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Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

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Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#151
post #125
post #122

Decentralization has never worked in human history beyond hunter gatherers. It’s continually amazing to me that people listen to people like Musk and Dorsey as if they have a clue they know what they’re talking about. You can tell they have full confidence that they do, trapped in their bubble of fame.

Because centralization works REALLY well, right? That's why the US practices decentralized command, that's why centralized economies have been so successful. This idea that decentralization has never worked is insane.

I didn’t say centralization works well. My point is that anything “decentralized” becomes not so or if not, doesn’t work well.

Do you have examples of something decentralized that has stayed so and was not taken over by centralization or became highly bottlenecked or continued to work well?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#152
post #122

Decentralization has never worked in human history beyond hunter gatherers. It’s continually amazing to me that people listen to people like Musk and Dorsey as if they have a clue they know what they’re talking about. You can tell they have full confidence that they do, trapped in their bubble of fame.

Capitalism is inherently decentralized. Even just currency lets you separate production and consumption in time and space, which decentralized trade. Writing, even with manual copies but certainly with the printing press, decentralized learning to great effect.

In theory. The wealth gap and inequality would say otherwise. The percentage of people who own as much as the bottom 60% is in the sub thousandths of a percentage. It’s so small I can’t remember the amount of zeros after the decimal point.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#153
post #33
post #12

> I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists... You can't fix it Jack, you fucked it up big time and shitting out yet another platform won't ever make it better

> Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists... Or like most US presidents discovering the war on drugs is a scam and the military-industrial-entertainment complex is out of control only after they leave office...

I don't think that's old age. a young president could serve a single term, lose re-election and still be under 40. In their post-presidency they have the freedom of not pandering in order to be re-elected so they can speak freely. But this is independent of their age/mortality.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#154
post #58

Is he talking about ActivityPub[1, 2] and the Fediverse[3]? Just look at Mastodon[4, 5] if you're looking for something like twitter without the centralization and the corporate greed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub [2] https://activitypub.rocks [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) [5] https://joinmastodon.org/servers

It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he rea…

Bluesky performed a months-long discovery exercise of existing solutions and Mastodon was amongst them.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#155
post #12

> I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists... You can't fix it Jack, you fucked it up big time and shitting out yet another platform won't ever make it better

It's ok for people to grow. Even billionaires.

edit: I don't think these guys are good guys but people are able to change.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#156
I think to a certain extent there's an overwhelming culture in the SV VC world of being completely credulous. That exchange just seems like a uniquely weird situation of two people talking absolute bollocks and neither being willing to mention the elephant in the room. It's no wonder the second their plan hit the real world it exploded on impact. You would have thought the guy who ran twitter would actually understand the challenges that faced twitter, but I guess he really was so unengaged he's just unaware. They sound like 13 year olds.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#158
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when?

Watch this walk around Starbase with Elon and Tim Dodd, and you'll get a pretty good sense that he has an engineering brain that really understands the complexities of design, build and execute more than anything. https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw

I will watch it, but is he the same the “engineering” brain that thinks his Tesla tunnels are a good idea, continually promises tech that is decades away from realization is right around the corner (like self-driving cars or a humanoid robot or a Mars mission), and got replaced as the runner of the actual engineering organization (SpaceX)?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#159
post #67

Shame he couldn't do anything about that when he was either CEO, chairman or on the board of Twitter (for most of its existence). As Bloomberg said yesterday: "Twitter Is in This Mess Because Jack Dorsey Was Too Busy Being a Bitcoin Influencer" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-29/twitter-t... https://archive.ph/7ugqn

It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with the wrong kind of non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore. To me it seems this is what happened to Larry & Sergey, too.

People misunderstand the Peter Principle.

Why do you think our startup heroes were failed from below, rather than simply "having been promoted to the level of their incompetence"?

Dilbert, et al, rewrote the principle as, you promote the incompetent so they don't interfere with the real work. Or maybe that brown-nosers get promoted until they get fired. Or that the more incompetent you are the more you get promoted. But it's always been about how smart people who do good work end up in over their heads.

The reward for a job well done is another job, a harder or different job. Eventually you run up against a harder, bigger, different job you just can't hack. It doesn't matter if you're being promoted by your manager, yourself, or the invisible hand of the market.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he rea…

He may not be clear of Twitter enough to do something like this. I’m wondering if a public action like that coukd open him up to some legal jeopardy. Just a guess.

Yeah, seeing these texts where a board member discussed starting a competitor certainly raised my eyebrows
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