Thursday, April 28, 2022

Musk, Twitter and anonymity

One problem with Elon Musk buying Twitter is that elevates him to Trump-squared or -cubed, and that it extends the paradigm of the biggest, richest guy having the biggest megaphone to say whatever the fuck he wants to. Platform as penis.

I am carried back to my memory of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which a female character (the narrator?) listens to a male character blather on about politics or philosophy or something but all she can hear is him saying "I, I, I, I..." Earlier in the blog I classed this masculine tendency to try to stick out, however possible, as "Protuberance."

To counter this tendency myself, I continue to leave this blog pseudonymized. I of course love it when people read the blog, and try to gently promote it here and there in person to person dialog and one-to-one correspondence. Although there is wisdom in Jaron Lanier's idea that we should always speak from our own name on the internet, that is countered by Walter Benjamin's assertion in "The Task of the Translator": "No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience." It has to be for the work itself, not for the attention it garners.

Speaking of which, the work day is well underway. Onwards

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