ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

Here's something that's missing entirely

The entry for "computer crime" is longer:

I think I'll post images here. Here's the article on computer networking:

So my mom (I have been living with my parents since the onset of the pandemic) got a dumpster a few days ago. There were some disks littering the bottom from before it came to us. Today I saw an old compact disk in its protective insert, and brought it in to see if I could read the data.

I now have, tucked away on a Windows 7 VM on my modern Linux desktop, an installed copy of a Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia ... from *1992*, the same year I was born.

Initial thoughts: it's fascinating even at this level, simply as an artifact of the time. The thing is a grand total of 433 MB in size, and the articles I've read are *tiny* compared to modern versions. The multimedia is primitive, and the about page for the program, for reasons probably obvious to everyone here, *doesn't* list a website. Yet ... it's the same age as me, and if I had been maybe a decade older I would probably have been begging my parents to get me this for Christmas on my 10th birthday.

I posted this article at my personal website, specifically [here:](https://mathlover2.neocities.org/dave-troy-rebuttal.html). I am crossposting it here both to get more attention to this article and to demonstrate to new users the Markdown capabilities that some instances (e.g. Qoto) have.

# Dave Troy on Bluesky: A Rebuttal.

**[EDIT, November 4: Improved formatting and corrected for spelling
and grammar. Also edited language slightly for clarity.]**

**[EDIT, November 4, Qoto: I have modified the formatting of this slightly to work with Qoto, specifically a small change to prevent Jack's Twitter handle from being read as a user on this instance.]**

Recently, Dave Troy posted a Medium article about Elon Musk, Jack
Dorsey, and Bluesky, claiming a sinister connection between them
. This article has gotten significant traction on Twitter, but has had
very little in the way of critical scrutiny.

<https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d>

Let's be clear: I do not like Musk. He is a narcissistic sociopath
with an impulse control problem, who steals credit and ideas from
others and seems to be perennially incapable of a truly original
thought or joke.

On the other hand, while I like many aspects of (pre-Musk) Twitter as
a company, the site itself isn't one of those things I have ever
liked:

* For a supposed digital town square, it only has 200 million or so
users on it, yet a lot of them seem to think that Twitter is the
center of the Internet and the world, and an open forum for
debate. This is especially true for journalists, celebrities, and
others on the platform with real world importance and clout.

* It lacks the substructures that other sites have. Communities do not
seem to exist except as associations, and there's no way to, say, just
talk with one group of people rather than another. Whereas even
Facebook has groups, Twitter has nothing comparable; it's one big
great room with millions of people talking, many of them throwing crap
or worse.

* It has a 280 character limit on messages, and while multi-message
threads are both easy and innately supported by the site,
multi-message replies to said threads are difficult to write and often
not presented in full to those who read them. This greatly hinders
nuanced discussion, but doesn't at all hinder obnoxiousness, emotional
reasoning, or ad hominem attacks.

* The algorithm on Twitter seems to bring the most controversial
assholes it can find to the attention of the user, especially if it's
offensive, stupid, or both.

In short: Musk is a cesspit of a human, Twitter is a cesspit of a
site, and they are made to destroy each other. As of this writing
(November 2, 2022), Musk is all but certain to run it into the ground,
having fired both the top executive and the board of directors and
greatly curtailed moderation, and currently planning to fund the site
through turning user verification status into a paid feature any
account can buy.

Dorsey's continued support for Musk is puzzling. Perhaps Musk has
convinced Dorsey that he is indeed a good fit. Then again, Dorsey is a
crypto proponent, so maybe he's just very vulnerable to this nonsense.

I thus have no love for Musk or Twitter, and not much respect for
Dorsey. But Mr. Troy's article, despite criticizing all three, is just
... *wildly* wrong. It presents people like Musk and Putin as
impossibly cunning, prescient men whose plots somehow defy the
unpredictability of the future, rather than as the impulsive,
sociopathic assholes they are. It elevates Dorsey to the role of a
knowing accomplice with little to no evidence to support it. Worst of
all, it grossly misrepresents both Bluesky in particular, and
decentralized, federated, or open source social media (which I will
call DFOS for short) in general.

I'm pissed off enough, so I decided to write this and post it. Let's
see what happens.

## Part 1: The biggest error Mr. Troy makes.

The article is formatted as a weird cross between a frequently asked
questions section on a web page and a Socratic dialogue. It opens as
follows:

> Q: Jack Dorsey is launching “Bluesky,” a new social network to
> compete with Twitter. I’ll just join that instead!

> A: Sorry to disappoint, but Dorsey played a key role in Musk’s deal
> to take Twitter private. The two are good friends. And Bluesky is an
> initiative launched by Twitter. In April, Dorsey wrote, “In
> principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It
> wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a
> company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon
> is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the
> light of consciousness.” [Update: Dorsey did not transact his shares
> in Twitter, and now holds equity in Musk’s venture.]

This first question-response implies that Dorsey himself is launching
the platform. This implication is wrong. The CEO of Bluesky is Jay
Graber, and Dorsey does not own Bluesky. Dorsey is merely on the
board of directors, along with people like the inventor of XMPP (which
the basis for a lot of instant messaging protocols). This is [public
knowledge](https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-funded-social-media-project-bluesky-adds-jack-dorsey-board-2022-02-08/)
and has been since it was announced. Mr. Troy should know better than
to make simple factual mistakes like this.

The fact that Dorsey isn't the owner or CEO of Bluesky, and does not
control it, already undermines a lot of what Mr. Troy asserts in the
article. However, this article has many, *many* other issues which I
need to address; it is best that I go through this thing thoroughly,
because it gets a lot worse from here.

> Q: Uh, if “no one should own or run Twitter,” why did Dorsey
> advocate selling it to Musk… I’m confused?

> A: To get it out of the hands of Wall Street investors, and turn it
> into a “public good at a protocol level, not a company.” Dorsey and
> Musk believe it can do more good for humanity if it’s an open
> technology than if it’s a company owned by any one person or by Wall
> Street investors trying to maximize profits for shareholders.

Now, Mr. Troy has not established (and in fact never does establish)
that Musk shares Dorsey's ideology on this. However, the rest of the
answer isn't that inaccurate; indeed, the answer sounds quite positive
as descriptions go. What's the problem with open technology, after
all? Many people (myself included) think DFOS is a good idea, for a
variety of reasons which I discuss later on.

Returning to topic: as said, there's *nothing* sinister about open
technology or protocols, and while over the years, some finer issues
have been raised, it's hard to honestly look at either of these ideas
as being bad, let alone sinister.

Which is why Mr. Troy, knowingly or not, proceeds to be intellectually
dishonest.

## Part 2: Misrepresenting DFOS

> Q: What do you mean, a “public good at a protocol level?” What even
> is that?

> A: The foundation of the Internet is built on protocols that we
> mostly take for granted now. TCP/IP and HTTPS enable the web. Modern
> e-mail is built on top of SMTP and IMAP protocols. Usenet newsgroups
> are built on top of NNTP. Dorsey envisions a foundational “Twitter”
> protocol that anyone can implement and run. This would need to
> become a formal Internet standard, which requires going through the
> Internet Engineering Task Force’s “Request for Comment” (RFC)
> process. This can take a long time. This is what Bluesky has been
> working on starting to map out.

Here Mr. Troy shows that while he does seem to understand (or at least
parrot) information about Internet protocols, he's somehow not fully
aware of the difference between the Internet and the Web. In
particular, it is almost always the case that social media, regardless
of form, is implemented via the Web rather than a dedicated Internet
protocol, since social media pretty universally involves hypertext,
videos, media, and other things that by definition are generally
handled in Web browsers and the like.

> Q: This all sounds crazy. Doesn’t Musk want to make money by owning Twitter?

> A: The goals are more ideological in nature. Musk and his backers
> believe that the global geopolitical arena was being warped by too
> much “woke” ideology and censorship, and wanted to fix that by first
> restoring voices that had previously been silenced —and then
> implementing technical and algorithmic solutions that allow each
> user to get the experience they want. They think this can “solve”
> the problems that people cite about social media content. Making
> money, they figure, will come from the secondary effects of enabling
> “free speech” and the possibility of building other services like
> payments and replacing government on top of such an app. Plus the
> company’s social graph data is a goldmine for other businesses that
> may wish to benefit from detailed knowledge of the makeup of
> society.

> Q: Uh, isn’t it naive to think that there’s a technical solution to
> harmful content? Isn’t that likely to lead to more radicalization
> and cultish behavior?

> A: Yes, it’s completely naive and they are being willfully ignorant
> of the harmful side effects of content. It is a kind of tech
> fundamentalist solutionism that posits that for any difficult
> problem, there must be a technical solution. Many sociologists and
> cultural scholars would argue differently.

This part is ... bad. Indeed, it's so bad I barely know which end to
pick it up from.

For one thing, it's full of stuff that needs citation, particularly
with respect to the claims regarding the motives behind Blue
Sky. Remember that, so far, all Mr. Troy has to justify his claim
about Musk and Dorsey being in complete ideological agreement is a
series of leaked text messages, in which Musk's responses seem to be
his usual parroting. Let's also point out that Dorsey isn't the CEO or
owner of Bluesky, but a board member. Thus, the phrase "Musk and his
backers" asserts an ideological cohesion between Musk and Dorsey that
might well not even exist.

However, that's nothing compared to the mischaracterization of
decentralized, federated, and open-source social media protocols that
is displayed here.

For starters, there's the thinly-implied assertion that these
approaches are dangerous and haven't been tried before. They have, and
have even been wildly successful. Indeed, prior to the rise of modern
social media, decentralized systems for internet chat were the *norm*,
arising naturally from the decentralized nature of the Internet
itself: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was at one time the most common form
of chat and still used by many to this day. It is *inherently*
decentralized, with there being no one point of control for the
protocol. Due to its age and certain other issues (IRC cannot natively
display images or media) most people have moved either to Discord or
to newer decentralized chat protocols such as Matrix; however, the
resilience of decentralized protocols to takeover attempts was made
very clear when, after a hostile takeover of Freenode, then the
largest IRC network, in 2021, most of the traffic transitioned over to
a new network, Libera Chat, run by the former staff of the old network
who had resigned en masse.

Turning to more modern social media, Bluesky is not only *not* the
first decentralized, federated, open-source social media protocol to
be proposed, but it has established competition in the space that has
been actively running for many years! Indeed, I am going to be
cross-posting this on a Mastodon instance, which --- you guessed it!
--- runs on ActivityPub, a decentralized, federated protocol involving
a of other services and platforms, with 5.7 million accounts and
climbing as of this writing. That's right! Bluesky may ultimately
have additional innovations as well as the backing of established
talent and money, but it's neither the first nor the largest of its
kind, and in fact it has a lot of catching up to do if and when it
does launch.

Even on closed-source, centralized platforms, there have been
successful uses of systems where moderation is mostly if not entirely
done by people other than a central team, usually individual
users. Two particularly prominent examples are Discord and
Reddit. Both of these services are divided into subsections (servers
in the case of Discord, subreddits in the case of Reddit) and the
overwhelming majority of moderation is done by the people who control
these subsections. This allows for each subsection of the site to set
its own rules in addition to the site guidelines and enforce them
accordingly. As a result, rather than having to rely on a centralized
team of humans, or on AI moderation with its high false positive rate,
individual users, in communities they control, can rely on themselves
and on each other.

Secondly, Mr. Troy is excessively dismissive of ... well, a lot of
things. He dismisses the idea of decentralized, federated, open-source
social media as being "tech fundamentalist", claiming it tries to
solve the problems of moderation by a "technical solution". This
argument is as fallacious as claiming that trying to avoid political
and social problems in a new government via careful constitutional
design is "law fundamentalist". The constitution of a country has deep
political, social, economic, and cultural ramifications for said
country; similarly, the design and organization of a social network
has ramifications for its culture, governance, and overall
feel. (Incidentally, this can also be said of less fundamental things
on social network, like features and even user interfaces, but that's
a topic for another day).

Mr. Troy is also implicitly dismissive of "restoring voices that have
previously been silenced", presumably assuming people who talk about
this are simply referring to trolls and other assholes. While I am
sure Musk thinks of the term this way, the truth is in fact more
complicated: there *are* issues with voices that have been unfairly
silenced, and I do not mean ex-presidents and conspiracy-peddling
grifters with supplement shops. There are many cases of people being
banned or suspended due to poor decision making by AI moderation,
which is often required on sites like Twitter due to their sheer
size. This is also especially pernicious on even larger centralized
sites like YouTube, where automated moderation is common, human
support is hard to reach, and the general solution to a bad call by an
automated moderation tool is to reach out on other social media to the
official support accounts and **pray** that an actual human looks at
your case. This is often challenging for existing, established users
of YouTube with huge followings; imagine how bad it must be for
marginalized users with little to no social presence! With DFOS social
media, the need for AI moderation at this scale is eliminated, as
instead of relying on centralized moderation of massive amounts of
data, users and communities can moderate themselves and interact (or
not interact) with others as they see fit.

As for monetization: it is still not clear what model if any Bluesky
(currently a non-profit) will use, so the assertions about this that
Mr. Troy makes are premature at best. Furthermore, Twitter's social
graph data isn't going to be as useful as one would think. Most users
are anonymous and this graph data is going to be woefully out of date
by the time Bluesky launches, given that Twitter will probably be
dead at the rate Musk is ruining it as of this writing. As for
ActivityPub, it's ad-free. Smaller instances are often run by small
groups or even single people, and larger instances are usually either
run by volunteers or are funded via donations/patron systems. For
those curious as to whether ad-free cost-free services on the Internet
can even exist, I refer you to the ubiquitous one known as email.

Now some will ask "What about harmful but legal content, like
disinformation and hate speech? Wouldn't that proliferate?" From what
I have seen, no. While it is true that with DFOS, it is impossible to
block a person from the network entirely via technical means, two
other consequences arise. The first is that content on decentralized
networks is usually spread by human action, and thus content that is
widely recognized as offensive generally spreads more slowly. The
second is is that, because users and communities are able to moderate
and defederate with one another freely, users or communities that
spread don't handle hate speech, spam, or whatever else people don't
like can be blocked off by collective action to the point that they
never get the full attention they would on a centralized network.

(For those who think disinformation or hate speech are not protected
by the First Amendment in the US, see
[here](https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression-aclu-position-paper)).

## Part 3: Enter Putin.

> Q: What does Dorsey mean, “I trust [Musk’s] mission to extend the
> light of consciousness?”

> A: This is a reference to “longtermism,” the heavily marketed
> philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William MacAskill
> that asserts the only thing that matters is humanity’s future in
> space, and that the only goal of the living is to maximize the
> number of future humans alive, as well as the number of artificial
> intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future.
> This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving
> conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth
> now. Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn’t
> likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a
> rocket to Mars.

This is wrong, and it is hard to see how this wasn't deliberate on
Mr. Troy's part. Dorsey's line in fact refers to another tweet in the
very same thread Mr. Troy is discussing, penultimate to the one
Mr. Troy embeds in his article.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I love Twitter. Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness.</p>&mdash; jack (@ jack) <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/1518772753460998145?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 26, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

A nitpick with respec to longtermism: while it is indeed a deeply
flawed and horrifically problematic philosophy, the description here
is rather superficial. A better, more succint description is that
longtermism treats a potential person in the future, no matter how
distant, as having the same value as a person living now. The issue of
space travel is secondary, and from what I can tell, AI intelligences
*don't* factor into the philosophy (indeed, they are generally seen as
something to avoid creating by longtermists). The observation about
longtermism discounting present-day human suffering is correct, at
least for the version Musk subscribes to.

> Longtermism is heavily influenced by “Russian Cosmism” and is also
> directly adjacent to “Effective Altruism.” Musk’s stated mission,
> which he intends to fulfill in his lifetime, is to “make humanity a
> multiplanetary species.” The anti-democratic urge in longtermism is
> rooted in the belief that “mob rule” will lead to nuclear
> annihilation; we should, Musk thinks, be guided by “wiser” minds —
> like his and Putin’s apparently.

This is entirely unsubstantiated by Mr. Troy. From the evidence
presented, Russian Cosmism and longtermism have no links; the book
Troy links to certainly doesn't have a mention of any link, or even a
single use of the word "longtermism". Longtermism is a variation (and
in my view, very much a corruption) of [ethical
altruism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism); the
latter more generally seeks to maximize one's positive impact on the
world via the use of evidence and reason, and does not necessarily
have the same deep issues of longtermism in valuing the distant unborn
over the present.

Since Mr. Troy has presented no evidence for the link between Russian
Cosmism and longtermism, we can, by Hitchen's law, dismiss it without
evidence.

> Q: Okay, so Musk and Dorsey are collaborators in some weird Mars
> cult, and don’t actually care about making money from Twitter?

> A: Yeah, you’re getting it. Musk also seems pretty interested in
> helping advance Putin’s “multipolar world order,” which is why he
> plays footsie with QAnon and MAGA accounts, and pals around with
> Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. “How are things going in Bakhmut?,” Musk
> asked Medvedev.

This isn't that far-fetched, but still requires one to assume that
Musk is a knowing accomplice to Putin rather than a useful
idiot, which is also an equally satisfactory explanation.

The same cannot be said of the next question-response.

> Q: So this is why Musk has been so supportive of the Russians
> lately? I thought he was on Ukraine’s side, since he helped them out
> with Starlink?

> A: It’s best to look at Musk as a kind of power broker between
> multiple parties, including Ukraine and Russia. SpaceX was made
> possible by laws passed by Dana Rohrabacher, Putin’s favorite
> Congressman. He really doesn’t like the US government, the SEC, and
> our politicians, and all things considered, he’d probably prefer to
> replace all of it with an app — call it “X,” the everything
> app. Elon might say: “Do we really need a government, or could
> everyone just vote with an app? Be honest.”

For an actual, sensible answer to this question, watch this video by
Phil Mason (aka thunderf00t), a chemist and longtime critic of Musk,
on the matter:

<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3qGg6wiXoSc" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

Personally, I suspect that Russia and Ukraine would be surprised to
know they, or any other country in Europe, considers him a "power
broker" of any kind. However, this is just a hunch on my part. Feel
free to ignore it.

While Dana Rohrabacher *is* rather cozy with Putin, [the legislation
he
passed](https://www.congress.gov/bill/108th-congress/house-bill/5382)
was passed in 2004 and essentially opened the way private investment
in space travel and exploration. As such, it benefited a variety of
private parties other than Musk, not all of whom are necessarily
pro-Putin. In any case, implying that Putin was responsible for
passing this bill explicitly to help Musk in 2004 seems incredibly
far-fetched, assigning a prescience to Putin that seems impressive to
a superhuman degree.

While Musk has stated that he wants to turn Twitter into an
"everything app" in the manner of the Chinese app WeChat, this seems
exceedingly unlikely to happen as I write this given how rapidly
Twitter is falling apart under Musk's ownership.

> Q: So Musk wants to overthrow governments, and Dorsey is helping?

> A: Don’t be so dramatic. Everyone knows that the only way to advance
> society is through technocracy. Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman,
> was involved in the technocracy movement in Canada in the 1930’s and
> was arrested — because it was seen as a threat to the
> government. The philosopher James Burnham wrote in his 1941 book,
> “The Managerial Revolution” that society should be run by technical
> managers, not elected politicians. Russian “methodologists” and
> “political technologists” concluded the same thing in the 1990’s
> when they realized that “democracy” would just lead to mob-rule by
> populists. Democracy, they concluded, must be managed. This is what
> Putin has concluded, also.

So because Musk's grandfather was a member of the Technocracy
movement, that means Musk must be too. Again, this dubious deduction
underlies this *entire* argument, as does the earlier claim regarding
Dorsey and Musk being ideologically linked, as does the false premise
that Dorsey owns Bluesky.

Troy's reasoning really is very threadbare, isn't it? I'm not even
going through the rest of the claims. They may be true or false, but
they don't matter given that this sub-argument fell apart so quickly.

> Q: So Putin, Musk, and Dorsey share the same vision?

> A: It’s complicated. All seem to think a “multipolar world” is a
> good thing, because after all, shouldn’t Russia get to do its thing
> and not be bothered by anyone else? That’s “free speech” and opposes
> “cancel culture,” right? So yeah, that’s aligned with Putin. But
> Putin himself doesn’t support free speech; his government censors
> wildly, but it does support speech that breaks the hegemony of the
> Western elites. As do Musk and friends. This is internally
> inconsistent.

Yes, Putin is a hypocrite and this description of him and his
attitudes towards speech is relatively accurate. While not addressed
in this article, Musk is also very much a hypocrite on the matter of
free speech, as he has retaliated against employees and even customers
for speaking critically of Tesla vehicles in any way. None of this
matters because the original linking of Dorsey and Bluesky to all of
this is completely spurious, so this part falls apart as well.

## Part 4: Crypto Conspiracy.

Pretty much all of this is aging like fine milk as of this writing.

> Q: Back to the money thing… won’t advertisers balk at all this
> potential chaos, and won’t Twitter’s business model suffer?

> A: Musk and the people backing all this are more interested in
> reshaping the global order than in earning fake “fiat currency.”
> Their real goal is to usher in “hard currency” and re-base global
> currencies around scarcity and physical assets. So no it really
> doesn’t matter much what happens to Twitter’s ad model in the
> meantime. It will probably do alright, and they can probably find
> other ways to make money, like adding in payments and weird Dogecoin
> schemes.

Musk is currently planning to charge users $8/month for the verified
checkmark, and he's only going to be accepting real money from what I
can tell. This is precisely because Musk *needs* to make "fiat" money,
and given the decline in advertiser revenue, his need will only get
worse. Given the current state of crypto prices and the very small
number of crypto holders in the world willing to spend money on a 280
character limited cesspit, adding in crypto payments seems extremely
unlikely to make Musk enough money to cover the interest on the debt
he racked up for the deal.

Everything else here can be solved with another application of
Hitchen's law, because there is no evidence given in links for *any*
of these assertions.

> Q: How is Twitter going to help them kill off fiat currency? You
> mean like replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency?

(Short answer: it won't, and they won't even try, because this whole
thing is ridiculous.)

> A: As the Russian “methodologists” will tell you, it’s incredibly
> important to control the information space if you want to alter the
> real world. As the world plunges deeper into war and economic chaos
> in 2023–2024, there are real (perceived) opportunities to advance
> cryptocurrencies and asset-backed tokens to replace the
> dollar. Whether any of this is realistic or not remains to be seen,
> but this is what they’d like to pursue — Musk and his deal backers
> in particular. [Update: Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
> announced he is the second largest shareholder in Twitter; Saudi
> Arabia has long sought to unseat the dollar as the reserve
> currency.]

At this rate, with all the stuff Musk is doing, it looks like Twitter
will be a dead site months before Bluesky launches, so if Musk is
trying to control the information space to alter the real world, it's
going about as poorly as it possibly could. Cryptocurrency prices are
still far lower than they were a year ago, there is a high possibility
they could sink further if Tether or some other suspected fraud goes
belly up, and of course crypto prices are still just as volatile as
ever.

> Q: So isn’t Musk’s ownership of Twitter a national security risk?
> Shouldn’t the deal have been stopped on national security grounds?

> A: Yes, this is all a national security risk and the deal should
> probably have been stopped. The fact that it wasn’t is reflective of
> either fecklessness or capture of the US government.

Techdirt did [an
article](https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/21/dont-expect-the-us-government-to-actually-stop-elon-from-buying-twitter/)
on this. At the time I first read it, I thought it was a little short
of the mark, but looking at it again, it's spot on and a vastly better
explanation that Troy's assertion.

> Q: Can Musk and his friends really do all this? Should we really be
> worried? It seems so far-fetched.

(That's because it is.)

> A: That remains to be seen, and it’s unlikely they can achieve all
> they’d like to on the timeline they’d prefer. It will likely take
> years to make Bluesky into a viable product. However, just because
> it’s hard doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try. As for the broader
> anti-government agenda, as we’ve seen with January 6th and other
> attempts to challenge government, even unsuccessful efforts can be
> incredibly damaging. It’s worth monitoring the direction this takes
> and, the effects that it has on society and democracy.

At this point, I am not sure about the timeframe Bluesky will need
until launch, but there is at least one other competing service,
Planetary.io, in the works. I should not that as of this writing, new
signups to the Fediverse are continuing at a very elevated rate.

## Part 5: Troy's closing, and mine.

Mr. Troy now gives some run-of-the-mill corrections to some
run-of-the-mill comments people make. Of these, only two things are
worth commenting on.

God, I am sour after all this.

> Q: Boy, Jack really screwed Elon by making him overpay.

> A: No, Jack basically asked Elon to buy the company and Elon set the
> price. ...

Really? My impression was that Musk made motions to buy Twitter,
Twitter responded with a poison pill, some back and forth happened,
Musk gave an obscenely high offer for the company while waiving due
diligence, and the company went through with the deal because it was
too good to resist for an unprofitable social media company.

> Q: Elon never really wanted to do the deal… but they forced him.

> A: No, he wanted to do the deal all along, for the reasons I
> outlined. ...

Which is why Musk publicly backed out of the deal after the financial
statements came out, publicly disparaged the company, got himself
embroiled in a court case in order to force him to buy, relented when
he realized he would face deposition, and finally resigned himself to
buying Twitter? Did Jack ask him to do that too? Did Mr. Troy just
forgot to include the evidence or write about it?

> For the record I think Elon is a sociopath, and that this all is
> going to end in disaster — I just couldn’t stand seeing so much
> shallow, poorly informed analysis proliferate. So I’ve done my best
> here to set the record straight.

Shoddy analysis...like the article he just wrote, for reasons I have
given above. (Again, to Mr. Troy's credit, Musk **is** almost
certainly a sociopath.)

Mr. Troy closes by hawking both a white paper and another article of
his. I think I'll pass on reading those. I've had enough for today.