If you think that only folks in the US have cause to have issues with Elon Musk, our man in Italy is here to straighten you out.
POTUS-unelect Elon the One, First and Wannabe Immortal Last of His Name, does a lot of really debatable things. The ones we should all worry the most, however, are the two whose effects may long outlast him.
Sir Elon, Slayer of Links
The biggest and longer lasting flaw of X is not encouraging trolls (seriously: who doesn’t?) but something much more permanent. It is being managed to actively destroy the Web itself, by discouraging links in posts. It’s hard to explain the outstanding unintelligence of this policy better than these people did on Nov. 24th, 2024:
Paul Graham: “The deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw… more than all the new right-wing trolls. Trolls I’m used to, but what draws me to Twitter is to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.”
Elon the One: “Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”
Graham’s reply: “If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that’s “lazy linking,” but if I tweet that I’ve written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that’s somehow better?“
Randahl Fink: “Elon Musk just confessed to tampering with the X content algorithm so people will not read the news, effectively creating a platform where unsourced claims get prioritized, and statements with links to documentation gets pushed aside.”
I can only add that posting as long Twitter threads content that was not already available as one web page with a permanent URL is, together with snobbing RSS, the most self-harming thing that everybody willing to really share ideas could do online. In a sane world, Twitter would forbid suchdumbness, and everybody should go POSSE like Zendaya, sex workers and right-wing media.
Of course, Elon the One is not alone in pushing this particular flavor of idiocy. Everybody who shares webpages on Facebook by posting just an excerpt with “Link in the first comment” does exactly the same. But it’s Elon the One who’s doing all he possibly can to be the champion of this attitude, whose damages may outweigh and outlast anything DOGE.
Sir Elon, Slayer of Beauty and Inspiration
You may think that the only serious problems Starlink may create worldwide are stuff like:
- Making stealth targets glow on Chinese radars.
- SUV-sized boxes passing so “terrifyingly close” to each other every 30 seconds, at 7 km/second, that a few small mistakes may trigger a Kessler Syndrome, and leave everybody without LEO satellites for decades.
- Decreasing our protection from cosmic radiations, just when the one by the ozone layer is returning.
- A carbon footprint up to 30 times bigger than land-based internet.
- Cash-extraction in low and middle-income countries that may increase global inequality.
- Serious interferences in astronomy.
- Muting any “resistance” Elon the One dislikes, from Myanmar to Gaza and… the US themselves, of course, if BEAD’s fiber optics were swapped out for Starlink.
Right now, I’m particularly sensitive to the last issue, because, right after Elon the One warned that he can collapse a country’s defence by blocking their access to Starlink, all my own Prime Minister could answer was “Cool! What about I give you $1.6 Billion to “secure” communications of Italian diplomats and military?“ (details here and here).
Still, what really upsets me about Starlink is something else. Some people, me included, worry about companies making source code invisible. But I’m weird. Even if none of those issues existed, I’d still be quite angry at Elon the One because of what he is making invisible. I’m angry because, long after the damage caused by X or DOGE may have been fixed, mine and everybody’s else’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren could still never see what I enjoyed when I was a kid: the stars that inspired humankind’s curiosity and dreams since before the beginning of history.
Even with none of those other issues existed, the unilateral deployment of Starlink that has been going on for years now is as decent and respectful as attaching unremovable pictures of your own face onto your neighbors’ eyes… just done worldwide, even to people who may never know you exist. It is an unbelievable act of arrogance, that outside the West feels like I reported six years ago:
“[Elon,] your cost-benefit analysis are based on YOUR values and entitlement to this planet. If you define the greater good, is it really the greater good? The internet industry EXISTS outside of your white utopiae”
Am I reproaching the wrong person? Of course I am. Saying “Elon the One” is a declaration of hope that nobody else like Musk ever gets the same power again. But I should be mad at whomever let someone so immature run amok, that is me, you and everybody else. Including Trump, who just one presidency ago wanted to close down Twitter.
Marco Fioretti is an aspiring polymath and idealist without illusions based in Rome, Italy. Marco met Linux, Free as in Freedom Software, and the Web pre-1.0 back in the ’90s while working as an ASIC/FPGA designer in Italy, Sweden, and Silicon Valley. This led to tech writing, including but not limited to hundreds of Free/Open Source tutorials. Over time, this odd combination of experiences has made Marco think way too much about the intersection of tech, ethics, and common sense, turning him into an independent scholar of “Human/digital studies” who yearns for a world with less, but much better, much more open and much more sensible tech than we have today.
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