I have lots of questions! The most burning one right now is… how could one help conceptualize and test features? Not a coder here, but loads of experience in experience and visual design.

I love how much less cluttered #Nostr is compared to Twitter.

There’s no noise here.

I could get used to that.

TETRIS was a good movie. My first Apple one.

I agree with your analysis of Mr. Musk’s motivations, although as a creative by nature and marketer by trade, I can’t help but feel my profession being a little unfairly singled out by your use of it as a pejorative. I mean, marketing is just a tool we’ve developed to promote the best ideas out there.

This is my first night on Nostr and I’m already promoting to those friends I know will get its relevance. That’s me “marketing.”

Like with all tools, it is largely about how you use them. I use a pen to doodle, but I could also use it to stab someone’s eye if I was into violent stuff.

Still, I agree with the sentiment.

Though I take the kinder view: Musk is what happens when you we lose track of our own internal values, stop using them as a compass and let adulation go to our head.

It could happen to anyone, even founders, engineers, etc. In fact, after many shitty experienced in Silicon Valley with founders who drank too much of their own koolaid and used others ideas to aggrandize themselves, I know for a fact that it does.

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.