X is not like other platforms. It’s not even close. It’s the signal in a collapsing system of noise, and that’s exactly what people outside it don’t understand.

As a tech product, Twitter never was particularly remarkable. It could largely attribute its success to the fact that it was so early in the game. Sure, it was (and X still is) the only “direct line” to world leaders from Vatican to White House, and you could already see certain crowds like journalists and tech community to gather there.  However, signal-to-noise ratio was abysmally low from the get-go, and the legacy 140-character format (imposed by SMS protocol’s limit) didn’t help.

The company got bloated. Innovation died. It got ravaged by the parasitic ideology that swept across most of Silicon Valley in the 2010s. So called “Verification” system was based on the whims of the ideologues, where blue checkmarks were given and taken away based on reasons we can only guess, all the while the regular users got shadownbanned or worse. At least now we know (thanks to the #TwitterFiles) the latter happen at least partly by US government pressure, and to his credit, being a cog in the censorship industrial complex wasn’t something that the founder Jack Dorsey was particularly happy with.

But the platform was still worth saving. Twitter had never made any money, and everyone knew it was a bad business deal for Musk. He himself said the primary reason for the purchase was to make sure there’s at least one bastion of free speech among the popular social media platforms. As Bret Weinstein says, zero is a special number. if even one platform (or university, newsroom, science journal…) allows truth-seekers to speak freely, the establishment can’t own the entire Overton window.

Joe Rogan said it bluntly: “Elon may have very well saved humanity in some way.”

That might sound dramatic, but I bet the impacts of the $44B deal will be studied by historians. It was a fork in the timeline, for sure.

Continue reading “X is the Signal” →