Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[NoName 16351]

25 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Tesla can't cut prices again and again I suppose, but seems like their current market or the potential market for would-be buyers could be saturated.

are you saying that 5 US price cuts in 4 months and change is a bad thing?

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-cuts-prices-us-spur-demand-2023-04-07/

 

[Pig Bellmont 8717]

1 minute ago, NoName said:

are you saying that 5 US price cuts in 4 months and change is a bad thing?

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-cuts-prices-us-spur-demand-2023-04-07/

 

We’ve already been lectured how how Tesla’s business is booming in this thread…

[Leeroy Jenkins 2404]

17 hours ago, 'stache said:

I don't even know what "substack" is, buncha nerds in here. 

 

[Captain Ron 12876]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

So the Prius, while not technically an EV, but a hybrid, just hit 25 years old, so they came out with a new design that looks very nice.  This is the kind of stuff that Tesla should be doing (new designs) and it's the kind of stuff Tesla should be worried about (lot of overlap between the EV/hybrid crowd).

Tesla can't cut prices again and again I suppose, but seems like their current market or the potential market for would-be buyers could be saturated.

 

 

Let's not forget other cars too

GM made the EV1 from 96-03. People loved it but they discontinued it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

And the Chevy Volt seemed to be right in line with the Model S in terms of timeline. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt

 

[Chopper 17235]

I wouldn't have known substack was unveiling a twitter-like feature but for elmo's foot-in-mouth disease. Another brilliant business move by space karen.

[Captain Ron 12876]

3 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

In the interest of being fair and charitable, SpaceX Starlink DID launch the first LEO satellite internet network. They didn't invent the technology, but they do get credit for being the first company to actually attempt it.

Not quite. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar

 

[Chopper 17235]

Future biography: From genius to total putz in 90 days. The voyage of elon musk.

 

[Chopper 17235]

 

[Da Fino 2781]

3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

So the Prius, while not technically an EV, but a hybrid, just hit 25 years old, so they came out with a new design that looks very nice.  This is the kind of stuff that Tesla should be doing (new designs) and it's the kind of stuff Tesla should be worried about (lot of overlap between the EV/hybrid crowd).

Tesla can't cut prices again and again I suppose, but seems like their current market or the potential market for would-be buyers could be saturated.

 

That looks much better than the last generation. 

[Chooky 13307]

It's amusing that guys like Taibbi, among others, saw Musk as a beneficial ally and lifeline to further relevance. Musk discards his loyalty to others, and those formerly loyal to him, faster than he does employees.

I think the idea that anyone has ever done anything to deserve his loyalty actually offends him. Those are the people he's most eager to blast. He seems to despise those people the most. 

[texasdago 7573]

3 minutes ago, Chooky said:

It's amusing that guys like Taibbi, among others, saw Musk as a beneficial ally and lifeline to further relevance. Musk discards his loyalty to others, and those formerly loyal to him, faster than he does employees.

I think the idea that anyone has ever done anything to deserve his loyalty actually offends him. Those are the people he's most eager to blast. He seems to despise those people the most. 

Sounds oddly familiar... 

[Brian Fantana 6687]

25 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Not quite. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar

 

These are not the same thing. Iridium and Globalstar's networks serve satphones and basic low-speed comms. They are more analagous to old school cellular networks. Starlink's constellation is a pure high-speed data network, it's a very different configuration and they're the first to do it.

[atomheartbevo 89661]

1 hour ago, Da Fino said:

That looks much better than the last generation. 

Maybe Musk fired the Tesla designers, or brought them over to twitter.  With a fully EV car, based on years or EV production/research, seems like it should be much easier to design new models since they aren't constrained by internal combustion engines and exhaust, etc.

I'm really beginning to think that Musk designed the Cybertruck.  It looks like something a kid from the 1980s would have done, and he's showing the world he's reverted back to his 14 year-old self.

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

34 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Maybe Musk fired the Tesla designers, or brought them over to twitter.  With a fully EV car, based on years or EV production/research, seems like it should be much easier to design new models since they aren't constrained by internal combustion engines and exhaust, etc.

I'm really beginning to think that Musk designed the Cybertruck.  It looks like something a kid from the 1980s would have done, and he's showing the world he's reverted back to his 14 year-old self.

I thought this the moment they revealed the design 

[Ghost of LL 15531]

So now Twitter is in Japanese for me, which is an odd choice.

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

27 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

So now Twitter is in Japanese for me, which is an odd choice.

 

 

[texasdago 7573]

2 hours ago, Grade of D as in David said:

 

 

 

 

[bolverk 29671]

3 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

So now Twitter is in Japanese for me, which is an odd choice.

Last week, mine randomly changed to Spanish. Fortunately, I knew just barely enough to click around on some settings to get it to revert back to Inglés.

[atomheartbevo 89661]

4 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

So now Twitter is in Japanese for me, which is an odd choice.

36 minutes ago, bolverk said:

Last week, mine randomly changed to Spanish. Fortunately, I knew just barely enough to click around on some settings to get it to revert back to Inglés.

I wonder if it's a data center issue - I've had it happen to me recently, and I noticed the URL had changed either because of a data center issue, or it was serving it up from another country.  You should be able to remove the part of the URL pertinent to whatever language it's throwing at you, and it'll revert back to English.

[bolverk 29671]

4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I wonder if it's a data center issue - I've had it happen to me recently, and I noticed the URL had changed either because of a data center issue, or it was serving it up from another country.  You should be able to remove the part of the URL pertinent to whatever language it's throwing at you, and it'll revert back to English.

That makes sense.

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

His dog.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/12/elon-musk-twitter/

Quote

Nearly six months into his ownership of Twitter, Elon Musk says he’s been sleeping on a couch inside a seventh-floor library of the company he bought for $44 billion, which is being run by his dog.

The Twitter CEO — or rather, its leader (Musk said Twitter’s current CEO is actually Floki, his dog) — addressed a range of topics in a spontaneous interview Tuesday night on the site, and he unloaded on the interviewer over questions about the alleged increase in misinformation since he took over. Musk also addressed his frequent Twitter controversies, allegations of a family-owned emerald mine (which he declared false) and lessons learned from his first six months in charge of the website.

 

 

Quote

Twitter has been vastly transformed under Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla, as the world’s second-richest person has ushered in policies maximizing his view of “free speech” while laying off thousands of staffers, aggressively cutting costs and experimenting with little regard for whether his changes might break the site. Twitter has leaned into a subscription model under Musk, offering its signature blue “verified” check marks to anyone willing to pay $8, and eliminated many of the content moderation safeguards aimed at impersonators and those trafficking in misinformation.

 

 

Quote

But Musk hailed many of the changes he has made since buying the company in October and laying off more than two-thirds of the staff in the ensuing weeks. The layoffs, he said, were “not fun at all … painful.” Musk said Twitter is down to about 1,500 staffers, from more than 7,000. Musk also acknowledged problems, such as shutting down a Twitter data center in December, leading to troubles with the company’s servers.

 

Spoiler

“It was quite catastrophic,” Musk said, and Twitter rushed to restore it.

He touted Twitter’s open sourcing of its recommendation algorithm, the site’s emphasis on video and its resilience in the face of vast transformation. He said Twitter is breaking roughly even from a financial standpoint, advertisers were returning to the site, and Twitter usage and growth are satisfactory.

“Many have predicted Twitter will cease to function,” Musk said. “Their predictions have not come true. … We’re literally on Twitter now.”

The billionaire made the comments in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night over the company’s live audio feature, Twitter Spaces. In the interview, Musk said Twitter would tweak a new label it has added to accounts including NPR and the BBC referring to them as state-affiliated media — highlighting instead their reliance on public funding.

But Musk also contested that misinformation and hate speech were more prevalent on the site, after the journalist was unable to name a specific example of the phenomenon.

“You said you see more hateful content, but you can’t even name a single one,” Musk said, his tone growing agitated. “You just lied!”

The two continued in a back-and-forth.

“Give me one example! You literally can’t name one,” he said. “You literally said you experience more hateful content and then couldn’t name a single example, that’s absurd.”

The Washington Post reported last month that Twitter was amplifying hate speech in its “For You” page, the curated timeline where it recommends posts to users based on their interests. A Post analysis showed that accounts following those designated “extremist” or “extremist-associated” were subjected to hate-promoting tweets, including a tweet with a quote and portrait of Adolf Hitler.

The topic shifted to covid.

“Covid is no longer an issue,” Musk said.

As the interview went on, Musk — who appeared in a jovial mood — repeatedly made jokes, including innuendo about Twitter’s name and the idea of his dog running the company.

One of Musk’s most criticized moves came in December when Twitter adopted a policy banning the promotion of certain outside social media platforms. Musk, in response to fierce backlash, launched a poll on whether he should step down as CEO.

After users in the nonscientific Twitter poll declared he should, he said he had abided by that pledge (because his dog is in charge.)

“I did stand down,” he said. “I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.”

“I said I would appoint a new CEO, and I did, and it’s my dog,” he said later.

Musk faced renewed backlash this month after Twitter restricted engagement on tweets linking to the newsletter site Substack, after it announced a feature that resembled a Twitter clone in appearance.

Musk, in the interview Tuesday, also laid out his rules for avoiding Twitter controversies.

He said he probably shoudn’t tweet after 2 or 3 a.m. And he acknowledged the controversies his tweets have invited.

“Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times?” he asked. “Yeah. I need bullet-proof shoes at this point.”

Musk said Twitter had sought to turn one of its buildings, which is now vacant, into a homeless shelter but was turned down by the property manager of Twitter’s San Francisco office.

Meanwhile, Musk appeared to confirm a news report that Twitter was accumulating powerful computing hardware to pursue generative artificial intelligence, the field that has developed large language models such as ChatGPT.

Musk, who also banned a Twitter account tracking his private jet during a spate of controversies in December, denied using Twitter’s platform to make decisions benefiting himself.

He reserved some of his harshest criticism for those who predicted Twitter’s demise.

Ultimately, he said, “they were wrong.”

 

 

[Captain Ron 12876]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

His dog.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/12/elon-musk-twitter/

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

“It was quite catastrophic,” Musk said, and Twitter rushed to restore it.

He touted Twitter’s open sourcing of its recommendation algorithm, the site’s emphasis on video and its resilience in the face of vast transformation. He said Twitter is breaking roughly even from a financial standpoint, advertisers were returning to the site, and Twitter usage and growth are satisfactory.

“Many have predicted Twitter will cease to function,” Musk said. “Their predictions have not come true. … We’re literally on Twitter now.”

The billionaire made the comments in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night over the company’s live audio feature, Twitter Spaces. In the interview, Musk said Twitter would tweak a new label it has added to accounts including NPR and the BBC referring to them as state-affiliated media — highlighting instead their reliance on public funding.

But Musk also contested that misinformation and hate speech were more prevalent on the site, after the journalist was unable to name a specific example of the phenomenon.

“You said you see more hateful content, but you can’t even name a single one,” Musk said, his tone growing agitated. “You just lied!”

The two continued in a back-and-forth.

“Give me one example! You literally can’t name one,” he said. “You literally said you experience more hateful content and then couldn’t name a single example, that’s absurd.”

The Washington Post reported last month that Twitter was amplifying hate speech in its “For You” page, the curated timeline where it recommends posts to users based on their interests. A Post analysis showed that accounts following those designated “extremist” or “extremist-associated” were subjected to hate-promoting tweets, including a tweet with a quote and portrait of Adolf Hitler.

The topic shifted to covid.

“Covid is no longer an issue,” Musk said.

As the interview went on, Musk — who appeared in a jovial mood — repeatedly made jokes, including innuendo about Twitter’s name and the idea of his dog running the company.

One of Musk’s most criticized moves came in December when Twitter adopted a policy banning the promotion of certain outside social media platforms. Musk, in response to fierce backlash, launched a poll on whether he should step down as CEO.

After users in the nonscientific Twitter poll declared he should, he said he had abided by that pledge (because his dog is in charge.)

“I did stand down,” he said. “I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.”

“I said I would appoint a new CEO, and I did, and it’s my dog,” he said later.

Musk faced renewed backlash this month after Twitter restricted engagement on tweets linking to the newsletter site Substack, after it announced a feature that resembled a Twitter clone in appearance.

Musk, in the interview Tuesday, also laid out his rules for avoiding Twitter controversies.

He said he probably shoudn’t tweet after 2 or 3 a.m. And he acknowledged the controversies his tweets have invited.

“Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times?” he asked. “Yeah. I need bullet-proof shoes at this point.”

Musk said Twitter had sought to turn one of its buildings, which is now vacant, into a homeless shelter but was turned down by the property manager of Twitter’s San Francisco office.

Meanwhile, Musk appeared to confirm a news report that Twitter was accumulating powerful computing hardware to pursue generative artificial intelligence, the field that has developed large language models such as ChatGPT.

Musk, who also banned a Twitter account tracking his private jet during a spate of controversies in December, denied using Twitter’s platform to make decisions benefiting himself.

He reserved some of his harshest criticism for those who predicted Twitter’s demise.

Ultimately, he said, “they were wrong.”

 

 

The poop emoji is now making more and more sense.

[trza-hawk 269]

The twitter rival/copycat in India is called Koo, and it has more of a pro-Modi community model, and there is some snappy name for the pro-Modi online followers like Bakhti Boys or something I can't remember.

[Captain Ron 12876]

NPR just told Musk Peace out

 

[Brisketexan 105134]

9 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

NPR just told Musk Peace out

 

Good.  Let it become an echo chamber of Catturd2 and such.  In short, Truth Social  - the model for how to have a jillion dollar social media company, right?

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

Who's a better social media CEO? Elon or Devin Nunes?

[Brisketexan 105134]

2 minutes ago, Grade of D as in David said:

Who's a better social media CEO? Elon or Devin Nunes?

Neither.  The best social media CEO would be....

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

1 minute ago, Grade of D as in David said:

Who's a better social media CEO? Elon or Devin Nunes?

Right now-this minute?  Gotta go with Devin, simply because he hasn't lit fire to the same sized pile of money that Elon has.  Oh, and Elon started with a functioning product, where Devin had to oversee something from the ground up.

Don't get me wrong, Devin is over his skis here too, but this is a pretty low bar that he had to cross over in order to best Elon.

 

 

[NoName 16351]

19 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Right now-this minute?  Gotta go with Devin, simply because he hasn't lit fire to the same sized pile of money that Elon has.  Oh, and Elon started with a functioning product, where Devin had to oversee something from the ground up.

Don't get me wrong, Devin is over his skis here too, but this is a pretty low bar that he had to cross over in order to best Elon.

 

 

didn't they just fork Mastadon?

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

6 minutes ago, NoName said:

didn't they just fork Mastadon?

 

Yeah it's open source, but they had to build out all the infrastructure for whatever Truth is.  They did a half-assed job, which anything tied to Trump will be half-assed.

Still!  They started with mostly nothing, compared to Elon who was handed the keys to something Truth aspired to be.  Turns out Elon aspired for Twitter to become what Truth is.

 

 

 

Edited April 12, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

[royiv 9310]

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

NPR just told Musk Peace out

 

Reading the replies and it looks like Elon's goal of turning Twitter into Truth is right on track.

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Neither.  The best social media CEO would be....

 

Well, I'll be damned.   Speaking of Dril:

 

https://www.theringer.com/tech/2023/4/12/23673003/dril-twitter-interview-profile-identity

 

Quote

Dril is a real person, or so I had been told. Sitting in the House of Pies in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I was waiting for him to join me in a booth—but I didn’t know who was actually going to show up.

It was the quiet midafternoon hours at the diner, which is a relic of when the area was less upscale, and it still partially attracts an off-key clientele of misfits and bozos, some of whom are alone and in no hurry to leave. (As I sat, an older man in oversized overalls walked by carrying a seat cushion; it was unclear whether he worked there.) This venue was the most readily available approximation of Dril’s world that I could think of.

 

Quote

While I waited, I pulled up Dril’s Twitter account and looked at a recent post: “The fact is,” he wrote, “people arent doing a good job wiping their ass these days. And its attracting all manner of stray dogs and coyotes to our towns.” The likes were ticking up and up in real time as they moved toward their eventual zenith of almost 17,000. By Dril standards, this wasn’t even a particularly popular—or deranged—post.

 

Quote

With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet. Active since 2008, the Dril account—simultaneously known by the profile name “Wint”—with its grainy Jack Nicholson avatar, has been responsible for countless viral posts, just as beloved for the vivid scenes they induce as for the baffling grammatical and spelling errors they contain. Many of his tweets have become part of the permanent online lexicon: “‘im not owned! im not owned!!’, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob”; “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’”; “i am selling six beautfiul, extremely ill, white horses. they no longer recognize me as their father, and are the Burden of my life.”

 

Spoiler

To most people, he is nothing; show the unaffiliated some of his posts, and they will likely just generate confusion and possibly anguish. (“Uh, so, I think I’ll stick with gardening. Where bull poop helps good things grow, and the tweets come from birds, not nitwits,” read one of many upset people in the comment section of a recent Washington Post feature about Dril, inadvertently adopting their own Dril-esque cadence in the process.) But to a large sect of the Very Online, he is king—the undisputed poet laureate of shitposting, the architect of a satire so effective that it has become impossible to tell when Dril stopped mocking the way people speak online and when we, instead, started speaking like Dril online.

For almost 10 years, he was entirely anonymous. Like a decent number of the people in the so-called “Weird Twitter” scene that Dril is still vaguely a part of, he doesn’t put his real name on the account—but as time has gone on and his popularity has grown, it’s become nothing short of miraculous that he’s kept up the mystery. He’s a pyramid-obsessed phantom. He’s banky. Still, over the years, some of his digital curtain has begun to part—largely spurred by his being doxxed in 2017, when his identity was revealed to supposedly be that of a man named Paul.

Around the same time, Dril started a Patreon, released a book, Dril Official “Mr. Ten Years” Anniversary Collection, and had an Adult Swim television show, TruthPoint—a surrealist Infowars parody in which he manifested behind a cheap old man mask and bantered with self-professed “manic pixie stream boy” cohost Derek Estevez-Olsen. Dril also began doing an interview here and there, but never anything substantial, and always in character. I reached out to him via email, and when he replied, the name attached to the account was “paul d.” But I still wasn’t totally sure that he wouldn’t walk into House of Pies with his mask on, throw a plate against a wall, and then walk out.

“I’m Paul,” he said, once he found me and after I began by asking whom, exactly, I could say I was speaking to.

Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity.

He opted to stick with water—not a terrible decision at the House of Pies, but also, I worried, a choice that theoretically allowed him a quick exit at any point. For a while, I got the sense that he might have been deciding how much to reveal to me in real time, based on how the conversation went. But one thing he was clear about from the beginning: It was all right to end this game of living in the digital shadows.

“I mean, my name is already out there,” he said, acknowledging the fact that, after the doxxing, he had at separate points confirmed his name on both Twitter and Reddit. “It’s in my Wikipedia article. Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”

In some sense, anonymity has served a creative purpose. “Practically, it’s a good tool,” Estevez-Olsen told me later in a phone interview, “because when you make a post, you don’t want to be like, ‘From Paul Dochney, I fuck flags’ or whatever. You want to have some distance from it.” (He would know: “Estevez-Olsen” is itself a TruthPoint stage name that he asked me to use for reasons of privacy.)

But the secrecy has also lingered because of the types of personalities Dril naturally attracts to his orbit. “Most people are normal,” Dochney explained. “But there’s, like, three or four weirdos who just ruin it for everyone.” Jon Hendren, a fellow titan of Weird Twitter who is known by his subtle handle, @fart, told me that he had seen some disturbing messages people had sent Dochney in the past—that he wasn’t being paranoid or dramatic. “It’s gotta be kind of surreal,” Hendren said. “And it’s got to be kind of difficult to live with.”

 

Dril may be a phantom, but Dochney, like the rest of us, did come from somewhere. He was raised in New Jersey in a working-class family, he explained to me; his father worked as a FedEx manager “for the longest time,” and his mother was a homemaker who also chased down side jobs. “I was very into the internet from a very early age,” Dochney said, nursing his cup of water. “I was kind of in the background most of the time, just daydreaming about video games and stuff like that. I mean, I had a few friends. I wasn’t a total outcast or a weirdo. But I was on the quiet side.”

After dropping out after his first attempt at college, Dochney eventually gave it another shot at Wilmington University in Delaware—“the cheapest college I could find that would still give me a valid bachelor’s degree,” he said. There, he studied media design: “Like, web design and HTML and the Adobe Suite and all that stuff,” he said. “Graphics.”

In essence, the character of Dril was born on Something Awful, an outsider comedy website that had particularly popular message boards and file-sharing forums in the 2000s. It was where many—if not most—of the essential Weird Twitter personalities came from, and where some, like Hendren, were (poorly) paid moderators or contributors. “Effort was looked down upon for a long time,” said Hendren, who added that he apparently once banned Dochney from one of the forums (although he is friendly with him these days). “And so if you’re just naturally funny, and if you’re just naturally saying good things, then you did fine there.”

Cynicism and brashness defined the Something Awful aesthetic. Its founder, Richard Kyanka, explained to Vice in 2017 that part of his goal with the site was to produce “parodies of wonks who were saying the internet was the future without saying, ‘Well there could be a possible downside to the internet.’” He went on, “Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how shitty the internet could also be.”

Dochney was a regular in the infamous Fuck You and Die forum, and he said that he mostly posted artwork. (“They had this, like, flag system,” he remembered, “where you could post these little images of, like, cartoons or, like, asses that are shitting.”) At that time, Dochney went by “gigantic drill” on the site, a name he came up with when he was still a teenager. “If there was some inspiration behind it, I’ve forgotten it by now,” he said.

About two years after Twitter was founded in 2006, a friend told him he should sign up and join the growing group of Something Awful affiliates who were taking advantage of what was then a novelty: a mobile-friendly way to post. The handle “@drill” with two l’s was taken, so “@dril” it was. Dochney’s first post, which has since gone on to have an inexplicable life of its own, was partially a response to a friend who had told him to sign up: “no.”

“This is in 2008,” Dochney said, “when it was brand new, and everyone was just posting bullshit like, ‘Oh, this is what I had for lunch.’ It was just, like, tech guys posting inane details about their lives. I posted ‘no’ because I didn’t care for it at the time. I still really don’t care for it.”

Dochney posts often, and with seeming abandon. “For the Pleasure of the Fans,” he recently released four versions of a book compiling 10,000 of his “finest” posts, the equivalent of roughly two posts per day during the 14 years of time covered. (The font in these books is beyond minuscule, and getting past the line spacing to actually read the tweets is a high-wire act; the format is its own joke.) “I just post whatever bullshit I’m thinking,” Dochney explained of the Dril Process. “I kind of have to get into, like, the writing mood. But there’s no ritual or anything. Usually when I’m driving or I’m in the shower, I’ll come up with some sort of idea.”

The character of Dril is fluid, but taken as a whole, the blurry image starts to come into focus: It’s that of an easily agitated, overly confident, wildly crass, IBS-ridden middle-aged man thrashing away on a computer—probably a PC. He speaks in outlandish non sequiturs and engages with brands with unreasonable love and hate in equal measure. He is the dark, democratic promise of the internet—that anyone can use it to broadcast their opinions at any time—fulfilled. “I just go back to how specific and unique it is,” comedian and actor David Cross told me. “There’s nobody quite like him, and it perfectly encapsulates that Twitter dialogue.”

When I asked Dochney whether the type of person he’s satirizing is more common now or merely more visible, he said, “I think there’s just so many of those minds out there that we can only see because of the internet. In the 1920s or whatever, there were just as many dumb, crazy people who only met, like, four people in their entire life, and just died in obscurity.” He noted that he appreciates that the site “records this interesting snapshot of all the insane people who exist in the background and just post.” It was one of the only moments when he had anything remotely complimentary to say about Twitter.

 

Since Dochney moved to L.A. a few years ago, which he did to hopefully “get a job entertaining in some capacity,” he has survived mainly on his various Dril-based incomes. He told me he’s making a decent living but clarified that he probably makes “as much money as a Kmart manager or something.” (His Patreon, which is now focused on funding the development of a video game and is available in “disgusting” and “Fucked” tiers, is currently taking in $1,468 a month from roughly 500 subscribers.)

There is clearly a market for what Dochney does, but tapping into it hasn’t been the easiest process. He recalled talking to a publisher about potentially putting out his book The Get Rich and Become God Method, which is a textbook-sized survey of his art and humor and also quite literally a step-by-step guide to getting rich and becoming God. “I sent them the PDF,” he said, “and I did not get a response from them. I can imagine that, like, they turned to Page 11 and saw a Ku Klux Klan member with his blue penis sticking out, and just said, ‘No, thank you. I can’t market this for the life of me.’” (The page being referenced is titled “Thoughts of My Son,” and it features said blue, seminude Ku Klux Klan member being defended by his father: “I ask that you PLEASE look BEYOND his Crude Visage before you lay Judgement upon this Man,” the father pleads. “AND read some of his Posts.”) Like his other books, Method was eventually self-released.

The arrival of TruthPoint on Adult Swim was an unexpected moment in Dochney’s career, not just because it marked his transition from writer to performer—something he said he had never dabbled in before—but also because of the corporate legitimacy of it. Still, TruthPoint was one of the more bizarre programs I have ever watched in any capacity, let alone on a channel owned by Warner Bros. (The second episode, which is almost an hour long, at one point features Estevez-Olsen reading a passage from the novelization of the 2001 movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, which is itself an adaptation of the video game franchise of the same name; Dril’s review of the book was “This is a thriller from beginning to end, folks.”) The show had promise, but the timing was bad; the pandemic forced them to do episodes over video calls, and new episodes stopped airing in fall 2020.

Dochney and Estevez-Olsen are working to keep the TruthPoint enterprise alive—ideally by rebooting it in a more sketch-oriented format, they said. (Estevez-Olsen cited Chris Morris’s ’90s news parody show, Brass Eye, as a partial model.) But part of the difficulty is communicating just what the show is—who, exactly, they are.

“We met with this agent from a big [agency]. We were showing him the pitch decks we had put together that we worked hard on,” Estevez-Olsen said. “He was just like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I can do anything for you. Because it’s almost like you’re saying you’re not comedians, really, you’re not writers—we can’t, like, put you on a sitcom as a writing team.’ I think in that moment, I felt pretty stupid. I felt like an outsider artist, and we’re, like, dragging in our misshapen barrels that we were painting in the backyard and being like, ‘You should put this in a museum.’”

In the diner, I asked Dochney whether he thought of himself as a writer, and he said, “I kind of consider myself a lot of things. I do art and writing. But I’d rather be called a writer than a social media influencer or something like that. That is vile to me.”

Defining and understanding how social media works in the artistic realm is still a new field. It is also one that will likely be far more important in the grand scheme of things than many would like to imagine. “This is the world young artists and art students live in,” Aaron Betsky, a writer and critic specializing in art and design, noted in a 2014 New Yorker feature about Horse_ebooks, a bot-imitating piece of Twitter art. “The way we represent our world is more and more digitally based and networked. If art is in any way reflecting our world, it will have to adopt and adapt these techniques and technologies.”

Mark Sample, professor and chair of digital studies at Davidson College, told me that he believes Dril might be understood within the developing field of netprov (as in internet improvisation). Not altogether unrelated to electronic literature, or net art as a whole, netprov is, Sample explained, “the idea of using a social media platform as a kind of improvisational space in which the people on the other side aren’t really sure, are they seeing something that’s really sincere and earnest, or are they watching a performance?” I started to imagine Dril as the Ornette Coleman of the internet, but Sample said he likens it in some way to a living statue street performer “who’s just always doing it, whether there’s even a crowd around or not.”

Darcie Wilder, writer of the tweet-inspired 2017 novel literally show me a healthy person, sees something that’s similar to performance art: “It’s not just the jokes he’s doing—it’s the performance and the actual whole thing,” she told me.

Perhaps no artist has done more to push forward the conversation about how social media can exist in the artistic realm than Jacob Bakkila, who ran Horse_ebooks as part of a larger artistic collaboration with Thomas Bender. The Horse_ebooks project was deliberately ended in 2013—“No one wants to work on a painting forever,” Bakkila said at the time—and Bakkila, who now works in advertising in addition to his ongoing work as a multimedia artist, spoke thoughtfully to me over video call about the promise of art in the digital landscape. But of anyone I talked to, he was the most concerned about the risk of overintellectualizing Dril’s act—of being the type of person who, in his analogy, would study photosynthesis but forget to watch “the leaves change color.”

“He’s a poster,” Bakkila said. “And I think that there’s a great beauty to that because it’s also the native language of the internet. … It’s what the internet is designed to do, is to let you post on it. And it goes deeper—in that sense, it’s more profound than comedy, although obviously he’s very funny. And it’s more profound than art, although obviously he’s artistic. But I think first and foremost, he’s a poster. And he’s the best one we have.”

 

Often, when people talk about Dril, they use him as a vehicle to talk about Twitter itself—its initial promise, its inevitable demise. The approach is something like using Andy Kaufman to talk about Saturday Night Live; it’s not wrong, exactly, but it is a missed opportunity for something more specific, and more interesting, at any rate. There is plenty to learn about Twitter through Dril, but less to learn about Dril through Twitter.

Dochney described his popularity on the site as “incidental” and his association with it more as a millstone than a gift. “I do find a lot of aspects of Twitter very disgusting,” he said. “It would not be my first choice of websites to get popular on, but that’s just the way it goes. And I got to work with that.” (Twitter, for what it’s worth, seems to value Dril’s presence, as he is reportedly one of about 35 elite users, along with the likes of LeBron James and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, currently being “boosted” on the site.)

Posting, in its various forms and locations, is a skill, and Dochney knows how to recognize it as well as anybody. Donald Trump, he noted, is “a very good poster”—a skill that is likely bolstered by the fact that he’s also “legitimately probably nuts, a little bit.” (“Sometimes,” Dochney did add, however, “being mentally ill makes you a worse poster.”) As for memes, one of the primary forms of posting, Dochney doesn’t “respect” them: “I think memes are just jokes you stole, basically,” he said. “I like making shit.”

To my eye, Dochney hasn’t lost a step in his second decade of posting as Dril, and more than that, some of his best posts have been in the last year. But the criticisms and half-serious conspiracy theories are constant. One that Dochney is particularly irritated by is the “you didn’t used to be topical” line: “I was always a product of what was going on around me,” he said, exasperated. “So it’s kind of weird when people start accusing me of, like, ‘Oh, you sold your account to Waffle House, and now you’re posting differently,’ or some bullshit like that.” If anything, Dochney added, he believes he’s been “doing the same shtick almost to a fault, really.”

When TruthPoint was first announced in 2019, there was enough of a cynical reaction from some of Dril’s followers that Darcie Wilder addressed it in an essay for The Outline (a platform that, notably, is now dead): “Twitter and Hollywood are obviously vastly different ecosystems,” she wrote, “but as the time we spend staring into a screen becomes split between traditional entertainment products and crowdsourced online content presented by tech platforms, their value becomes intertwined. But only one of these industries pays its writers.”

“Neither one of us really had in our heart of hearts,” Estevez-Olsen told me, “that we were going to write 140-character, pithy, little, funny, cute things for the rest of our lives. Paul wanted to—like me—write books, make TV shows, do whatever you can to build a world and express all of that.” The way Dochney put it, posting, for him, is “kind of like going to the bathroom, really—just putting something out there.” He seemed a little worn out by the idea of being an old man firing up Twitter. “Posting is not something you want to do forever,” he said.

Contrary to the nature of his comedy—pitch black, often finding a deceptively amusing way to channel some of the most disturbing inclinations that society has—Dochney does not identify as a nihilistic person. The darkness of the internet, he believes, is an illusion that comes from when “you’re on Twitter, and you’re just exposed to the worst of it, mainlined 24/7,” he said. “I don’t want to be like one of those guys, like, ‘You know, war is not so bad if you look at the positive stuff.’ But it’s not 100 percent hopeless, I’d say.”

This surprised me. If there’s one accent in the posting language that could be arguably sourced to Dril, it’s the disaffected irony so many of us have adopted online—the way we seem increasingly allergic to earnestness and blanketed in a wisecracking despair. I told him his answer was pretty starkly different from the image I had of Dril in my head: sweating, drooling, grinning maniacally, on the verge of a heart attack.

“If I wasn’t relatively happy with my life, maybe I could have been that guy,” he said. “Maybe if my posts never took off and I was still working in a mail room at the age of almost 40, I would be just as angry, and posting about my ass and balls with all sincerity.”

 

In January, I went to see TruthPoint Cataclysm, a live reincarnation of the TruthPoint show, which functioned as the first substantial time that Dochney had made a public appearance as Dril. The performance was at the Elysian Theater in the freeway-adjacent stretch of L.A.’s Frogtown, and tickets for the 135-seat venue were sold out. Inside, however, there were some empty seats, mostly in the front, which was perhaps a sign of an instinctive avoidance of a splash zone that did, actually, become a factor later on.

Presented in 12D—“10 times more than a normal 2D experience,” according to Estevez-Olsen—the show’s topic was gambling, with Dril and Estevez-Olsen engaging in a variety of salient debates about best practices when betting money, whether in the casino or with crypto or what have you. Toward the end of the show, there was a raffle to give away a copy of a small book that Dochney had supposedly written called How to Cheat at Casino Games by Being a Bitch. In a fit of fury, he tore one of the copies of this book up, and Estevez-Olsen threw the pages into the audience.

On my way out, I made off with a few torn sheets, which I was later amused to find consisted of semi-coherent chapters—filled with actual jokes. (“If you want to make any decent money at the track, there’s one thing you must remember,” the section on horse racing reads. “You’ve got to get ‘WET’, which stands for ‘Win Every Time.’”) Dochney had sat down and written all this out and then had it printed, presumably just for the bit—or for his own personal satisfaction, or both.

The whole event—from the in-person nature of it to the physical prop book—felt very distant from anything I might experience while aimlessly scrolling around on my phone. Still, despite his live comedy sets with Estevez-Olsen and his gigs hosting movie screenings, Twitter remains at the forefront of everything when we talk about Dril. And it most likely will until the platform is out of our lives.

“If people find out about who he is in real life, and then they suddenly don’t like the stuff anymore, that’s just silly. If you like what he’s written, you like it, and that’s all there is to it.” —Derek Estevez-Olsen

“I think it’s getting further away from, like, whatever cool thing it was,” said Wilder, who told me she used to think Twitter was its own art but these days finds that belief “embarrassing.” “Now it’s obviously just, like, data mining and advertising. … Dril is also very different from that. Like, those things don’t really apply to his feed. It’s really weird that he’s still so successful.”

Late last year, as Twitter users worried about the future of the platform amid new CEO Elon Musk’s takeover, the thought of losing Dril prompted at least one user to catalog every Dril tweet like he was grabbing the family pets and photo albums from a burning home. But Dochney wondered whether Twitter’s demise could potentially force him to “grow in ways I never thought possible.” He also considered the notion that it might destroy his career entirely. Either way, he decided, “You gotta commend Elon for doing everything in his power to wipe this nuisance website off the face of the earth.” (Add swapping Twitter’s blue bird logo for Doge last week to Musk’s long list of screwups.)

Regardless of Twitter’s fate, one development that’s guaranteed in the immediate future is that relinquishing pure anonymity will change things for Dochney, at least to some degree. If his fans were replying with “don’t do this” and “this account is ruined now” when he posted his name a few years ago, how they’d respond to a gesture far more forthright remains to be seen.

“They want it to be, like, an insane guy who lives in the woods or something,” said Estevez-Olsen. “Or they want it to be just a blurry man. But yeah, it’s a guy named Paul. He’s, like, fairly normal. … I feel like if people find out about who he is in real life, and then they suddenly don’t like the stuff anymore, that’s just silly. If you like what he’s written, you like it, and that’s all there is to it.”

David Cross brought up when Bobcat Goldthwait decided to stop performing in his outlandish voice, even though it was what the comedian was initially known for. “At some point, he was like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Cross said. “I mean, it’s Bob Dylan going electric.”

One way I’ve processed the idea of Dochney’s story undergoing a sea change is to remind myself that he is, by nature, a troll. And more than that, he’s a troll who trolls trolls. The most disappointing thing Dochney could become is predictable, even in something as outlandish as perpetual namelessness. I’m glad he didn’t walk into the House of Pies and throw a plate against the wall. But part of the fun is that I thought there was a chance he might do it anyway.

 

Before meeting up with Dochney, I wrote down a list of artists and art that I thought he might have some lineage from, and late in our conversation, I began rattling them off to see whether he felt any attachment. I wanted to attempt to understand Dochney within the context of the history of comedy.

Looney Tunes? “I was more of a Ren & Stimpy child,” he said. Kurt Vonnegut? “Pretty good.” Jack Handey? “I really liked that.” A Confederacy of Dunces? “I thought it was funny. I thought it was kind of ahead of its time. … [Ignatius J. Reilly] was, like, the first internet nerd before the internet even existed.” Marcel Duchamp—the, uh, “urinal guy,” I stammered. “I don’t know if I can respect a man who you refer to as ‘the urinal guy,’” he replied.

Dochney described himself as being “overexposed” to comedy these days and didn’t appear to be too enamored of the mainstream comedy scene in general. But there was one moment when he noticeably brightened up about the subject of comedy he was a fan of—and that was when he was talking about posts that he thought were categorically funnier than his. The Dril page often retweets arcane mutterings from accounts with essentially no followers, and Dochney was explaining one way he sometimes navigates Twitter to locate these lonely crevices of social media: Think of something, and spell it hilariously wrong.

The other day, he said, he took “Willy Wonka” and spelled it “Welly Wonka,” and he found a bunch of posts from “the dumbest people ever” talking about the characters from Roald Dahl’s books. He also found what appeared to be an elementary school classroom that was “taking place on Twitter for some reason.” The class was discussing Wonka, and the teacher had prompted the students to choose three words that they would use to describe the Oompa Loompas in some way. “The responses were some of the funniest shit I’ve probably ever seen,” he said. “There was one that was, like, ‘small, clown, smart.’ The other one was, like, ‘short, dumb, unfunny.’”

I told him that it felt like a demonstration of the fact that, ultimately, there’s nobody funnier than someone who’s not trying to be in the first place.

“It’s very sad for all these professional comedians that there’s something there that they can never grasp,” he said. “And I guess me, too, in a way.”

 

[Pig Bellmont 8717]

Holy longcat

[HamsterHookah 112]

SpaceX will launch Kenya’s first operational satellite into orbit this week, providing agricultural data to support food security. The satellite was developed by engineers from the Kenya Space Agency.

[The Royal We 3072]

[Brisketexan 105134]

28 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

SpaceX will launch Kenya’s first operational satellite into orbit this week, providing agricultural data to support food security. The satellite was developed by engineers from the Kenya Space Agency.

I also guarantee that the worst, least competent engineer at the KSA is 10X the "technical genius" the Elon is.

[HamsterHookah 112]

20 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I also guarantee that the worst, least competent engineer at the KSA is 10X the "technical genius" the Elon is.

prob.

Hey you'll get a kick out of the Elon answers from his interview, paraphrased:

On why he bought Twitter: Musk admitted that he went ahead with the $44 billion acquisition because he believed he would lose his legal case to try and back out of it. Buying Twitter has come with “emotional strain,” he added, saying running it had been “painful.” But he said he still thought buying it was the right thing to do.

On profitability: Since buying Twitter six months ago, Musk has slashed staff and made big changes to the platform — including an $8 monthly blue-check subscription — to try to reverse losses. (The slimmed-down Twitter has experienced a series of outages and user unrest, but he largely blew off those problems as glitches.) Musk reiterated that Twitter was on a path to be cash-flow positive this quarter (without giving evidence) and claimed advertisers were returning to the platform.

Head count: There are 1,500 Twitter staffers on payroll, down from “just under 8,000” when he took over, Musk said. He defended the mass layoffs, saying the company was four months from going bankrupt and “drastic action” was needed. But he added that it was “not fun at all” to fire people, and admitted that not everyone had been told in person: “It’s not possible to talk with that many people face to face.”

On bots, disinformation and mainstream media: Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist, pushed back hard on the BBC’s assertions that there had been more hate speech on the platform since he took over. He said it was his mission to make Twitter as accurate as possible — by, for example, removing automated accounts — but he added that “no system is going to be perfect.” He also returned to a favorite punching bag: the mainstream media, which, he complained, “is able to trash me on a regular basis.”

On blue checks: With advertising revenue shrinking, Musk is going all in on subscriptions. He says the blue checks that were once given to celebrities, influencers and journalists to verify their accounts will be phased out by next week, after the company missed an earlier deadline.

But he also grumbled that big media companies were reluctant to pay for blue checks. “It’s a small amount of money, so I don’t know what their problem is,” he said.

On who succeeds him as C.E.O.: Musk said in December that he would abide by the results of a Twitter user poll and step down from running the company. When pressed on that promise, he joked that his dog was in charge. But his jovial mood vanished when he was asked about running the business. He said that the workload meant he sometimes sleeps on a couch at Twitter headquarters. (Another regret: When asked about his sometimes controversial tweets, he said, “I think I should not tweet after 3 a.m.”)

[NoName 16351]

41 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

On blue checks: With advertising revenue shrinking, Musk is going all in on subscriptions. He says the blue checks that were once given to celebrities, influencers and journalists to verify their accounts will be phased out by next week, after the company missed an earlier deadline.

But he also grumbled that big media companies were reluctant to pay for blue checks. “It’s a small amount of money, so I don’t know what their problem is,” he said.

exactly. it's a small amount of money, so i don't know what their (Twitter's) problem is.

[royiv 9310]

4 minutes ago, NoName said:

exactly. it's a small amount of money, so i don't know what their (Twitter's) problem is.

Elon is really bad at basic math.

Edited April 12, 2023 by royiv
Or it's proof that his dog really is running the place.

[atomheartbevo 89661]

46 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

But he also grumbled that big media companies were reluctant to pay for blue checks. “It’s a small amount of money, so I don’t know what their problem is,” he said.

Holy shit he's fucking stupid, he still doesn't get that these companies and people like Lebron James are giving him content for free, that by making it purchasable by anybody with a credit card he's removed the point of it, and he still doesn't understand that they are the product, not the customer.

This is fucking amazing how astoundingly stupid he is when it comes to the business model.

[HamsterHookah 112]

I wonder if this opens the door for Artifact, a relatively unknown social media product that just launched, by the founders of Instagram. They unrolled a new feature this week that has shades of twitter feed to it.

https://gizmodo.com/instagram-founders-artifact-reputation-scores-comments-1850323907

Edited April 12, 2023 by HamsterHookah

[Captain Ron 12876]

2 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

On why he bought Twitter: Musk admitted that he went ahead with the $44 billion acquisition because he believed he would lose his legal case to try and back out of it. Buying Twitter has come with “emotional strain,” he added, saying running it had been “painful.” But he said he still thought buying it was the right thing to do.

 

[Brisketexan 105134]

16 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

 

Being a raving psychopath has resulted in a reaction that causes "emotional strain" and is "painful."  Gee, Elon, if only there was SOMETHING that you could do so you wouldn't elicit such a reaction.  I wonder what it could be....

[atomheartbevo 89661]

Failing really hard, really publicly would probably benefit Elon a great deal - him being booted from PayPal leadership/replaced by Peter Thiel when Musk went on his honeymoon didn't teach him anything, nor did his being told "no" when he tried to take over the ChatGPT stuff.

Or he'll just double down and post more memes.

Unfortunately him being taught a harsh and expensive lesson will hurt a lot of other people and will hurt an important platform.

[atomheartbevo 89661]

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

Being a raving psychopath has resulted in a reaction that causes "emotional strain" and is "painful."  Gee, Elon, if only there was SOMETHING that you could do so you wouldn't elicit such a reaction.  I wonder what it could be....

Appointing somebody else to run twitter and get it back on track and get advertisers back would be admitting that he's not competent enough to run twitter.

He will never do it.

[Brisketexan 105134]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

Or he'll just double down and post more memes.

Oh shit... NOT THAT!  HIS MEME GAME IS STRONG!

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

Unfortunately him being taught a harsh and expensive lesson will hurt a lot of other people and will hurt an important platform.

That ship has already sailed.  Kind of like the Titanic was doomed from the second it hit the iceberg.  It just takes time for complex systems to completely collapse.

[Goredho 17405]

On 4/11/2023 at 8:03 AM, atomheartbevo said:

So he uses Wikipedia to personally determine which news organizations should get the government funded label or whatever.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-wikipedia-government-funded-media-label-npr-1850322323

This is what the world's richest or second richest man is sitting around doing - reading fucking wikipedia and ordering changes based on what he's read.

If it is impossible for NPR to provide unbiased news because they accept 1% of their yearly operating budget (~$3 million) from the United States government, how can Twitter provide an unbiased social media platform given $1.89 billion of Elon's purchase price was provided by Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) & the private office of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal -- giving them the 2nd largest ownership stake in the company?

They had their Arab Spring.  We're having our Redneck Fall.  Both promoted and organized largely through social media.

Edited April 12, 2023 by Goredho

[atomheartbevo 89661]

23 minutes ago, Goredho said:

If it is impossible for NPR to provide unbiased news because they accept 1% of their yearly operating budget (~$3 million) from the United States government, how can Twitter provide an unbiased social media platform given $1.89 billion of Elon's purchase price was provided by Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) & the private office of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal -- giving them the 2nd largest ownership stake in the company?

They had their Arab Spring.  We're having our Redneck Fall.  Both promoted and organized largely through social media.

Tesla and SpaceX get billions from the government, shouldn't they be labeled appropriately?

[HamsterHookah 112]

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

 

He’s such a bully 

https://twitter.com/Jamin2g/status/1646108572911116290?s=20

Edited April 13, 2023 by HamsterHookah

[Chopper 17235]

lol @HamsterHookahspeaking of things breaking, twitter links no longer imbed apparently.

https://twitter.com/Jamin2g/status/1646108572911116290?s=20

If he were on his game even at even a minimal level that interviewer could have ripped a million examples right out of his asshole. Mehdi Hasan, for example, would've absolutely wiped the floor with elmo. But you don't have to be Medi Hasan to wipe the floor with elmo, you just have to do a little homework and have enough of backbone to tell him stop filibustering and listen.

Edited April 13, 2023 by Chopper