Stages

Doomberg, a prolific and pseudonymous bitcoiner, reveals how Twitter worked and how Xlon changed it.

Summary:

Like all social media, Twitter had Lurkers, Participants and Creators. Twitter was different from other media like Youtube or Facebook or old-fashioned publishers, because Twitter didn’t pay its creators. Instead, the Creators were meant to use Twitter as a pure billboard or signpost, directing customers to the real revenue source whether it was Youtube or books or beer.

Xlon destroyed the billboard aspect when he prohibited links to places he didn’t like, so the Creators lost their reason for being on Xitter.

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This revelation got me thinking about the longer timeline. Tech Tyrants have taken industrial slavery to a new stage.

Stage 1: Agrarian employment is natural, a direct human use of the social model seen in elephant herds or beehives. Each member is loyal for life, working for the herd when able. The hive ALSO takes care of babies before they’re ready to work. A medieval fief or Dixie plantation followed this pattern. Everyone was expected to work when they were able, and the owner fed and housed everyone FOR LIFE. It was a good deal for the peasants. Humans WANT AND NEED to work, but a solitary human will starve if unable to work for pay. Two-way loyalty sustained this model for 100k years.

Stage 2: Around 1700, some lords figured out a way to take more and pay less. The peasants were now “free” to work all day and all night without breaks or sabbaths or seasons, and the lords were FREE to pay the peasants only when working. The lords were FREED from the obligation to support the peasants when young or old or infirm. But the lords still had to pay the peasants while working, because otherwise the peasants wouldn’t bother to switch to the new system.

Stage 3: Around 1970, other lords figured out how to extend the sweatshop to its ultimate perfection.

First, eliminate division of labor, and eliminate the jobs formerly occupied by women. Executives and professionals formerly relied on women to organize and file and write letters and documents. Now execs have to do all that work on their own, which makes them more “productive” for the lords and vastly less efficient in terms of real work. Execs also have to do their own promotion, which was formerly reserved for a company’s publicity flacks. Professionals no longer have time to think or talk or sleep or develop their OWN SPECIFIC SKILLS.

Second, reduce pay to an absolute minimum for the remaining helpers and peasants. The 1700 lords persuaded peasants that they were “free” to choose work, because work was the only way to get paid. The 1970 lords persuade peasants that they are “free” to choose UNPAID gig work, with the implicit but unkept promise of future riches. The goldrush principle has been extended across all knowledge work. The Hollywood actors and writers are calling dramatic attention to this unkept promise.

Third and final. The unpaid giggers and overloaded professionals have piled up a sufficient body of unpaid art and text and patents and program code, which is all obligingly stored in the private Cloud of the 1970 lords. Now the 1970 lords are grinding up (securitizing) the work and sausaging it out into “new” works of art and text and patents and program code. The real creators don’t have to be paid or respected or credited for the securitized sausage. All money and credit goes to Atlas.

Job done! Negative externalities no longer paid or needed or supported. Atlas wins. Atlas becomes the sole occupant of the universe.