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Of course he did

Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to an anonymous founder with a deep devotion to a fascist ‘guru’

Dorsey gave $10 million to a foundation supporting Nostr and 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, directly to Nostr’s founder, who until now was known pseudonymously as Fiatjaf.
Nostr “has no board, no company behind it, no funding,” Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. “It’s a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them.” Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden.
“We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian,” Dorsey said.
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

So not that long ago I posted something about Beardo quitting Bluesky because he was more interested in Nostr, and I noted my puzzlement at him funding this thing without even knowing who “Fiatjaf” was. I mean, that’s quite a lot of money to give to someone you don’t even know the identity of… evidently that identity is now known somehow (bet he’s thrilled about that), and for some reason I find myself suspecting that Dorsey was perfectly aware of who he was all along. The end of the article further says:

On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
“I want to tell these people to go somewhere else, but I think we need these people, too,” he said.

Giovanni, meu irmão em Cristo, NO ONE needs Nazis. No good comes from Nazis. And no good is going to come of Nostr if you think Nazis might be useful to it in any way.

Jack’s off

It was news to me that Jack Dorsey was still part of Bluesky until a few days ago, cos I could’ve sworn he’d actually left it a while ago (apparently that was just him deleting his account, not leaving the company), but never mind that. He’s out for real now and not just in my fevered imagination, and here’s why, apparently:

Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter, slammed the board that oversaw the social media firm during his tenure at its helm, saying the group had “always been a problem.”
“I was extremely challenged by my board,” Dorsey said during an interview published Thursday by Mike Solana, the head of marketing for VC firm Founders Fund and editor of digital media brand Pirate Wires.
“The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end,” Dorsey continued. “But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that’s the greatest act.” […]
But Dorsey said he was also unhappy with the board because of an activist investor seeking to boot him, he said.
“I didn’t want to be on a board with an activist,” he said. I didn’t want to run a company like that. It’s just a Wall Street mess. It’s not creative, it’s diminishing.”

So now that Twitter is apparently much more like Beardo thought it should be, he’s recommending people use that instead of Bluesky, cos the latter’s become too much like what Twitter actually was:

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

So people being asked not to be cunts on the Internet is the real problem? Of course it is… and I’ve seen a few folks on BS frown at his choice of the words “very common crowd” to describe the people migrating there, which is indeed a somewhat odd phrase I don’t think he explained or expanded on. Were we all not elite enough for him or something?

And fair enough, maybe some people are offering uncharitable interpretations of what he meant, but maybe explain to us why he used the word “common” instead of those others…

Anyway, though he’s boosting Shitter again (it’s “freedom technology”, apparently, as long as Oolong likes you), Jack’s real interest is Nostr. You know, the social network that only crypto bros like Jack seems to be into. I mean, have you ever seen Nostr mentioned in any other context? Cos sure as shit I haven’t. Who uses it? What do people do with it? Why do you never see anyone talking about it or quoting what people have said on it? And who is the guy who invented it? We don’t seem to know anything about him other than that he’s a developer from Brazil in his early 30s who fell in love with Bitcoin after falling in love with Austrian economics. Maybe it’s just me but I’d be hesitant to give millions of dollars to someone whose identity was unverifiable. Still, libertarians gonna liberty, I suppose…

Less obviously

Elon Musk Asks Fellow Transphobe JK Rowling To Post Other Content

Astonishingly, Oolong is apparently as sick as the rest of us of Mr Galbraith hating trans folks all the time:

Harry Potter author and self-proclaimed TERF JK Rowling has been asked by CEO of X (formerly Twitter) and fellow transphobe Elon Musk to turn the transphobia down a notch.
In response to a lengthy tweet from April that saw Rowling employ much of her usual anti-trans rhetoric, such as invalidating trans identities and touting gender essentialism, Musk decided to step in and personally ask the author if she could perhaps pivot to other topics.
“While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender,” he said, “may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters?”
Musk’s request is particularly ironic, given his previous attempts to lobby against gender-affirming care and current plans to sue Australia’s ESafety Commission after a request to take down an anti-trans post on his platform.
Rowling is yet to respond to Musk’s request, and though most people would probably pause to reflect if told to scale back the transphobia by Elon Musk, it’s not difficult to imagine Rowling will only be emboldened to quadruple down on her anti-trans rhetoric due to this request.
In fact, in the days since this reply, Rowling has continued to post transphobic content completely undeterred by Musk’s request.

According to The Humanist Report, she did in fact post one non-transphobia thing after making a snarky comment about Musk’s tweet, but does seem to have otherwise carried on business as usual after that. But yeah, when a champion transphobe like Oolong is saying “Jesus fuck, Joanne, can’t you talk about something else for once?”, you’d think she might take a bit more notice than that… but I suppose we’ve known for a while what really matters to her, and it’s not being remembered for the Potter books…

The state of the blog

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.

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