All That Twitters is Not Fairy Dust
So, every once in a while CNN does some journalism. I guess they are finally picking up what new Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav is putting down.
The era of woke is over. The era of self-sabotage and kowtowing to The Davos Crowd’s idiotic war on language, truth and common decency is coming to its ignominious end.
This article about the Twitter whistleblower, Pieter Zatko, from early last week is surprisingly good. Like the person writing it actually decided to tell the story rather than just editorialize about how it’s all Putin’s or Trump’s fault that Twitter had the right to misrepresent itself to a potential buyer.
This shift in editorial tone at CNN is being mirrored throughout Warner Brothers’ properties. And it has immense implications for the future of the Culture War we’re fighting against these vicious little Leninists.
As happy as I’ve been to watch Brian Stelter get the axe and the canning not only of the $90 million Batgirl movie and Ellen Degenerate’s groomer HBOMax series (20 episodes finished and now unreleased) it’s nothing compared his forcing a rework on the woke plans to invert the DCEU by unmaking the Snyderverse through the reported plot of The Flash (killing Superman and replacing him with Supergirl) and forcing reworks on other DCEU projects to un-Davos them.
Zaslav’s threatened to can a $250 million film while putting other projects through complete reshoots because he understands that some things are more important than the sunk-cost fallacy…
…Your reputation.
CNN and DC were being burned to the ground by people who knew their days were numbered and pushed through all sorts of terrible projects, stories and on-air behavior from its ‘talent’ in order to achieve this.
If we can’t control the narrative, better to destroy the brand than allow it to be resurrected.
This is why I was, and still am, so jazzed about Zack Snyder’s Justice League first getting released and then absolutely crushing all its competition in streaming for the past year.
The hunger for real heroes in stories told with passion and without cynicism is real. It’s palpable and it represents something vital in our culture.
A year ago I saw the problem clearly as the execs at Warner Media were trying to downplay Justice League’s success and that the merger with Discovery would lead to something better.
The other big fight is happening over DC’s pantheon of heroes. There is such internal division within Time-Warner over the direction of DC Comics’ film universe that Warner Bros. and Warner Media are literally fighting a civil war in the trade press. It’s part of what’s driving today’s $43 billion merger between AT&T and Discovery which will split off the whole mess, including CNN and HBO, making a pure media company under the direction of Jason Kilar, who greenlit The Snyder Cut of Justice League in the first place.
That’s how much Warner Bros. executives hate Zack Synder and the basic message of his DCEU films. Chaos is bad, men need to be strong and unite against madmen who are irredeemable.
Management are furious by the runaway success, across the globe, of his version of 2017’s Justice League.
Okay, enough DC fanboi stuff from me. What’s important is that there is a cultural shift happening within WBD that is resulting in significant changes regardless of what the entitled twats on Twitter want.
In a way I feel like Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter are a part of that story as well. Twitter, like it or not, is an important communications platform which needs to be protected as such for all sides of the public debate. As I said back in March:
By forcing Twitter’s board, who doesn’t own any shares in the company, to adopt a Poison Pill strategy, Musk has revealed them to be more interested in maintaining Twitter as a social control response engine rather than as a public company with a responsibility to shareholders.
The fact is, Twitter is a poison pill for society at large, all Musk did was put a price on it.
And I have to give Musk his due here, he’s performed one of the greatest public services in recent memory exposing the lengths to which Davos et.al. are willing to go to maintain their power. Because that’s what mass media to them is, a conduit of their power.
We’ve always known that Twitter was a manipulated playground with variably-applied Terms of Service depending on whatever Davos told us was “the latest thing.’
But that doesn’t cover the half of it. The reality is that it wasn’t some evil mandated corporate conspiracy, but rather a poorly-built internal architecture which was purposefully allowed to remain broken for plausible deniability purposes.
This paragraph is the money shot for the entire article:
What Zatko says he found was a company with extraordinarily poor security practices, including giving thousands of the company’s employees — amounting to roughly half the company’s workforce — access to some of the platform’s critical controls. His disclosure describes his overall findings as “egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy.”
As Dexter White said to me, Twitter gave “root admin privs for Tumblrinas” to run around doing their thing. Here’s the internal corporate structure within Twitter, as revealed by this single paragraph.
After a showdown with the FTC in 2010 to give the company cover that it was under proper government oversight, Twitter grew with no internal regard to those mandates, instead leaving a flimsy server architecture in place, poor employee oversight and a Technology vertical led by someone sympathetic to a particular worldview.
All you need then is an HR department that puts its thumb on the scale of hiring practices and you build an edifice of Tumblrinas running around doing “God’s work” silencing anyone with the wrong ideas.
In the process CEO Jack Dorsey had his company effectively taken away from him, and he was marginalized to the point of being the target of our vitriol. This is typical misdirection by Davos to hide the real villain, former CTO and current CEO Parag Agrawal, who was promoted for his good work in turning Twitter into a megaphone for the WEF and scapegoating the guy trying to stop the madness.
Maybe now we understand some of those tweets from Dorsey that seemed out of place while all of this was happening.
The story here is fascinating, Dorsey hires Zatko to shore up the company’s internal processes but he reports to Agrawal who stymies him at every turn and then fires him for ’cause,’ ensuring he’s ‘tainted goods’ and harms him professionally.
Then Twitter promotes Agrawal after finally turning the world against Jack Dorsey for the thousand poison flowers he let bloom within the company. The only thing that upset this apple cart was a bored Elon Musk who, like a lot of people who used to benefit from this shitty system, decided to turn his enormous pile of “Fuck You Money” into a stake in Twitter.
I have to wonder who Zatko ultimately worked for this entire time and why? You have to think that Dorsey knew what was going on but really was powerless to stop it. Was Zatko Dorsey/Musk’s mole within the company to root this stuff out and set the hook for Musk’s takeover?
I doubt it, but it makes a good story worthy of MI6. More likely Dorsey had simply had enough of this crap, understood the risks to the company he’d built because of Agrawal and the Board’s reckless behavior and tried to slow it all down.
His reward was a good ol’ corporate decapitation.
But was the shift in leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery the only way such a detailed article gets published by CNN, who would normally bury the lede if not memory hole the entire story? I think it’s very possible.
The bottom line here is that Davos’ control over Twitter is slipping and someone is helping Musk out here. This L’affair Zatko is a very big deal. It portends that the suit against Musk will get thrown out and/or he could still wind up buying the company for a lot less than $44 billion.
Why this matters should be obvious, regardless of how angry we are with Twitter, big tech companies, etc.
There are a lot more of you here reading this article today because Elon Musk blew up Twitter in March. I just passed 20,000 followers there. In March I was at around 9,700. I went from adding 300-400 followers per month to 1000-2000 per month.
My growth rate didn’t change dramatically because I changed my behavior on Twitter. I’m still an unrepentant asshole. It changed slope dramatically because those Tumblrinas that had been suppressing alternative voices had to remove the roadblocks while Musk was digging through the company’s books.
The growth is stark. And I’m not the only creator to see this. Twitter is an amazing marketing tool. Davos understands this. They understand why it’s more important than Facebook at this point, which is why Data just threw the FBI under the bus on Joe Rogan.
The ability to jump containment into new addressable markets is unparalleled. It allows us to find our audiences in a way that ensures our survival.
The whole point of compromising Twitter was to discourage conservatives, populists, and truth-tellers and ‘go build your own.’ They wanted us in smaller echo chambers where we could be easily grouped up and targeted for silencing.
Or did you miss the attacks on Gab and Parler?
The purpose of Twitter is to break down echo chambers, not create them. Musk understands this. So does Davos. That’s why the Tumblrina Army was nurtured and actively recruited.
It’s also why I stayed on the platform, same as Patreon. This too shall pass. It always does. I’ll stay on there for as long as I can building real relationships with real people and pro-actively doing my part to block bots and amplifying them.
I have deep faith that eventually the truth overwhelms the lies. Eventually the incentives for maintaining the lies reverse and the dam breaks.
There is diminishing marginal utility even in lying. As long as events like this keep happening in Musk’s favor there is a path to getting a hold of the megaphone and tearing down the house that Davos built.
Can’t stop the signal, Mal.
