The Billionaire and the Anarchists
crimethinc.com
Tracing Twitter from its grassroots origins as a protest tool to Musk's acquisition—a history of the capitalist takeover of the internet in microcosm.
  • DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    This article touts Twitter as a tool of resistance, yet Jack Dorsey is still friends with Musk, he’s still heavily invested in Musk’s various companies, Dorsey definitely doesn’t seem like he gives a shit about anything but making more money with Apartheid Space Karen, just like Spez wishes he could.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
      9·
      1 year ago

      Jack Dorsey did not invent the idea behind Twitter, but rather took it from others he pretended to be friends with at the time.

    • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netOP
      6·
      1 year ago

      Strangely enough the article goes into that:

      But Twitter did not simply spring, fully formed like Athena, from the head of company co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, it was a modest refinement of a model already demonstrated by TXTmob, the SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protests at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

      Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, anarchist developers who worked alongside Dorsey at his previous company Odeo, helped refine TXTmob and later took the model with them into the conversations with Dorsey that gave rise to Twitter.

      If the unrelenting urgency of social media in general and Twitter in particular can be exhausting, that’s to be expected—the infrastructure of Twitter was originally designed for street communications during high-stakes mass mobilizations in which information must go out immediately, boiled down to its bare essentials. It’s not a coincidence that, despite its shortcomings, the platform has continued to be useful to street activists and conflict journalists.