One idiot can ruin everything.
The article about that gets overly repetitive about how Musk has wrecked Twitter in less than two years and it's downright preachy in spots, but it doesn't change the truth of the principle. You should click on the link in the quote, but this is the gist of it:
One idiot can ruin everything. It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars your company is worth. Doesn't matter how many customers you have, or how many years you've been in business, or whether your product is a machine that turns dog poop into gold bars or a single injection that cures cancer. As a business, you are always just One Idiot Away from making a decision that will turn the whole company to rubble. One idiot in any significant position of power can take everything you've built and break it; an idiot who is surrounded by other idiots could very nearly kill God.
I have seen this play out in companies that were large enough to be on the Fortune list of top companies to medium-sized companies to long-established family retail businesses.
One idiot can ruin everything.
And it pays out, as well, for political parties and even nations.
One idiot can ruin everything.
8 comments:
Oh excellent! Most excellent. Now I want to have Hunter Lazzaro's baby.
Full disclosure: I'm not on X, have never been on Twitter for that matter -- my delight with the article is entirely due to the utter contempt I feel for Elon Mustelid. The guy who's giving entitled malignant narcissism a bad name.
Hunter Lazzaro's website: https://www.unchartedblue.com/author/hunter/
As you say, one idiot can ruin everything. But the difficulty is in specifying what is an idiot and what is not. Musk is not exactly an idiot. It is more to the point to say that he is a narcissist and a saboteur. One of either of those is also sufficient.
Another current idiots' (that's decidedly plural) game is pin the tail on the GOP elephant. Time for the Right to spend however long it takes in the wilderness.
One of Lazarro's best and REALLY worth reading is:
https://www.unchartedblue.com/internet-kessler-syndrome-are-we-witnessing-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-open-internet/
A small part:
The rapid growth of manipulative information sources that present themselves as objective but are fronts for manipulating public opinion. The most notorious may be the fake news sites apparently run by or for Russian intelligence services, sites with names such as "The Houston Post" that spread misinformation seemingly designed to undermine support for the Ukrainian government or create distrust in American elections. Earlier this year it was revealed that Israeli government backed an artificial information campaign targeting U.S. lawmakers, one in which "around 600 fake profiles unleashed more than 2,000 coordinated comments per week" supporting support for the Israeli military's brutal actions in Gaza, including ones "dismissing claims of human rights abuses." American political groups are themselves turning to so-called "pink slime" campaigns producing misleading websites designed to look like true news organizations but which instead publish "reports" that target political opponents.
Ever-expanding efforts by "good" information sources to monetize information by presenting it in smaller and smaller visual frames that are surrounded by more and more visual "debris"—advertising content the user did not ask for or alternative "information" that better matches what the host would prefer users see. One example would be Amazon's intentional enshittification, flooding product pages with sponsored and often dubiously branded alternatives. Non-middleware content creators, however, are have been expanding their use of such "debris" as a survival strategy. Go to most major news network's or newspaper's online sites and you will be assaulted with advertisement "debris" to an extent that threatens to overwhelm the content you came to see. As advertising rates continue to decline, content providers have expanded the number of advertising slots and loosened guidelines on what companies can place in them—likely kicking off a self-defeating cycle that will see both those trends continue.
We are getting to the point where the free internet is dysfunctional/disinformational /shitified while the real, salient, incisive and important stuff is getting paywalled off. Guess what takes over the mindshare of John and Jill Q. Public?
Enshitification shows up early in the article; the whole thing is worth a read.
And then there's today's napalm strike on the NYTimes:
The New York Times again both-sides fascist extremism, balancing Harris 'tax cuts' against Trump's mass deportations
The incompetence and amorality of our press may be more responsible for America's descent into authoritarian extremism than any other factor.
I'd tell you to enjoy, but a train wreck is no damn fun at all.
I used to read C&L, but the popups are out of control. StrategyPage is closing in on them.
I use the Adblock Plus and Diosconnect addons in Firefox and never see a popup or ad on Strategy Page.....
Yet another tanked company: Boars Head coldcuts;
Blood puddles, mold, tainted meat, bugs: Boar’s Head inspections are horrifying
The USDA recorded 69 violations in a year. So far, 9 people have died in the outbreak.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/blood-puddles-mold-tainted-meat-bugs-boars-head-inspections-are-horrifying/
Toast, if not napalmed.
Thanks. I had been using a different browser. Those seem to work well.
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