I just happened across a reference to a proposed cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg from last summer. I had forgotten all about that little brouhaha. A quick Google confirmed it didn't happen because, basically, Musk wimped out despite some typically boisterous Tweeting.
And there you have one curious bit of modern living in a nutshell. In the attention economy those who can hold our attention are the big winners. Trump and Musk are masters of it, as is Taylor Swift. And so on. It's all kind of a big waste of time except to the extent that it gives us shared discourse to discuss. In a slower information flow world dominated by text, people used to be able to have marginally more serious discussions about more serious topics more frequently. Or so it seems to us with rose-colored, 20/20 hindsight. I'm not sure what's actually true.
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