. The nuance Peters is looking for does not exist: Musk’s actions and associations make a clear case that he is a right-wing reactionary.
Musk, for his part, has maintained that he is a centrist, that his politics have remained unchanged, and that it is the Democratic Party that has veered dramatically leftward. (Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Musk’s logic—that wayward leftism has given a lifelong moderate liberal no choice but to support right-wing causes—is a common trope among far-right activists. It has been employed by many in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and influencers such as Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, and others. The argument stretches far back in American politics. The neoconservative movement in the United States was originated by liberals who grew disillusioned with the Democratic Party, especially in relation to the left’s Vietnam protests.
Beyond Musk’s political affiliations, his actual political convictions—by which I mean the bedrock set of values, ideologies, and organizing principles through which he sees the world and wishes it to be structured—are a slightly different conversation. Here, I tend to agree with The Verge’s Liz Lopatto, who wrote recently that Musk doesn’t really have political beliefs, only personal interests. But one can have vapid or nonexistent political beliefs and still be a political activist. Political activism is about actions. Here’s what those actions look like in practice:
Publicly, Musk appears deeply committed to the right’s culture war against progressivism in most forms. His purchase of Twitter was an explicitly political act couched in the notion of preserving free speech. But Musk’s notion of free speech is a broad course correction that involves amplifying and advancing the interests of right-wing reactionaries while trolling the left. Musk might argue that this is restoring balance to the system, but if we are judging based only on actions and outcomes, it is very hard to see his tenure at Twitter as anything other than a series of policies intended to benefit a particular ideology
Musk also simply loves palling around with far-right influencers on Twitter. A scroll through his Twitter replies is a rather remarkable document of a man who has (or at least had) more money than any other human being in the history of humanity, a fair amount of power, and an endless supply of options for how to spend his time, and who chooses to spend his time as a reply guy for prominent MAGA voices, such as a user who goes by the handle @catturd2 and Turning Points USA’s Charlie Kirk.
In a similar fashion, Musk’s “Twitter Files” project, for which he has been releasing Twitter’s old internal documents concerning controversial content-moderation decisions to independent journalists, is an attention spectacle dressed up in the style of investigative journalism designed to delight Musk’s Twitter friends. As I wrote on Friday, some of the internal conversations and screenshots from Musk’s company are fascinating documents that shed light on the intractable problem of content moderation at scale. But they are presented in a blatantly partisan and misleading manner, and have been released only to journalists who share Musk’s pet ideological issues: that the mainstream media is ethically bankrupt, that social media and most elite institutions are biased and colluding with the government.
The hypocrisy at the center of Musk’s Twitter tenure is crucial to the understanding of Musk’s political activism. He has championed ideals of free-speech maximalism and amnesty to those who’ve offended his rules. Twitter, under his management, has let back on organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin; and January 6–investigation personalities such as Roger Stone. At the same time, Twitter has suspended accounts that have mocked Musk or expressed left-leaning views. Whether intentionally or not, Musk has, in effect, been governing Twitter using the classic Frank Wilhoit maxim: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Put differently, the billionaire has been advancing a long-running right-wing political project described recently by my colleague Adam Serwer as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”
Why is Musk doing all of this? The answer is reasonably simple. Musk’s far-right activism clearly seems to be, like all else in his life, personally motivated, not by a strong political ideology or value system but, as Lopatto argues, by the accumulation of money and “being perceived as a visionary who will reshape human society.” Musk is interested in preserving the political values and systems that keep him on top as a revered member of culture. It’s a philosophy that the writer John Ganz has described as “bossism” or “bosses on top.” For Musk, right-wing activism serves that role. Musk’s tweets—like his dismissive tweet this morning, or his concerning insinuations that, perhaps, his former trust-and-safety employees did not stop child-exploitation posts for motivated reasons—are cruel for the shallowest reasons: because they are likely to draw engagement to the platform that Musk has plunged into financial uncertainty, due to both his piling on of debt and his alienation of advertisers.
But even as a far-right shitposter, Musk is hapless. Unlike somebody such as Donald Trump, who remains the Twitter troll template, Musk is a try-hard. And although the Twitter shock jocks will happily lap him up because he triggers the libs and serves their purposes, Musk is still seen as a dilettante by the inveterate shitposters and bigots. Over on 4chan, the far-right message board, Musk’s Fauci tweet barely merited discussion. “Elon is just being controversial to drive traffic to his website,” one poster mused. Even in his thirsty attempts to be an edgelord, Musk is failing to be anything other than cringey.
krtek a houby
Merry Xmas!
Musk does seem to be obsessed with giving them a platform, and don't ever see him putting them under any kind of duress.
With all his power and control needs, the battle is one sided. So far.
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