Updated 07302023-043933
Ultimately, though, I don't think that part of my life actually had anything to do with my tears from a goddamned broken website - I really REALLY just miss my fucking friends, bro.
— π π π© π’ π (@NeoYokel) July 31, 2023
I've been blaming Elon Musk as the primary aetiology of the need for my prescription to blood pressure medication for a good while now, less in jest than many who know me well would assume, I think. (Usually when I say shit like that, it's a sort of melodrama designed unconsciously to entertain - I can also thank Melon Man for my newfound clarity regarding this dynamic.)
I've repeated it enough that I absolutely should have a far more thoroughly refined monologue by now. This production - thanks once again to Casey Newton's special thoughts about the internet, no doubt - was especially resonant/validating re: this Melon Man Agitation of Mine Own. From the onset, thank you PJ so much for dwelling on what I, too, have never been able to ignore: the evolution of the Melon Man Ideology illustrated so aptly in the ..."development"... of the Melon Man Aesthetic.
I, too, often reflect on the very different Melon Motherfucker I first encountered via Jay Leno's Garage circa 2008: then (as he always will be, to me,) as simply the dude who somehow managed to misunderstand existence, physics, and the Lotus Elise so profoundly as to build a whole company (which he - to no small offense against the whole history of the human intellect - would call Tesla Motorcars) whose sole fucking product was a heartbreakingly molested, grotesquely engorged bastardization of that adorable, elemental, absolutely crucial little sports car which they called the Tesla Roadster. (Lotus is a very, very small company... the Elise is an extremely low volume product... so every single Roadster represents a worse-than-death happening... and yes, in a way, I do feel each one to be a theft from me, personally of a sliver of an opportunity to ever own perhaps the most desirable driving car, period.)
(To witness said video yourself, navigate to davidblue.wtf/idiot.)
Without allowing this to grow much bigger...
(If you don't know me, you should know for context that my whole adult social life was largely borned in orbit of Twitter. For the record, this was and is the opposite of an inherently negative thing. Frankly, I prefer my most distant Twitter friendships to any of y'all's closest [whatever.])
I'd been engaged in an intermittently public diatribe throughout the acquisition - somewhat constructively, I hope - as comes naturally to me, but it wasn't until I opened fuckin TweetDeck on my iPad a few weeks ago to four empty columns and just ... started bawling... that I realized it's probably okay to let myself acknowledge what Elon Musk has directly taken from me. (Yes, that specific language, unqualified.)
For my whole adult life and then some, the first of those columns has been set to a private Twitter List, which has grown over some 13 years to almost 300 accounts, representing the whole of my social existence, basically. I have set eyes on this chronological feed of their most immediate thoughts, jokes, howls, gripes, insights, arguments, blunders, and proudest work at least once a day without exception throughout the entirety of those years. (For the record, TweetDeck as a PWA is working again as of this writing lol.)
If you hadn't noticed, I have invested a LOT of my time and energy over the past 5 years, especially, in trying to figure out how to liberate myself and my friends from the dangerous, far too absolute dependence on a single, unbelivably incompentent organization this arrangement constitutes.
Ultimately, though, I don't think that part of my life actually had anything to do with my tears from a goddamned broken website - I really REALLY just miss my fucking friends, bro.
PLUS: I went on the best new podcast, PJ Vogt's Search Engine, to discuss: what happened to Elon Musk? https://t.co/4PTcM9xVEI
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) July 21, 2023
This week, Search Engine investigates the erratic behavior of the world's wealthiest man with Hard Fork's Casey Newton. The three top theories for why the CEO has begun to act strangely, including one that upset our very understanding of reality.
Obviously, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and, until recently, Twitter, has become a poster boy for erratic social media behavior in the past year, tanking audience on one of the world's most popular websites.
We were very excited to talk to Casey Newton of the newsletter Platformer and the podcast Hard Fork about Elon Musk. Casey is one of the absolute best writers about the internet and social media platforms specifically, and just a hilarious person to chat with. We hope you enjoy it half as much as we did. Maybe three quarters.