To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal.
And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws โ as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things โ and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost โ even give them away for free for a time โ until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
I'll do a thread tomorrow on the X dot com/Paypal merger because I think it's really important to understand how that went down to know why Musk is STILL salty about how X died (and about Peter Thiel) now.
But in the meantime, here is a quick, but telling, story called:
That Time Elon Totalled his McLaren F1 While Trying to Show Off in Front of Peter Thiel /1 ๐งต #history#technology
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage โ news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music โ where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
NEW: WhatsApp will soon make it possible to chat with people who use other messaging apps. It's revealed some more details on how that will work.
โ Apps will need to sign an agreement with Meta, then connect to its servers.
โ Meta wants people to use the Signal Protocol, but also says other encryption protocols can be used if they can meet WhatsApp's standards
โ WhatsApp has been testing with Matrix in recent months, although nothing is agreed yet. Swiss app Threema says it won't become interoperable
The attack on encryption in Europe is very real. We obtained a leaked document from the EU showing Spanish officials want to ban end-to-end encryption.
Beyond this, the document shows the views of 20 countries on encryption, and how it relates to a controversial proposed law that would allow companies to scan people's chats to hunt for child sexual abuse material.
The majority said they are in favour of some form of scanning of encrypted messages.
The document also reveals that a lot of countries don't appear to know how end-to-end encryption works, with many proposals being technically infeasible.
30 years ago, one decision altered the course of our connected world
On April 30, 1993, the World Wide Web was released into the public domain. It revolutionized the internet and allowed users to create websites filled with graphics, audio and hyperlinks.
John Bannister Goodenough, the American co-inventor of Lithium-ion batteries and a co-winner of 2019 Nobel prize for Chemistry, has passed away. He was just a month short of turning 101. Goodenough also played a significant role in the development of Random Access Memory (RAM) for computers.
The BBC News Verify team has published their first article using a new open media provenance technology called C2PA that we've been working on for the past three years.
This shows where media comes from and how itโs been edited - like an audit trail or a history.
Reddark - An open source website to watch subreddits going dark (reddark.untone.uk)
Looks like someone threw up a tracker checking on subreddit going dark. Live status looks interesting....
Mozilla study reveals that โmodern cars are a privacy nightmareโ (www.theverge.com)
All 25 car brands reviewed raised privacy concerns regarding customer data.
Mozilla's petition against in-browser censorship law (foundation.mozilla.org)
The French government is considering a law that would require web browsers โ like Mozilla's Firefox โ to block websites chosen by the government.
John B. Goodenough, Nobel laureate who gave the world Li-ion batteries, passes away. (www.thehindubusinessline.com)
John Bannister Goodenough, the American co-inventor of Lithium-ion batteries and a co-winner of 2019 Nobel prize for Chemistry, has passed away. He was just a month short of turning 101. Goodenough also played a significant role in the development of Random Access Memory (RAM) for computers.