>For the first and only time in my life I became political. Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate on farcaster cable or lying tapped into the All Thing. Someone once estimated that the All Thing deals with about a hundred active pieces of Hegemony legislation per day, and during my months spent screwed into the sensorium I missed none of them. My voice and name became well known on the debate channels. No bill was too small, no issue too simple or too complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a false sense of having accomplished something. I finally gave up the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All Thing regularly meant either staying home or turning into a walking zombie. A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn’t take Helenda’s derision to make me realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many millions of other slugs around the Web. So I gave up politics.
If Twitter is a consciousness, then it's one that's all "id":
the instinctual component of personality that is present at birth, and is the source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and the libido (sex drive).
It doesn't have even a shadow of "superego" to put in charge of moderating its wants and desires. It's an infant -- an infant that is never going to grow up.
If it's a "global consciousness", then it's a consciousness of an entity I do not wish to ever meet. It's a terrible person, and it's only getting worse.
Well, as long as it is run centrally, it can never be "global consciousness". Even if you trust Musk to run it in an open and transparent fashion, there is no guarantee that this will continue to happen after he's gone.
The same forces that control the media (corporations, states) will continue to control Twitter policing. The idea that everything that is legal will be allowed on Twitter is great in Musk's head but it will be circumvented by shadow laws in the name of "national security" or "protecting the children" or something similar... and not necessarily in a transparent way because they can be marked "confidential"... and if Twitter fails to comply, the forces will get rid of it... or worse, those who run it.
The only foolproof way to ensure free speech is to run it fully decentralized. It doesn't have to have unlimited history... one can archive important tweets if necessary.
If that becomes successful though, the forces may target those who maintain the system... so they need to remain anonymous but give control to the community as soon as possible so that the system can continue to live even if they die by suicide with two bullets on the back of their heads.
Also, if that successfully happens, the chipmakers will be targeted because the only way to fight the people will be to stop production of computers. So, that needs to be reasonably decentralized first.
Fighting the globalist cartel and truly giving voice to the people is much more difficult than Musk and his followers in the issue seem to think.
and yet, such a thing is already possible - in fact there's plenty of choices. None of them have taken off for various reasons.
I really don't believe a decentralized system works as the network effect fails to achieve domination under such a system (aka, competition from centralized network will out-compete it).
how does this change anything? The other day I saw this tweet from Kelsey Hightower, which I agree with, something like the tech might be decentralized but the power structure that the human tend to create around it will not be. Maybe it's just human nature to require SOME level of centralization, just look at our political system.
- Dan Simmons, Hyperion, 1989