Friday, December 16, 2022

Dear Dark Lord Elon Thinkskinnious:

The peasants are revolting.* (and your support is falling.**) I agree outrage is pretty pointless and can even be counter-productive.  In that case, maybe it's just time to go: Life support does seem to be failing, Cap'n! And me engines cain't take much mar o' this! *You can say that again!  Thanks!  I'll be here all week!  Tip the buffet!  Try your waitress!  You've been a great crowd! 

**Just to explain the "transportation coordinates" panic that set this all off:  a kid set up bots on Twitter to track private plane flights, based on publicly available data.  FAA tracking info, available for all flights tracked by FAA, including Elmo's private jet. See? 

So here's what happened in a nutshell, via JMM (second tweet above):
It’s important to note what this information is and what it isn’t. If Drake flies from New York’s JFK to LAX, that’s really all the information you get. Flight speed too, maybe. The time he touches down in LA. But that’s it. Apparently this has annoyed Elon Musk for a very long time. Indeed, early in his reign at Twitter he boasted that he believed in free speech so much he wouldn’t even ban the @ElonJet account even though as owner he now could do so any time he chose.

On Wednesday something happened. According to Musk, someone followed one of his cars that had one of his children in it and eventually banged on the car’s hood or jumped on the car’s hood. It’s unclear what part of this story if any is true. There appears to be no police report about the incident, which Musk characterized as an attack. But let’s assume for the moment that something did happen. Musk decided that the attack was based on the tracking provided by the @ElonJet account.

This, to put it mildly, is pretty hard to believe. If you’ve ever flown into Los Angeles, you know that LAX is basically a small city. There’s virtually no way you could take the information that Musk’s jet landed at LAX at 8:20 p.m. and use that information and match that to one of the thousands or tens of thousands of cars transiting in and out of the airport every night. It’s ludicrous. Musk has grandly termed these “assassination coordinates” and declared he will have zero tolerance for anyone threatening his family. But again, this is absurd.

It should be noted Elmo made no police report on this "incident," per the LAPD.  In short: like one of Trump's "Sir!" stories, no evidence it ever happened.  But somehow the banning of journalists and others is linked to this story of what Musk calls "doxxing." (Again, this flight information was available all over the internet, not just from this Twitter account.)  I mention it at all in this detail because I like this take on it:

Likely nothing captures the vast gulf separating ordinary mortals who transit our separate corners of the globe in cramped planes, trains and automobiles and those who do so on private jets. The story does capture one key dimension of neo-Gilded Age life: the degree to which billionaires and plutocrats argue that their very wealth and power and all the static it generates requires or entitles them to even more protections and privacy. One example of this is the increasing demand for anonymity for donors who gives hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to candidates and campaigns on the argument that, without that anonymity, they’ll be targeted. In other words, their very heft and power entitles them to special levels of protection.

As Fitzgerald said, the rich are different.  And they want to keep it that way.  And I agree with JMM: banning journos is just a way to be sure they squawk about it (he who holds the megaphone, and all that).  And it just drives Twitter further away from making money, which is it has never done, and more and more likely, will never do. C'est la vie.
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