lol

“Musk’s egomania drove him to buy and inevitably ruin Twitter because he hoped to transform it into X, his totalitarian “everything app” WeChat clone he wanted to send us to space with. But there is another, simpler narrative here. A man who grew up in apartheid South Africa, whose family owned a diamond mine, who made his name helping cyberlibertarians bypass banking laws, manipulating the US tax system to build faulty self-driving cars, and shooting rockets into space in the hopes of establishing debt slavery on Mars, bought an app built by activists and Black Americans, and that is relied on by the Global South as a valuable democratic tool, and is used by journalists around the world as a free and open source of information, and tried to turn it into his personal country club. This is just the mundane nightmare of watching a wealthy man wreck his new plaything — an imperfect, but vital communication system for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world. This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do. And I hope that when this embarrassing circus is over, we can figure out how to build something back that someone like Musk can’t turn into his new diamond mine.”

portrait of a lady on fire (2019)