Deconstructing Musk’s slogan “Freedom of Speech, Not Freedom of Reach” to its Orwellian essence: Any algorithm that does not attempt to match what the reader would have chosen is a violation of the reader’s consent by Musk As Big Brother.
I would strongly advise Musk to identify where that Orwellian phrase came from – down to whatever systemic structures it may expose – and eradicate it. If that includes structures in his own world-view, then do so even more ruthlessly.
Twitter has announced its “re-branding” as “𝕏” today, 2023-07-24. X.com now redirects to Twitter. Here is the new logo, full size:
The instant this dropped, everybody who’s been around the Unix world for, say, three decades or so, remarked upon its striking similarity to the logo for the X Window System, whose development began in 1984 at MIT and whose protocol, X11, has been frozen since 1987.
Shortly thereafter, font and character set gurus began to chime in.
Wait! It’s a standard Monotype Special Alphabet character!
Hold your horses! It’s an “X” in TeX’s mathbb font!
Hey, look! It’s Unicode character U+1D54F, “MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X”!
Since the new logo is an existing character in a variety of widely-used typefaces, one wonders how that may affect X’s ability to protect their logo. In the U.S., typefaces cannot be protected by copyright, as the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook explains:
Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. v. Ringer), but fonts can be protected by design patent and may be protected by copyright. The idea that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States has been black letter law since the introduction of 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e) in 1992.
The new logo is already shown in the header of the browser version of ex-Twitter.
Single characters have been registered as trademarks. Consider:
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87178708&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch
Perhaps it’s of no significance, but I recall Larry Wall saying something like “God, I hate X-Windows” which, of course, given his fundamentalist Christianity, is saying he hated it more than Hellfire.
If this Twitter thread from “John Bull” is to be believed, there is quite a bit more to Elon Musk’s history with and ambitions for X, then and now, than just changing the name. If this is the case, it may explain some of the millenarian comments about plans for X from Musk and Yaccarino in the last few days.
Notably, X Corp is a NV corporation not DE.
After reading the Twitter thread I linked to in comment #366 above, I had two brainstorms regarding Musk and Twitter.
His long-deferred ambition for X may explain why he was willing to pay US$ 44 billion for Twitter. That may seem grossly overvalued for a money-losing chat site, but if looked at as a pre-existing user base of more than half a billion users (including heaven knows how many inactive accounts and bots) and the stability conferred by the network effect of such a large base, making it difficult to launch a competitor, plus a prominent position in the top tier of social networking companies with the in-place infrastructure to support it, that may be a reasonable price to pay if your goal is to broaden the product and services line into, as Linda Yaccarino tweeted on 2023-07-23, “the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
So, if that’s where X is going, what’s the destination? Well, let’s call it WeChat/Weixin, but without the Chinese communism. Wikipedia describes it as follows:
WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.
Sounds a lot like Yaccarino’s description of the plans for X, doesn’t it?
One may, of course, dismiss Musk’s ambition to take on the entire rest of the mass market big tech and financial services players as hubristic foolishness, but then they laughed when he said he was going to take on all of the world’s biggest automobile manufacturers and every player in the commercial space launch business.
The opportunity out there is to build up an operating system around personal data that would facilitate an ecosystem of modular services on top of it (instead of the current ecosystem of data being locked up inside services, or even inaccessible to owners). Here’s a vision of this from a decade ago.
- As set forth in detail below, CCDH, on several occasions since at least March 2021, has intentionally sought and obtained unauthorized access to data sets regarding X that were provided by X Corp. to Runtime Collective Ltd., T/A Brandwatch (“Brandwatch”) pursuant to written agreements. Those data sets were and are accessible only via secure login credentials that Defendants (except for the third party who is included as a Doe Defendant and improperly shared its login credentials with CCDH) were never authorized to have. CCDH, in turn, and on at least two occasions after accessing that data without authorization, quoted the unlawfully accessed data incompletely and out of context to create unsubstantiated and incorrect assertions about the presence of hate speech on X.
- CCDH, as a registered user of the X service, also breached its agreement with X Corp., i.e., the Terms of Service (“ToS”), which expressly prohibit “scraping” without X’s “prior consent.” CCDH’s February 9, 2023 report admits to scraping X to obtain data for the report, in which CCDH uses its manufactured and inaccurate narrative to openly call for companies to not advertise on X, claiming they would otherwise be “bankrolling the spread of hate and disinformation on Twitter.”
I have renamed this topic “Twitter, Elon Musk, and 𝕏” to better reflect items discussed here, which have ranged far and wide from the original topic about Musk’s acquiring Twitter shares with the goal of a take-over. This will be the first in a series of renamings of vintage threads whose longevity has outlasted their original titles.
It’s on!
I’m not very excited by this. The novelty value is far outweighed by the civic actions these two titan$ take on behalf of liberty. Z has shown himself clearly by financing, let’s generously say - questionable vote harvesting in the 2020 election. M, by contrast, has at least said some things against censorship and has launched a possibly important lawsuit against purveyors of censorship justifying themselves as preventing so-called “hate speech”.
A better heavyweight match, IMHO, would be for him to take on the monopoly Visa, which crushes non-progressives financially. This behemoth and others have been de-banking (and closing credit card accounts) individuals and organizations for purely political reasons. As @CTLaw has pointed out previously and left un-prosecuted, only because those affected are uniquely conservatives. Such acts are already illegal on various bases and ought to be litigated as well under public accommodation law. This kind of financial warfare is as un-American as it gets and unfair by almost any legitimate standard. Such power in the hands of monopolies is an egregious evil, at least if one envisions a decent, civil society which can function financially and economically. Visa needs to be crushed. I am presently composing a post which will tell the story of how Visa tries, unscrupulously, to get out from under making good on its “rewards” (read water torture) programs. But that is a lesser and separate issue.
Want to bring back to your attention Elon’s earlier presentation to Ron Baron’s investor conference at the end of last year. His segment pretty much outlined most of what he’s done with Twitter → X
This was covered in John’s post from Nov 2022 Elon Musk at the Baron Capital Investment Conference
Vaught tweeted a letter from the social media site’s management saying that the 16-year-old account would have its handle replaced with a new one, offering “@musicfan,” “@music123,” or “@musicmusic.”
Twitter—which rebranded to ‘X’ in July—said in its email to Vaught: “The user handle associated with the account @Music will be affiliated with X Corp.” It isn’t the first time the newly rebranded company, under the control of tech billionaire Elon Musk, had seized a valuable Twitter name.
Just last week, a San Francisco-based photographer named Gene X Hwang had the handle “X” taken by Musk’s company, telling The Telegraph: “They just took it essentially—kinda what I thought might happen. They did send an email saying it is the property of ‘x’ essentially."
The company’s email to Vaught contained a similar tone: “We appreciate your loyalty and want to minimize any inconvenience this may cause,” the email stated. “At this time we will be changing this handle to @musicfan.”
Shouldn’t this be in the “Crazy Years” thread?
A few suggestions for the headline, courtesy of St. Chat, assuming the “fight” would take place at the Colosseum:
And my number 1 personal preference: Rome Ruckus of the Tech Titans