Elon Musk paid a midweek visit to Apple, apparently. In a pair of tweets1 he shot a vista of what looks like the huge pond set inside the giant ring that is Apple Park (with Tim Cook, if he was there, present only by his shadow), and thanked Tim Cook for “taking me around Apple’s beautiful HQ”. Then he added:
This, of course, is completely at odd with what he tweeted earlier in the week, when he said:2
But in the two-day period in between, he’d ramped up all sorts of noise about Apple, and the App Store (including the shocking revelation—kept secret for so many years until he used his powers of free speech!—that Apple takes 30% of payments made through the Store), and induced a Two-Day Hate at the whole concept of buying apps. (Wait until he finds out that retailers typically buy wholesale at 40% of the retail price you pay!)
Nor had he been accurate in complaining that Apple “has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter”. As Gizmodo points out, on that very day it spent over $80,000, and the day before had spent $100,000, on advertising on Twitter.
It’s amazing to have to explain it, but Musk is a troll. He says things to get a reaction. The even more amazing thing is that it works on adults who have been on the internet long enough to know better.
Early days
There have been trolls nearly as long as the internet—certainly its social functions—have been around. In Social Warming, there’s the story about what happened at The WELL, back in the days when bulletin boards (of which it was one of the first) made their money by charging people per-minute for access.
What’s the solution if you need people to be connected to your bulletin board for as long as possible? Just as with modern social networks reliant on advertising, it’s that magic word “engagement”. Which, for The WELL, turned out to be effected by a troll.
Mark Ethan Smith was actually female, but the male screen name worked fine, and didn’t make any secret of her sex. She would post claims about feminist history that were obviously wrong and, when corrected, launch into ranting tirades. People would respond. She’d respond. They’d respond (or someone else would). And so it would go on.
Did Smith get thrown off? Did she hell. The site’s director observed that she was messing with users’ cultural expectations, understood how they were going to react better than they did themselves, and was playing them “like an instrument”.
This is often the case with trolling. It brings people to the yard. Everyone gazes at the car crash, or reacts to the insult, and the cycle becomes self-sustaining. Trolling begets reaction, and the troll gets what they wanted. And so do the owners of the site, usually, if their aim is more time spent there. (Sometimes it isn’t: if you want to run a nice forum for discussion of some specific topic, you don’t want it disrupted by trolling.)
But all things must come to an end, and Smith got thrown off The WELL less than a year after joining. She didn’t take kindly to this, and wrote an angry screed titled CENSORSHIP IN CYBERSPACE (which is still online). It’s an abbreviated autobiography, with emphasis on why she got kicked off:
The Well was more like a professional wrestling ring than a forum for discussion. In real life, sexist males would have resorted to physical violence to force me to conform to their stereotypes of how a woman should act, but in cyberspace the only weapons available were words, and in that realm I was able to defend myself. The people [NY Times reporter and book author Katie] Hafner describes as strong advocates of free speech and opponents of censorship, permanently removed my account and censored my words because it was the only substitute for physical violence they had. But Hafner does try to list some possible reasons I was kicked out, such as my “unsettling,” and “over the top” ideas, and that I attacked people.
In her spiel, she’s insistent that she wasn’t the troll; it was everyone else who was mean-spirited and who launched into ad hominem (or ad feminam) attacks, and she was just giving as good as she got. Without making a judgement, that’s quite a common response from trolls who get banned. People who aren’t trolls who get banned usually express puzzlement about what they’re meant to have done. For an example there’s Dean Baker, an economics expert who on Thursday found himself suspended, and then reinstated a few hours later, both for no obvious reason.
But! The modern media is incapable of recognising when it’s being trolled. Trump did it continually, typing things onto a little screen which then roiled the media. And Musk is following in his footsteps. He has 119 million followers, but that doesn’t make the things he tweets necessarily true. It’s a bizarre outgrowth of the modern social media-infected world that there are so many people who think a large following equals truthiness.
As much as anything, Musk doesn’t seem to take much care to check what he tweets; instead he goes for maximum effect, as though he had 119 followers and was thirsty for interaction. Such as his fake CNN tweet:
As was pointed out to him (and added to the tweet by Community Notes, a “correction” feature that’s only visible to some people), this is a fake: if you were to post it on Facebook you’d get a big correction. But it’s highly likely that a lot of the people who saw that tweet believed it to be a real headline because of who it came from. If he had 120 followers, it would subside. As things are, that’s lodged with some people.
We do have a problem with the media, which is too ready to respond. Karl Bode captured it well, pointing to the opportunity cost of the kneejerk response to getting trolled. This time, the trolling—or whatever you want to call it—comes from Kanye West, who has created some pretty good music but displays every sign of serious mental health problems. Which means in the modern world that people thrust microphones in front of him at every opportunity, in the hope of catching the moment.
Bode’s absolutely right. For example: are there still lead pipes in Flint, a poisoning that began in 2014/15? Musk said in July 2018 that he’d fund replacements. He didn’t. (Here’s the answer.) Who’s writing about that, and the longstanding problems that that has caused?
Bode is also right that too many people who should know better spend too much time amplifying what doesn’t need amplification:
Now, you can say that I’m doing exactly what he says we shouldn’t: amplifying the troll. What I’m trying to do, though, is point out that the reaction is what he wants, and that what you need to do instead is to ignore it. That’s a principle of resisting social warming: don’t feed the trolls, and don’t respond to them. A tweet is not an action. Musk saying he’ll put implants in human brains, rather than monkeys’, isn’t an event. It’s a claim. News should not be driven by empty claims. But we have a generation of news editors who would rather get people to write the same story as a million other sites rather than finding out their own. (Pick up the phone, call the water board in Flint. Do a search on companies that announced blockchain projects, see how many are still going. And so on. I always hated doing the same story as everyone else, because how do you stand out in that situation?)
At heart, the problem is this:
Something to ponder while ignoring those tweets. There’s a lot more that’s actually valuable on Twitter. Seek that out.
Glimpses of the tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• ChatGPT is out from OpenAI, and jaws are dropping all over the internet. The new language generator “makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” People are throwing absolutely insanely complex questions at it, and getting really impressive responses. “Historians will talk about the tech industry before and after ChatGPT. It is that good,” one user remarked. Even if that’s hyperbolic, the noise around these generative models is becoming impossible to ignore.
• What happens to work when generative AI is everywhere—able to write articles, design products, draw images, do that work you think of as creative? Noah Smith and “roon” (who works at a generative AI company) have a thoughtful post about this:
Marketers will have an idea for a campaign, generate copy en masse and provide finishing touches. Consultants will generate whole powerpoint decks with coherent narratives based on a short vision and then provide the details. Financial analysts will ask for a type of financial model and have an Excel template with data sources autofilled.
What’s common to all of these visions is something we call the “sandwich” workflow. This is a three-step process. First, a human has a creative impulse, and gives the AI a prompt. The AI then generates a menu of options. The human then chooses an option, edits it, and adds any touches they like.
The sandwich workflow is very different from how people are used to working.
• The importance of “negative prompts” in AI-generated images—essentially telling them what not to include.
• Text, images.. why not proteins? And yes, there’s not one but two companies which are using AI generation to create proteins that could be used for medical applications.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
on his iPhone, natch
I’m using screenshots, and linking to the tweets, because I believe Musk auto-deletes his tweets. And anyway, it’s good to be sure.
Ah, there's a name from long past (MES). But I must disagree with you on calling MES a "troll". I very much dislike the way the word "troll" is used to mean both 1) liar who says phony things to provoke outrage and 2) sincere person who loudly says contrarian things. It's functionally the old slam on activists of "You're just seeking attention!". My impression is that MES deeply believed in what they said, even though it was far outside the norm.
Now, I hate to defend Musk, but let's be fair - there's been, not screaming, but rocket-blast level, outrage from the chattering class about how Apple should BAN Twitter, "get" him, etc. etc. It's a direct reply to the query "If you say billionaires should control speech when they're on your side, what happens when it's controlled by a billionaire opposed to your side?". Simple answer: "We'll try to get the billionaires on our side to defeat the opponent". Practically, I would not fault Musk for making a mistake and wrongly but honestly thinking some of the endless noise reflects reality (especially if someone at Apple got, let's say, a bit overzealous). Yeah, he shouldn't, but it's an understandable human error. Of the many things he's done, the Apple kerfuffle is perhaps the least "troll" (by any definition other than "noisy").
But why do you think the "modern media is incapable of recognising when it's being trolled", versus engaging in mutual attention antics? I'd say many recognize exactly what's going on, and enthusiastically participate from their side. But exhorting individual virtuous action will not change this, as the incentives don't reward individual virtue.