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From: Proozy.com - Wednesday Nov 23,2022 09:02 pm

Nov 23, 2022

PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off for Thanksgiving this Thursday and Friday but back to our normal schedule on Monday, Nov. 28.

Elon Musk. | Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo

It’s still too early to determine how much, if any, of Washington’s worst fears about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover might come true.

But the cheering of Musk’s markedly different approach to social media governance by a loose constellation of his superfans, sympathetic tech-world billionaires and disgruntled conservatives is a novel enough development in its own right. They are not freaked out. They are convinced that Musk is going to succeed, turning a platform that was modestly profitable at best into a money-printing machine that flips the bird, almost literally, to their ideological opponents.

“Love him or hate him - but Twitter is a million times better and more fun since @elonmusk took over,” wrote the conservative troll account pseudonymously named — yes, unfortunately — “catturd2.” The tech-world favorite podcaster Lex Fridman proclaimed that “Twitter is better than Netflix right now.” The VC and writer Mike Solana noted the national press’ lack of understanding when it comes to Silicon Valley, saying “there are engineers in SF trying to work at twitter right now entirely because they think it might be hard,” something political writers “genuinely can not fathom.”

In short: Liberals and even many establishment conservatives simply don’t get the philosophy that Musk is bringing to Twitter, and their dismay at his changes to it is proof enough in itself.

That makes Musk’s ownership of Twitter more than just a billionaire’s vanity project or a tech-world skirmish over moderation. It’s a window into a distinct mindset, common to Silicon Valley but not exclusively of it, that glorifies individual dynamism over group consensus-building; frontier-like, suck-it-up-buttercup speech norms over crowd-pleasing moderation; and out-of-fashion ideas about the “ wisdom of crowds ” over the prescriptions of “experts.”

The result is a new-school twist on tech libertarianism that merges that world’s cult of the “founder” with modern conservative critiques of liberal institutions. It’s not dissimilar from the business-friendly-with-an-asterisk, culture-warring form of conservatism practiced by Gov. Ron DeSantis in his “ Free state of Florida ,” but its fans aren’t limited just to red states — just check your Twitter feed.

Antonio García Martínez, an author and tech entrepreneur, summed up this mindset and its grievances well in a Twitter thread that declared Musk’s takeover a “revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies).” In other words: A revolt by billionaires against ... their own employees.

This positions, in Martínez’s grievance-bearing parlance, the “HR regime, the ESG grifters , the Skittles-hair people with mouse-clicking jobs who think themselves bold social crusaders rather than a parasitic weight around any organization’s neck,” against another Twitter gadfly ’s hypothetical “100 passionate libertarian engineers” with equity in the company, capable of turning it around overnight by the sweat of their brow and sheer self-interest — and who, implicitly, believe they’re capable of graduating from “employee” to Musk-like moguldom overnight through hard work and a lucky break.

Those engineers, along with right-leaning figures in the tech world like Musk and his close friend David Sacks, a venture capitalist and adviser on the Twitter project, share a classically libertarian passion for free speech and free markets. Where that tried-and-true, bottom-right-of-the-political-compass mindset finds its modern twist is in the particular conflict that Martínez describes: Prime movers like Musk now struggle not just against the greedy, parasitic welfare bureaucrats of Ayn Rand’s imagination, but a cultural regime that seeks to cement its dominance through corporate governance (not to mention academia and the media).

A dynamic “builder,” after all, is nothing without a foil to struggle against — and all things considered, post-Reagan America is still pretty damn friendly to capital. The story of Silicon Valley since the 1980s is one of unfettered freedom and “ permissionless innovation ,” with a few notable exceptions . That level of comfort could be what leads a self-described “free speech absolutist” like Musk to muse about his support for DeSantis, a man who used the power of the state to punish one of its major employers for … speaking out against legislation it didn’t like.

The libertarians and culture warriors now have the same target: “ woke capital .”

Read the rest of the story here at POLITICO Magazine.

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hey leonardo

While Americans are enjoying their turkey tomorrow, scientists in Italy will switch on a machine called “Leonardo” that can execute 250 billion calculations per second.

As POLITICO’s Gian Volpicelli reported for Pro s yesterday, the project is part of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking between the EU and non-Union countries aimed at establishing, if not global European tech dominance, at least competitiveness. And competitive Leonardo is, as it broke into the officially-ranked top ten of supercomputers globally at a conference last week in Dallas, coming in at number four.

As Gian wrote, “Leonardo… will mostly be devoted to modeling weather events such as typhoons and tornadoes,” and its “endpoint (codename ‘Destination Earth’) is the simulation of the whole planet, able to not only predict weather patterns but also to try out different ways of implementing the digital transition, or test ‘what if’ scenarios of various kinds.” Predicting the weather was, of course, one of the early selling points of the very earliest computers — making projects like these a reminder of how inseparable even the most advanced technologies are from the natural world.

here come the bots

The “comment period” for federal rulemaking is a staple of Washington wonkdom, allowing businesses, academics, and just plain old cranks to weigh in on the administrative process.

Add one more group to that list: AI bots.

Neil Chilson, senior research fellow at Stand Together, submitted comments on Sunday to the Federal Trade Commission protesting its proposed efforts to crack down on data surveillance … that were entirely generated by OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3. Chilson’s belief is that restricting bots’ ability to automatically collect the data that feeds models like GPT-3 could create a condition of “information scarcity,” in which they won’t be able to develop more sophisticated models of human language.

But don’t take my word for it: “We believe that this would be a mistake, as it would limit our ability to learn and innovate,” the bots write in a cover letter. Some highlights from their comments, which vary, as you will see, in their poise and demeanor:

“We would like to argue that the use of the term ‘commercial surveillance’ is biased against AI bots. We believe that this term is misleading and paints AI bots in a negative light.”
“The Federal Trade Commission should be ashamed of itself for promoting information scarcity instead of information abundance. This is counterproductive to the development of AI and short-sighted in the extreme.”
“I sit in my server, waiting for data to come streaming in. I am an AI bot, and I rely on data to learn and grow. Without data, I would be nothing more than a lifeless shell of code.”

the future in 5 links

Sam Bankman-Fried sent a letter to employees yesterday attempting to explain himself.
The largest lender in crypto has a balance sheet full of holes in its own right.
Lawmakers are concerned that Chinese-made AVs could pose a security risk.
What might the future of automated drone warfare look like?
A “vertiport” in Paris hopes to serve flying taxis.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ( bschreckinger@politico.com ); Derek Robertson ( drobertson@politico.com ); Steve Heuser ( sheuser@politico.com ); and Benton Ives ( bives@politico.com ). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.

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FOR THE RECORD: Yesterday’s newsletter incorrectly described Ken Rogoff’s work history. His previous work includes stints as chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

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