Jack Dorsey: “Elon is the singular solution I trust” (2022)
So let&#x27;s say you wanted to get to a decentralized alternative to Twitter--which Jack Dorsey would claim to have wanted for a long time--but you had this giant impediment: Twitter exists, and it just isn&#x27;t that bad... like, it isn&#x27;t great, and maybe it is barely even good, but it is just totally reasonable enough that a lot of people use it, and so you can&#x27;t really even enter that market because people are all insisting that Twitter is fine and your decentralized thing is a bit too awkward or a bit too confusing or whatever.<p>Now, one thing you could do is what I have spent some time doing: try to point out that a centralized business is broken by its very nature, and go on about wasting your life trying to educate people that we all should not trust such systems because, at the end of the day, even if you absolutely love the people behind such a product, one day people you do not like will buy it and kill it off. Despite collecting a ton of examples--if you are old enough to remember the LiveJournal era, did you pay attention to when it finally got sold to a Russian company, for example?--the reality is that even people who go see such a talk <i>and agree</i> go off and tweet about it on Twitter (and like, having given that talk, you know where I would tell people about it? well, I was forced to do so on Twitter a lot; I avoid what I can, but I have to go where people are or I am alone in the woods.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vsazo-Gs7ms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vsazo-Gs7ms</a><p>So, with Twitter as it existed being a losing situation, you have two hopes: 1) that a new person can come in and fix it, by dismantling what made it so valuable to shareholders... but like, are they really going to do that? probably not; but I mean... maybe they could? If someone was going to do that, I guess I was willing to believe that Elon might do it for some weird reason? I dunno. I actually had at least some hope that it might go in this direction... but even if he did, I still wouldn&#x27;t have been happy until &quot;I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company&quot;.<p>But like, Twitter as a company before <i>was not OK</i> to anyone who believes in decentralization, which this tweet claims very strongly to do; so you have to remember that and then ask if there was any solution you think had even more of a chance than Elon to pull that off, and frankly I just don&#x27;t see it: I don&#x27;t see any way to go from what Twitter was to what Twitter should be... which is gone... oh... right ;P.<p>And hence we get to the other hope to fix Twitter: 2) you just buy it and kill it. Now, there are other ways to do this: we could beg Yahoo to buy it--they have an amazing track record for this purpose--but they aren&#x27;t really in a position to do that anymore; Google buying it would almost certainly kill it, but I imagine they don&#x27;t see a reason to, as they can always just build their own products to kill :(. So, we are stuck with Twitter until someone else comes in to buy it and kill it... but like, the risk is that they come in and then just run it without either fixing it or breaking it... that would suck!<p>What we want is someone who will somehow <i>either</i> dismantle Twitter and make it a free and open platform protocol <i>or</i>, <i>if they fail to</i>, for whatever reason--including malice or greed!!--that the result will die the swiftest possible death imaginable, as remember: we absolutely need to get rid of Twitter to replace it with something decentralized. And, you know what? This went <i>great</i> for Jack. A ton of people have left Twitter, more people are hating it every day, the narrative has finally turned into one of Twitter as a centralized scourge, and Jack is thereby getting to re-do Twitter: he has launched Blue Sky, and people actually care now in a way they simply did not years ago. (And like, if you believe his vision, and not his ego, a ton of people on Mastadon is also amazing!)<p>&gt; In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company.<p>So, OK: let&#x27;s go with that.<p>&gt; Solving for the problem of it being a company however...<p>I am loving how vague this is.<p>&gt; ...Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.<p>Well, wow: mission accomplished (lol). Honestly, I feel like this might go down as one of the most ironically accurate assessments ever made (whether or not Jack understood any of this going in).