So the black grandson of South Africa’s arguably most famous black person just had his Twitter account suspended. You know, Twitter, the company by that white South African character who evidently has little if any idea how this is going to make him look, and how little this is going to change perceptions of him as a racist shithead. Well done.
This, apparently, is Twitter’s latest thing. Blogging. And it’s only available to premium users, too. Blogging. Oolong wants people to pay money to BLOG. I mean, Jesus Christ, FUCKING BLOGSPOT AND TUMBLR AND WORDPRESS ALREADY EXIST AND ARE FREE! I pay for WordPress for extra storage space and other features, but that’s my choice to do so; they’re not demanding I pay money for the privilege of blogging. Needless to say, the cultists are all for it because OF FUCKING COURSE they are… I think this dialogue from Bluesky is gold:
So, back to that Simon Reynolds article I mentioned in passing the other day…
The blogging circuit I joined was only one corner of an ever-growing blogosphere. Even within music, my blog’s primary focus, there was a whole other – and larger – network of MP3 blogs. Still, my particular neighbourhood was bustling all through the 2000s. Out of its fractious ferment emerged cult figures such as K-punk, aka Mark Fisher, one of the most widely read and revered leftwing thinkers of our time, and the prolific cultural critic and author Owen Hatherley. Then there were those like me, who fit a different archetype: already a professional writer but someone who relished the freedom of style and tone offered by blogging.
Today, there are still plenty of active music blogs I enjoy reading. But what’s changed – what’s gone – is inter-blog communication. The argumentative back and forth, the pass-the-baton discussions that rippled across the scene, the spats and the feuds – these are things of the past. If community persists, it’s on the level of any individual blog’s comment box. I prize the unusual perspectives and weird erudition of my regular commenters, while wondering why so few of them operate their own blogs.
I found this the most interesting point he raises in the article. That conversation that used to keep the blogosphere going 20 years ago—and yes it is a bit disconcerting to realise it was that long ago, and I was part of that scene myself with the legendary in its own lunchtime Hot Buttered Death—doesn’t seem to be there now in whatever remains of that blogosphere (I think Youtube is where that sort of community has moved). I, of course, don’t do anything to encourage conversation here cos my own comments section is resolutely shut and no one seems willing to spend time on an email… I don’t exactly do anything to advertise this place’s existence so I was never overwhelmed with commenters anyway, I think I’ve had precisely one real commenter and some trolls, some of which were using the same IP and I think I know who that was (HI JAMES if you’re still reading and it was indeed you). I mean, they were never going to get posted anyway cos I had all comments set to be moderated first, but why waste my time if that was all I was getting anyway? May as well just disable the fucking things and be done with it.
Anyway, Reynolds also says he’s not actually bothered by this anyway, and would still be blogging even if no one were reading. This is much like myself, in that I’m doing this while hardly anyone is reading… I mean, look at my recent visitor stats:
I’m not exactly a hub of activity for other people, am I? Which is fine, it doesn’t really bother me, cos this is for my own interest and my own record more than anything. But am I writing about the things I want to write about? Reynolds again:
…one of the great things about blogging, for a professional journalist, is that you can write about topics that aren’t topical. You are unshackled from schedules. An old record or TV programme you’ve stumbled on, or simply remembered, is fair game.
And this is the thing: I find myself having written a lot of stuff here that is immediately topical, political stuff, Oolong’s increasing derangement, whatever the fuck’s happening in Ukraine, vanishing subs, kings getting crowned, nuclear material going missing, etc… and to be sure some of this is kind of important (or at least sufficiently amusing or irritating) stuff worth discussing… but it’s not really what I envisaged this blog being. As of now there’s 594 posts on here and nearly 140 of those are tagged “politics”. That’s nearly a quarter of all the posts on here. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what I wanted this blog to be—I think I envisaged something more arts-based a la John Coulthart’s blog—but I don’t think it was a repository of political discourse.
And, to be even more honest, the fact that it’s not quite turned out as I’d thought it would is largely down to me. It’s because I’m hardly reading anything, hardly watching anything, and definitely not creating anything. I’m not exactly going many places and photographing things, and in any case all I have is my phone camera which leaves an awful lot to be desired. I don’t even know if it’s worth investing in a proper new camera or not. So I’m a bit hamstrung on the visual front, and even more so on the literary front. All quiet on the musical front, too. (Or maybe this is my creative outlet?)
This is a general slump I’m in, and I know I’ve let myself get into it, and at least some of why that is. I’m in a Youtube rut, I’m watching a stupid amount of that instead of the stupid number of films and TV shows I’ve accrued (though my burnout on film and TV had been going on for years before YT became such a centre of gravity for me), to say nothing of the ludicrous number of books I’ve acquired. I don’t do new year’s resolutions, but this is something I have to make myself rectify in 2024. I’ve already observed elsewhere how I’m trying to cut back on the political content, though that’s going to be hard in 2024 what with a certain election coming up in November and what will no doubt be the endless bullshit surrounding that for months beforehand… still, the effort has to be made.
And it’s not that I’m not happy with the blog in general, I’m actually quite pleased with it and I’m having fun with it. But I am undeniably in a kind of rut and I have to do something to pull myself out of it. I need to start reading more and watching more. And to start writing more of the stuff I intended to write more of.
So Alex Jones has not only been invited back to Twitter, he’s been invited to do a show on there… which I find a bit odd given that he’s already got Infowars on which to do that sort of thing, but I subjected myself to a couple of minutes of Jones’ video and apparently it’s just going to be like a headlines & highlights reel of each day’s Infowars tirade. Either way, so much for what Oolong said about people profiting off the deaths of children… but I do think this might attract the interest of the lawyers for those people Jones infamously owes a billion dollars to that he’s been making a point of failing to pay up…
Yeah, Alex Jones is back on Twitter, despite what Oolong once said about how that would never happen:
A sentiment of perfect nobility, obviously, except for the fact that it didn’t happen that way, according to his by then ex-wife:
OOF. And it now turns out he was lying about not letting Jones back on Shitter; I don’t believe for a second that he only did it because he posted a poll on there that ended up in favour of Jones’ return, he wouldn’t have posted the poll if he weren’t already thinking of doing it, this just made it look like “the will of the people” or some shit. From that BBC article:
After Musk posted the poll, Jones shared a video online in which he called on his supporters to vote in favour of his ban being overturned.
Jones’s old account was reinstated hours after the poll ended.
Responding to one user on Saturday, Musk said he “vehemently” disagreed with Jones’s statements about Sandy Hook, adding: “but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not?”
He said the move would be “bad for X financially” but “principles matter more than money”.
I mean, the answer to his question is “no, don’t be so fucking stupid“. And there’s no principle involved here; Musk was right about hating people profiting from the deaths of children, but somewhere along the way that principle’s fallen by the wayside. I don’t know whether he or Jones is the bigger moral vacuum in this situation.
I haven’t said anything about Oolong for quite a few days now, unlike the man himself who, well, said quite a lot with just a few words recently:
The funniest thing about this interview was the bit where Elon got the interviewer’s name wrong, of course, but the really important bit was where he uttered the deathless words “go fuck yourself” to those advertisers who’ve lately become sniffy about him after the Media Matters thing a few weeks ago. And then he had the nerve to post this a couple of days later:
The idea that if he wants advertisers on his platform maybe he should give them some sort of incentive to give him money rather than telling them to fuck off appears to have escaped him, as it appears to have done with this buffoon:
Lady Ballers looks like a horrible story unto itself, of course, but it’s not really the point here. The point is, these cunts clearly operate on the principle that they necessarily deserve advertising revenue purely by virtue of them simply being themselves? Disney should advertise on Shitter because Oolong is Oolong? No. The onus really is on him to give them a reason to. Instead he did the opposite; if there was anything he said in that debacle that he shouldn’t have said even more than “go fuck yourself”, it was “DON’T ADVERTISE”! That’s not how you do this sort of thing, you complete vacuum. It’s all about the free market for these bloody people until the free market tells them to go fuck themselves in return… and at some point I suspect he’s going to say the same thing to his investors and they’re not going to take that for an answer…
X ad boycott gathers pace amid antisemitism storm
An advertising boycott of social media platform X is gathering pace amid an antisemitism storm on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Apple, Disney, Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery have all halted advertising on X, US media report, following hot on the heels of IBM.
The European Commission, TV network Paramount and movie studio Lionsgate have also pulled ad dollars from X.
It comes after X owner Elon Musk amplified an antisemitic trope.
The corporate boycott has also been picking up steam in the wake of an investigation by a US group which flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X.
A spokesperson for X told the BBC on Thursday that the company does not intentionally place brands “next to this kind of content” and the platform is dedicated to combatting antisemitism.
And what do the ADL make of this?
On Friday evening, the ADL – one of the most vocal critics of how X moderates incendiary content – offered rare praise for Mr Musk’s steps to fight hate on the platform.
Mr Musk had posted on X that anyone using terms such as “from the river to the sea” – which the ADL has described as a coded call for Israel’s destruction – could be suspended from the platform.
ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt replied that this was “an important and welcome move”.
I couldn’t resist posting on the Bad Place for once what Oolong had said about the ADL just the day before Greenblatt said that (not that he’ll notice):
One of the other terms Oolong is claiming implies genocide is “decolonisation”. I don’t understand that. Genocide against whom, the colonisers? And what else has the world’s favourite white South African billionaire had to say on the current matter?
Well, that’s certainly one way to get those advertisers to stop boycotting you, I suppose. But insulting the ADL has kept Stephen Greenblatt on-side, obviously, so maybe it’ll work this time too…
IBM suspends ads on X after they appeared next to Nazi posts
IBM has suspended advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, after a report said its ads were placed next to posts praising Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
The company said it was “completely unacceptable” that its content appeared in such threads on the platform.
X said it does not intentionally place brands “next to this kind of content”.
It comes as X owner Elon Musk was criticised after calling an antisemitic conspiracy theory “actual truth” when replying to a post on the platform.
The left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America said it found ads bought by IBM and other companies next to posts including Hitler quotes, praise of Nazis and Holocaust denial.
This has, obviously, been the source of much mirth online today, given IBM’s… chequered history when it comes to these things. But nice of them to take an overt position on the correct side of history… at least until they change their minds like the ADL, who you may remember Oolong threatened to sue a couple of months ago because they were supposedly killing off his beloved X before he made some token statement and they agreed to go back to advertising on there. We’ll see how long it takes IBM and the other companies the article mentions (including Apple) to do the same.
Of course, the fact that the ADL are advertising on Musktown again doesn’t mean he actually likes them now, of course; after Jonathan Greenblatt took exception to Oolong promoting that antisemtic tweet the other day, Oolong took exception to him and his organisation:
After Musk began to face a backlash for endorsing the antisemitic tweet, he took aim more specifically at the ADL.
He wrote, without providing any evidence for these claims, “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
Which I suppose is what they deserve for being foolish enough to believe the prick when he said he opposed antisemitism while letting Nazis run rampant there. Meanwhile Linda Yaccarino, the whole point of whom becomes ever more mysterious and obscure, is quoted as saying this in the BBC article:
“X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board – I think that’s something we can and should all agree on,” Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino posted on Thursday.
“X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination,” she added. “There’s no place for it anywhere in the world – it’s ugly and wrong.”
I read someone on Bluesky interpreting that as really meaning Jews should stop hating white people and everyone else should stop hating Oolong in particular, which I initially thought was a bit uncharitable but only very slightly. Cos after that initial antisemitic he boosted, he decided to do it again:
Look, I’m a white person myself, as you may have noticed, being a white person is one of the things that I do on a regular basis, and… well… I don’t hate “white people”. I hate some individual white people, but not as a whole class of human beings… I just view them with a certain degree of irony and awareness that, historically, we could’ve done some things a lot better than we did (and in some cases still do). And I don’t see that just being white is an achievement or anything. Weird, though, that the only people I’ve ever read or heard say “white people are supposed to hate themselves” are white people like these ones who clearly don’t and how dare you suggest they should.
And Elon’s now actively encouraging them. He’s not just sitting back and letting “free speech” do its thing. He’s agreeing with them and thereby promoting them and pushing the message out. It only goes downhill from there. Great.
Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union’s tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don’t agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta’s products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google’s app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months, are an attempt to comply with the EU’s crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.
Yeah, it’s an attempt to comply with the EU’s laws rather than a cynical attempt to screw people out of an excessive amount of money for a service that isn’t worth that much. Fourteen bucks a month? We really are trying to make Oolong’s $1-a-year-for-now deal look lightweight, aren’t we, Mark… then again at least he’s not talking about cutting off the service to Europe entirely, unlike Oolong:
In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
Musk is increasingly frustrated with having to comply with the Digital Services Act, according to a person familiar with the company. The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app’s availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said. This would be similar to the way Meta is currently blocking people in Europe from using its new app Threads.
The DSA took effect in August and requires large online platforms like X to have effective and transparent systems in place for the moderation and removal of false, misleading, and harmful information. With a wave of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas war quickly going viral on X, the platform is likely already in violation of the DSA.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said last week the Commission is officially “investigating X’s compliance” with the new law and formally requested detailed information from the platform on its actions to mitigate and remove harmful or toxic information.
Cash-strapped X could face a fine if it’s found in violation of the DSA. The Commission can impose “periodic penalty payments,” or fines, up to 6% of a company’s global revenue.
So for having the temerity to tell him to stop his platform being shitty and harmful, Husk apparently thinks he cam “punish” Europe or something by cutting off Twitter there. I mean, sure, THAT’LL work, when you’ve already blown the value of your service by 80% why not just cut off hundreds of millions of potential users, the advertisers will LOVE that… I can see him doing that in Australia too, though, now the government here is also on his back about the amount of CSA material he’s also doing nothing about. The problem is, I can’t see them actually succeeding at getting that from him, even though it’s a pissy sum (about $600,000), because as a billionaire he is clearly above all man-made laws, and for all the talk that he could be fined a further $800,000 per day if he doesn’t pay up… well if he’s not going to pay the original fine, I can’t see him paying the even bigger extra. But I can imagine him just turning the service off altogether here just for considering making him do something to protect kids. And what a loss it’d be if it happened, eh…
So Oolong Husk wasn’t kidding about charging Twitter users…
Apparently the plan is to test the subscription model in just two countries, New Zealand and the Philippines (why those two? Who the fuck knows), and from November new users will be paying $1 a year for basic Twitter functionality. Which is cheap, sure, but this is Twitter we’re talking about, it’s barely worth that much… Also, this won’t stay at a dollar per year and it also won’t stay at new users. The end begins here, surely.
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