Month: November 2022

Dave Chappelle, Or How I Learned To Quit Worrying & Love The ‘Woke Cancel Culture Mob’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Sometimes when I talk to my Traditionalist relatives, I’m aghast at how different they perceive the world relative to me. At the very forefront of their mind is the idea that the “woke cancel culture mob” is not only “grooming” children, but they will “cancel” anyone who is conservative enough to question their aggressive “gay agenda.”

Not canceled.

Ugh.

A prime of example of this bizarre world view is Dave Chappelle. My Traditionalist relatives believe that because of his aggressive anti-trans stance, that Chappelle’s career is dead and he now lives under an assumed name along with all the other “canceled” conservatives of Hollywood.

Of course, this is complete bullshit.

Chappelle is doing fine. He’s very popular and continues to have a robust career. But the expression my Traditionalist conservatives give me when I point this out is complete disbelief. They really believe that the “woke cancel culture mob” is so absolutely powerful that by definition if you have the temerity to cross them that you burst into flames and descend into some sort of “canceled” hell to be with a groomer Satan or some such.

This is why I just don’t believe there is any hope for America anymore. The idea that the people who otherwise would be the bedrock of our democracy now apparently, in the abstract, live in abject fear of having their lives ruined by the “woke cancel culture mob” just for being conservative is extremely alarming. They are primed and ready to, when the time comes, support America’s transition into autocracy.

Then, of course, the only question we face is do we endup around Hungary and Turkey politically or do we careen towards something closer to Russia or Nazi Germany. At the moment, I honestly can’t game things out that far.

And, yet, it definitely seems that this is it. Call it the Fourth Turning, or the “Great Reset,” or whatever the fuck you want, but the United States is far less stable than you might otherwise think. And, really, the issue is — when MAGA demands Blues bend a knee to autocratic fascism, do they do it or do they serve papers on a National Divorce?

At the moment, I think Blues are going to be so sucker punched by how rapidly the transition to fascism happens in the United States that they’ll just shrug and let it happen. After a brief moment of panic in late 2024, early 2025, we’ll just slip into autocracy, probably through a process that will ultimately end in a Constitutional Convention.

There is a small chance of a military junta, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

If you have the means, get a passport and start figuring out where you’re going to flee once the American Nazis known as MAGA finally consolidate power.

The Approaching Twitter Death Spiral Tipping Point

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We’re fast approaching the theoretical terminal velocity tipping point in the demise of Twitter — maybe? It’s one of those, I’ll know it when I see it types of things. But the key thing to focus on is there remains a narrow window of opportunity for someone to swoop in an eat Twitter’s lunch once and for all.

But whomever did it would have to be quick about it — you probably have months, not years, to get whatever it is you want to found out the door and in the virtual hands of the currently Twitter-using public.

At the moment, it’s possible that this window of opportunity will come and go, giving Elon Musk enough time to finally get his sea legs and come roaring back. He didn’t become the wealthiest man in the world by being totally incompetent. It’s just were in a chaotic moment between him buying Twitter and him turning things around for good.

Anyway. I still wish someone would do something with MY Twitter Killer idea.

But here, again, is a basic feature set of my daydream.

Groups
Everyone would have to create Groups, both Public and Private just to use the service. Everything would be found in Groups that individual users would create in an ad hoc manner for whatever they wanted to talk about. Groups would be attached to an individual User’s ID, so you could have multiple, redundant Groups about the same subject. This aids in scalability.
Managed Participation
One key element of a Group would be not everyone could contribute. Whenever you created a Group, you would be prompted to set participating requirements, like, say “Only Verified Users” or whatever. This also helps with scalability because even most popular Group, the ones viewed by potentially millions of people, would not become unmanageable

Threads
Inside of each Group, there would be Threads. These would be laid out like a blog. Subthreads would be a clickaway and set up in a similar fashion. This does away with the clunky threading of Usenet, which just isn’t practical anymore.

Posts
The Post would be the central component of the service. You would have a whole Webpage to work with. You could throw in anything you might otherwise put in a Webpage using a WYSIWYG editor.
Inline, Collaborative Editing
What’s interesting is, once a Post was published, there would be collaborative inline editing of that post by other Users — until, of course, you ran out of colors and a new Post was spawned in the Thread.

Absolutely no one cares or is listening to me. So, unless I win the PowerBall, all of this is a huge waste of time. But, as I keep saying, it is relaxing to keep solving different problems in this hypothetical service, even if it will never come into being.

I Do *Not* Know Why Someone From The Justice Department Looked At Your LinkedIn

I wrote a post about myself but it never said anything about the motives of the Justice Department looking at people’s LinkedIns in general. I put a rhetorical question in the title.

After years of it being used by people worried like I was, I have changed it, hoping it will no longer be indexed and found by people panicking about this thing happening to them, too.

Sorry.

Hell, Sometimes Even I Want To Burn It All Down

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I am not, by nature, a violent man. In fact, I hate guns and I hate violence of any sort. I’m a man of ideas, a man of peace. And the argument could be made that having three cats when I was growing up gave me that brain parasite in cat urine that is makes you “nicer.”

But even I have to admit that income disparity in the United States is growing so alarming as to make the country far more unstable than you might think. I keep being reminded of this massive disparity when I listen to some of my favorite liberal-progressive podcasts.

The things they talk about are simply impossible for me to imagine being able to afford. And they’re so casual about it. They talk about their jetset lives and the elements of their latest AirBnB as if EVERYONE can do such a thing. I understand that some of it all is aspirational in nature — they talk about it to make themselves sound cool or they’re just clueless — but the net effect is I feel like going to the ramparts in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson.

All of this is even more relevant when you realize that the wealthiest, most stable, most powerful democracy humanity has ever seen could very well implode into civil war at some point between now and spring 2025. I know that at the moment that sounds both hysterical and fantastical, but if you look at macro trends — like income inequality — oh boy.

What’s even more alarming to me on a personal basis is I’ve shifted own my position on the future of the Union some. I used to consider myself a Lincoln Unionist through and through….but now, as autocratic MAGA fascists grow more and more politically ascendant I have come to believe that on paper, at least, Blue states should seriously consider secession.

But at the same time, I hate violence so much that I suppose it would be for the best if Blues simply bent a knee to fascist on the state level and let wealthy liberals flee the country en masse. Of course, there is a possibility that some sort of military junta will step in during any Certification Crisis in 2024 – 2025 and that will be a stop gap solution between autocracy and civil war.

Who knows. But all I know is the United States is primed and ready for civil war / revolution from either the Right OR Left. I suppose your best bet is to get a passport and leave the country now, in advance, if you have the means.

‘Bothsidesing’ The Death Of Democracy

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have yet again had an opportunity to have an impromptu focus group with my conservative relatives. And I’m very, very alarmed for the state of our American birthright, our democracy. The key element is the my Traditionalist conservatives, who would otherwise be the cornerstone, the bedrock of a stable liberal democracy are now primed and ready to be the same for fascist MAGA autocracy.

Here’s why — Traditionalist conservatives simply can not, will not unite with the center-Left to protect our democracy. And because of that, rather than even having an opinion when it’s factually proven that MAGA is in the wrong, they just throw up their hands and say, “both sides.”

By “bothsidesing” things, they are actually complicit in collapse of our democracy. When they tune out from political debate because they don’t want to agree with the center-Left, the fucking autocratic fascist MAGA cocksuckers win.

In short, Traditionalists who “bothsides” things are one step away from being “Good Germans,” or, in this case, “Good Americans.” And they will sit on their hands when ICE is weaponized and there’s a Constitutional Convention that will pass the modern MAGA version of the Nazi Enabling Acts.

And, of course, the issue is that they will be Good Americans until it gets personal. So, for my Traditionalist conservative relatives, the rise of autocracy is an abstract convenience. They won’t have to worry about being “canceled” by the “woke cancel culture mob,” but for ME, the end of American democracy is very concrete in the sense that I’m inevitably going to cross the autocrat because of my drunk big mouth.

Anyway, they key is — be prepared for the United States to transition into autocracy. The other two options — civil war or military junta — aren’t that great either. It will be interesting to see which of the three options we endup doing.

Imagining The Userbase Move From Twitter To My Hypothetical Replacement

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, suppose we’ve designed a new Twitter-like service inspired by Usenet UX — then what? Well, the first thing I would do is have an invite-only program designed to seed the service with content providers — especially the type that Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to alienate at the moment.

This artificial scarcity would not only allow the service to gradually boostrap itself up, it would also generate a lot of buzz that would make people want to join as soon as possible. This worked really well with the original launch of Gmail.

Anyway, what would be the reaction of your typical Twitter user once the there was a mass migration to this new, hypothetical service?

I think the first thing that Twitter users would note is how there was a lot of control over who could actually Post to the service. This would probably the the thing that was the most controversial. Right wing nutjobs would blast the service as too restrictive and “censoring” them from be racist, misogynistic and generally caustic and abusive.

But once people got used to that element of the service, the next thing that Twitter users would find weird is how much space they had when they did Post. Instead of just 280 characters, they could really get into whatever subject they wanted to talk about. They could throw in video, pictures and, hell, a podcast that they recorded, as well.

Now, obviously, there is a problem with this — sometimes, people just want to write less than 280 characters. There are two ways to look at this. One is the “medium is the message” and as such, by definition, people will write a lot more simply because they can or feel obliged to.

The other idea is that you would have to manage shorter Posts in some way. I think one way to do this is you would have some sort of Executive Summary feature where you could write essentially a tweet. Remember, this service would have a Feed like Twitter and Facebook and, as such, would already excerpt a portion of the longer Post found in a Group. You could lean into that use that excerpt need as the place to feature shorter Posts.

Or something.

I guess the point is — while the transition from Twitter to my hypothetical service would be a bit bumpy, it wouldn’t be impossible. People would eventually get used to the idea and, if you played your cards right, Twitter would become just another forgotten social media service like Friendster and MySpace.

A Better Mouse Trap

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only keep writing about my proposed “Twitter Killer” because it seems like every day on Twitter now, its new owner Elon Musk flings off yet more chaos. As such, I find myself thinking — what are we going to do if Twitter implodes? What then?

Then I remember the Twitter Killer idea that I’ve been noodling on for years now and think up yet another angle I might write about. But I am well aware that all of this is pointless in the end. It’s not like anyone is going to take me up on this idea — I would have to fund and build it myself it was ever to become a reality.

As it is, I’m just a broke ass writer in the middle of nowhere, struggling to finish my first novel. So, lulz.

But here, again, is a basic feature set of my daydream.

Groups
Everyone would have to create Groups, both Public and Private just to use the service. Everything would be found in Groups that individual users would create in an ad hoc manner for whatever they wanted to talk about. Groups would be attached to an individual User’s ID, so you could have multiple, redundant Groups about the same subject. This aids in scalability.
Managed Participation
One key element of a Group would be not everyone could contribute. Whenever you created a Group, you would be prompted to set participating requirements, like, say “Only Verified Users” or whatever. This also helps with scalability because even most popular Group, the ones viewed by potentially millions of people, would not become unmanageable

Threads
Inside of each Group, there would be Threads. These would be laid out like a blog. Subthreads would be a clickaway and set up in a similar fashion. This does away with the clunky threading of Usenet, which just isn’t practical anymore.

Posts
The Post would be the central component of the service. You would have a whole Webpage to work with. You could throw in anything you might otherwise put in a Webpage using a WYSIWYG editor.
Inline, Collaborative Editing
What’s interesting is, once a Post was published, there would be collaborative inline editing of that post by other Users — until, of course, you ran out of colors and a new Post was spawned in the Thread.

Absolutely no one cares or is listening to me. So, unless I win the PowerBall, all of this is a huge waste of time. But, as I keep saying, it is relaxing to keep solving different problems in this hypothetical service, even if it will never come into being.

Controlling Who Can Post To This Hypothetical ‘Twitter Killer’ Is Key To Its Scalability

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the biggest problems with using the old Usenet UX as the basis of a new, modern “Twitter Killer” is scalability. If you have a few hundred million users, individual Groups could be so full of users to manage that the whole idea just collapses.

And, remember, there is a key problem with the Group concept that you would have to figure out — by definition, the same questions would be asked over and over again and you would have to create a FAQ. I really, really hate how the Group concept usually forces the existence of FAQs because it’s pedantic and way too much work in this age of Tik-Tok. What’s more, both Usenet and Reddit have shown that having a Group inevitable causes an little microculture to develop where are Us and Them.

This is probably one of the best features of Twitter — there’s no Us and Them. There’s no rigmarole for new users to plow through to simply use the fucking service. You can literally as a new User, jump right in and participate.

There are few ways, I think, to manage the issues of scalability and microculture.

You fix scalability by managing who can Post into any particular group if they don’t own it. This really fixes a lot of problems, especially if a Group was REALLY POPULAR, with potentially millions of people reading it. But you would have to be really careful about such things, otherwise you endup with complex bloatware with way too many granular features that will turn people off.

It should be simple — when you create a Group, you’re asked — who can post to this group? So, you might have the option to say Only Verified Users, or whatever with the option to include specific Users that you feel can contribute to the discussion, even if they’re not Verified. This way, you have the best of both worlds.

You get the power of a Group, without it being overloaded by thousands and thousands of Users all struggling to comment. This also really would help the signal to noise ratio. It also, hopefully, might solve the troll problem that seems to plague so much of social media these days.

Now for the innate parochial nature of the Group concept.

In addition to controlling who can Post, the existence of the Feed feature would do a lot to end this problem. It cuts through Groups so you can passively monitor what’s going on in the Groups you follow without having to actually be a regular user.

Controlling who can Post would probably be controversial — the thing the Tech Press would talk about all the time when you first introduced the platform — but in the end I think people would love it for obvious reasons.

Now to win PowerBall so I can found this thing. Wink.

Representing Threads On My Theoretical ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s occurred to me that there’s an awkward situation with the a hold over from the original Usenet UX that I’m basing this service on — how threads are represented within the service.

I think to properly update this concept, I’m going to have to think outside the box some. As such, I’m going to throw up the way it was done with Usenet — lines that represented each post in the thread or subthread.

Because of the existence of a Feed feature, I think what happens is you simply click on the subject of the Thread and you see the first post in the thread. Maybe on the right side of the screen you might be given some context as what’s going on with the Thread, maybe not. It could be that Threads would represented much like Posts on a Blog. This really simplifies things and also makes it easer to slip in a full page ad that fits whatever the thread is about.

Subreads would be represented as a link somewhere around a Post that would let you to get even more specific about whatever is being discussed — which, in turn, would allow for even more specific ads. This is a very potent advertising opportunity, all things considered because you could sell ads about things that are directly related to whatever heated discussion was going on within the Thread.

And, remember, each individual Post would be collaboratively in-lined edited like a Google Doc. A new Post in the Thread or Subthread would be spawned….maybe when x number of people have edited a specific Post? (There are only so many different colors you could use to distinguish between different Authors.)

The point of this would to reduce the overall number of Posts within a Thread to keep things both manageable and scalable. And I still like the idea the idea that a content provider could push pre-formatted content directly into the service that would look like whatever Website it was coming from. (You might have to figure out a way to convince them these content providers to allow in-line editing of their content, even though it would look like people were editing a Webpage from, say, The New York Times.)

While we’re talking about that, the ability to push pre-formatted content from an established Website would really help Users and content providers alike. Users would be able to see the whole story without being blocked by a paywall and content providers would be able to sell ads on the content pushed into the service — with my hypothetical Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.

Anyway, I wish I had the money — or skill — to make this proposed service a reality. I guess I can keep dreaming about winning the PowerBall, huh. But this particular daydream is really interesting to explore and think up different problems to solve. It’s very relaxing.

A Very Narrow Window Of Opportunity

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Barring me winning the upcoming PowerBall lottery and suddenly having the funds to do all of this myself — all this verbiage on my part about some supposed “Twitter Killer” is just a bunch of bullshit. I can’t code, don’t have any money and absolutely no one listens to me for any reason — even when I’m right.

But, as I like to say, “Cool things happen when people listen to me.”

As such, there is a very, very narrow opportunity for someone to eat Twitter’s lunch with a better mousetrap. The length of time this window will exists depends a lot on things no one can predict — specifically if users will flee Twitter because Elon Musk alienates them.

In general, I’m not prepared to bet against Musk. He’s very problematic for variety of reasons, but he definitely gives off a Steve Jobs vibe. So, it could be that all this alienating zaniness on his part is simply Steve Jobs in his post-Apple NeXt era and he’ll manage to save what seems to be a social media service at risk of freefall and we’ll all feel bad that we doubted him.

There are two not-so-great endgames for Musk.

One is, Twitter really does crash and burn, with the vast majority of not-insane MAGA people leaving the platform altogether. The other is that something similar happens, just on a far more nuanced basis.

In either case, if you were able to actually implement my fantastical Twitter Killer within the next six months or so, you might be able to grow it exponentially.