Does Musk's "values of the old Internet" apply to the new Internet environment?
Written by | She Zongming
"Musk lives in the old Internet age?" Teacher Huang Xilin wrote.
The target, of course, is Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
In my opinion, the more direct question is:
Is Musk really fit for the Internet?
01
As we all know, Twitter is going to have the surname "horse" - Musk's horse.
The sale was about $44 billion.
In the movie Justice League, The Flash and Batman have a classic set of dialogues:
The Flash: What's your superpower?
Batman: I'm super rich.
And "Iron Man" Musk smiled slightly: I don't care if he has money or not, I don't have any money anyway. After saying that, he danced the dance steps exclusive to "the world's richest man".
In the face of Musk's ability to make money, Twitter originally wanted to struggle a little longer - on April 15, Twitter's board of directors proposed to launch a "poison pill plan", also known as equity dilution anti-takeover measures or shareholder equity plans.
But Musk was possessed by Avi: Twitter I'm sure, Jesus can't keep him, I said.
▲ Image source: the movie "Sweeping Drugs".
Twitter's board surrendered. Jack Dorsey, the founder who was forced to hand over the scepter, read a poem when he was parting: "Don't be famous for learning the king stone."
After the whale swallowed Twitter, Musk's business footprint expanded again.
Space X can be nine days to catch the moon, Boring Company can catch turtles in the five oceans, there is Neuralink delving into the brain-computer interface on the left, Tesla on the right is running to unmanned driving, and there is Twitter to connect up and down left and right.
It seems that the only thing on the earth that can stop Musk's "disorderly expansion of capital" is the domestic "chandelier" sanctions.
Unfortunately, "although far away will be cursed" can not achieve long-arm jurisdiction.
02
From Twitter Big V, which has more than 83 million followers, to Twitter's largest shareholder, to Twitter owner, Musk has also demonstrated to countless hardcover chase girls with actions:
If you love her, you must be brave enough to chase her.
Of course, you have to have the goods in your pocket.
So, why is Musk bent on taking possession of Twitter?
You know, Musk has previously invested in hard technology, including space communications, satellite launches, rocket recovery, brain-computer interfaces, automatic driving and so on.
The relatively "soft" Internet and media are a new field for him.
In the eyes of many people, Musk's entry into Twitter can come to a "one-shot, two-shot, three-adjust" shot.
1, can save PR costs, but also with speculation to pull up the stock price.
Musk is very critical, free money is his usual means of influence monetization and marketing path, and the more than 80 million fans are his "public relations department". He has said that Tesla has a market capitalization of $1 trillion, while advertising spending is zero.
But before Twitter was not under control after all, the public domain traffic was as large as Chuan Jianguo, and it may also be "no one" at once.
Now that Twitter has become autonomous, he has learned that Jobs's distorted force field can be better played.
2, send a coin or something.
Sun Yuchen can send it, I Musk can't send it?
Musk has previously given Dogecoin a platform and raised the capital scythe.
After sitting on Twitter, Musk launched his own virtual currency, which is also a matter of course.
3. Adjust the Twitter business model.
Twitter has been losing money for years in a row, and its market value has been squashed by the teen social app Snap ($60 billion in market value).
Musk definitely wants to turn this hot potato into a sweet potato pie.
The paid model may also be arranged.
But for Musk, this... The pattern is small.
He threw out more than $40 billion, just this?
▲ In the latest issue of Time Magazine, Musk is the cover character.
Musk explained that he bought Twitter to create an "open market for speech" with minimal intervention.
In a word, it's for... (Four words omitted here)
This is quite in line with Musk's "human design".
As he thought, he wanted to get Twitter out of the cage instead of putting it in a smaller cage.
But can he turn Twitter into what he imagined it to be?
If he really insists on this, then I can assert in advance that Musk is "not suitable" to play the Internet.
03
After all, it's easy to own Twitter, it's hard to reinvent Twitter.
Musk wants to transform Twitter with two bottles of poison in front of him:
One bottle is: reduce platform intervention, the advantage is open speech, the disadvantage is that trolls are dominant, populism is popular, and Internet violence is prevalent.
One bottle is: increase platform intervention, the advantage is to reduce spam, the disadvantages, you know.
Musk wants to pick the first bottle.
He wants to create a "public platform for maximum trust and broad inclusion," so he promised to make major changes to Twitter to ban only illegal content, and said that open-source algorithms would increase public trust.
He hopes that "the fiercest critics of me will still stay on Twitter."
This outlines a beautiful vision of equalization.
But the cost of reducing platform intervention is the emergence of the platform "Dead Sea Effect": keyboard heroes are popular, and the guests are afraid of being sprayed, intimidated, torn, and dug, so they accelerate the evacuation. The platform has become a network storm resort and troll position, but it cannot accommodate too many normal people.
You have to see that there are no trolls everywhere, but the distribution density is not the same, the same is that their combat effectiveness is extremely strong.
According to a survey by the Hidden Tribes in the United States, the ultra-left and far-right forces at opposite ends of the political spectrum, accounting for less than 10% of the U.S. population, are the two most active groups on social media.
Not only are they good at spraying each other, but they also force the vast majority of netizens to become a "silent majority" – people who will automatically silence themselves for fear of becoming targets and targets of cyberbullying.
Because the Internet has flattened everyone into atomized traffic, it has no distinction between "high knowledge" or "low intelligence", only the difference in sound volume. Many emotional and inflammatory discourses can raise the volume of voice with the flow of the roar, and realize the counter-killing of rational voices.
In this way, what Twitter will eventually become does not depend on what Twitter wants to become, but on what the online world is like.
The truth is there: as the Internet passes the microphone that was originally in the hands of the elite to all netizens, the Internet has changed - the "open pluralism" envisioned by many people has not arrived, and the cocooning of the group and the tearing of the group have become the norm; the Internet is not a public forum of "the more argumentative the argument", but the echo chamber collection of "the more the crowd tears apart".
The hostility you see offline will be multiplied by 10 online; the normal people you meet in life may also be the lever essence of "keyboard cover I go to fight" online.
So, the ideal country Musk wants may just be a utopia.
Huang Yishan, former CEO of social news platform Reddit, reminded Musk on Twitter.
Huang Yishan, former CEO of social news platform Reddit, reminded:
As a "Gen Xers" (born between 1965 and 1980), Musk and he were exposed to and started a career in the 1990s, the Internet was still a new thing, a new world and a new frontier. At that time, the "open speech" that people were pursuing was nothing more than snatching the rights to adult content and violent games from religious conservatives.
But since Facebook created it in 2004, the online environment has deteriorated. Musk dared to take over Twitter, precisely because at that time he began to engage in electric vehicles, rockets and other "physical industries", without realizing the changes in the social media environment.
He speaks of "culture wars" and "stupid and trivial disputes" that we are no stranger to.
Behind the "broad tolerance" is that the wild prevails over the rational and destructive seconds to kill constructive.
Is Musk ready for this?
04
In reality, many platforms seem to have chosen a second bottle of poison.
However, "reducing spam" is not the purpose of their strong intervention algorithms, but to comply with regulatory requirements.
Their purpose is to fulfill the main responsibility of creating a "positive energy content pool" under the whip of "algorithms must have values".
I won't say more about that.
There are also platforms such as Facebook that mix two bottles of poison and take them.
On the one hand, they design weighted and de-weighted rules to intervene in the flow of information, and on the other hand, they tilt the traffic toward tearing hate speech to attract more people's attention with stimulating topics – they are the biggest beneficiaries of the industry chain and the "emotional economy" anyway.
But sooner or later it will be self-defeating.
Zuckerberg was named "Evil Man of the Year" by the US media, and the reputation fell to the bottom, which is an example.
▲ Zuckerberg was named evil man of the year.
Musk clearly doesn't want Twitter to go the same way as Facebook.
The best solution to the problem is undoubtedly to properly grasp the two, in the "both... Again..." to find the best balance.
But the idea that Musk threw out was obviously not allowed to stick to it, but fell to the other side of Facebook.
Will this become a new version of "I am a camel, but I manage people straight, and I don't care if people die"? How does he avoid the popular populist internet violence from eroding Twitter?
For Musk, it may be a real-life puzzle that is no less difficult than sending a SpaceX starship to Mars.
For now, the capital market is not very optimistic that he can transform Twitter.
Just yesterday, Tesla shares fell more than 12%, losing 3 tweets in one day.
Wall Street is not optimistic about Musk's acquisition of Twitter, which is not only the result of the risk of equity pledge blowing up tesla, but also a bearish outlook for Twitter.
05
In the final analysis, Musk, who came from a hard technology background, devoted himself to the Internet and media, which is also a kind of "dimensionality reduction".
But if he thinks that social media platforms are "open if you want to be open", it is indeed living in the "old Internet era".
Times are really different. Huang Yishan worries that Musk's "old Internet values" do not apply to the new Internet environment, and that "Musk's takeover of Twitter will not only not solve the problem, but also distract his time and attention on Space X and Tesla, and damage his mental health" is not necessarily unfounded.
Furthermore, Musk is "unfit" to join the Internet. It is not suitable here to put quotes on three words.
Of course, if Musk's creation of the "open platform for speech" is only self-proclaimed, and the acquisition of Twitter has another purpose, it is a different matter.
Nowadays, the company under Musk's name has been a number of layouts: heaven, into the earth, into the brain, control public opinion...
Starlink can provide space communications;
Boring Company can build underground tunnels, military fortresses;
Neuralink is a brain-computer interface;
Tesla focuses on autonomous driving;
Twitter is a public topic fermentation ground and a two-party political public opinion game field in the United States.
▲ Musk's business empire map.
Combined with Musk's interaction with the Ukrainian deputy prime minister during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the appointment of Putin, if he is really in the next so-called big game, it is pedantic to say that he is not suitable for the Internet.
In fact, he is a PR team on Twitter, which proves that he understands the law of public opinion dissemination and is quite good at playing with the Internet.
From this point of view alone, it is obviously inappropriate to say that he is "not suitable for the Internet".
06
In a way, the Internet is the road that is easier to step on than hard technology.
Today, Musk has paid a $44 billion tuition and fee.
Hopefully, he will succeed in trial and error.
Author | She Zongming
Operational | Lee plays
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