To Thread or not to Thread?
The moral compromise confronting users looking to adopt Meta’s Twitter-killer app
--
A few weeks ago, news broke that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were going to participate in an MMA cage fight. Zuckerberg has recently won some BBJ medals (it sounds like a sex act but BBJ stands for “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu”). Musk, unimpressed, claimed he could just flop down on Zuckerberg and squash him. “I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus’, where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing,” Musk tweeted. Zuckerberg reacted as if he had been slapped across the face with a glove. The proprieters of the Mixed Martial Arts circus and Italy’s department of culture got in touch with the feuding techbros. It all looked on until Elon Musk’s mother found out about it.
“El-OOn!” she said.
From her tone, Musk understood was going to get in serious trouble. “Guys! Its off! Its off!” he hissed into his phone to the PR rep putting the gig together. “My mom…MOM.. found out! She KNOWS OKAY?!! Sh*T! Bye! I think I hear her. I got to go. F*ck! Sh*T! Sh*T!”
My last post on Facebook was about two years ago. I periodically check in, about once in three months. When I do so, I marvel at two things.
The first, given how I was so addicted to the platform (I lost years of my life to it) is mild embarassment. Its feels like meeting an ex for whom you had extremely strong and irrational feelings, spent hours obsessing about, but now feel nothing. What was so compelling about throwing sheep, being poked, maintaining a virtual farm and falling out with people over political differences?
The second emotion, logging back into Facebook, is wonder.
Wonder that it is still going.
Back in 2006, I was introduced to a beautiful girl and the immediate next step was to be friends on Orkut. Orkut was hugely popular in India and Brazil. It was like a MySpace for brown people. We all had pages telling people what kind of music…
