I don’t generally like a snarky tone in non-fiction books, but in this case, it felt deeply cathartic. I picked this up at the recommendation of my friend Alexis, the idea being that it is helpful to have more detailed information about what Musk did during his (disastrous) Twitter takeover, given that he seems to be copy-pasting this “strategy” into his approach to the federal government.
To be honest, what I mostly learned is that Musk is just as deeply incompetent and profoundly egoistic as one might have suspected. Anyone who still thinks that maybe he’s some kind of secret genius playing 13-dimensional chess or whatever is warmly invited to read this book and get a behind-the-scenes look at how wildly impulsive, irrational, and just plain stupid most of his decisions are.
But what ended up also being really interesting to me was the account of all the other people involved, and what they did in response to his antics, as well as the more detailed information about what Twitter was like as a company, and by extension, what Twitter really was. Because I do think it’s actually dead now, and that is interesting, in that it attests to the fact that the infrastructure of it was really important to its functioning. Although much of what made Twitter into the fascinating thing it was, arguably, was user-produced content and interactions, it turns out that this alchemy relied heavily — far more so than I’d understood — on conscious choices by programmers. That stuff was really cool to learn about. People’s responses to the rapidly deteriorating situation at the company was a bit more depressing. I wish I could say that it helped me understand how to most effectively resist our current apocalypse, but I don’t know that it did. I mean, one line of thinking is that people should have just quit right away, recognizing that nothing could have saved twitter anyhow. But it’s hard to say.
Anyways, ultimately, this is mostly a kind of guilty pleasure hate-read of a book — it’s smart and insightful and well-researched, but mostly, it’s the dirt that makes it satisfying to read, and the cutting way that dirt is delivered.
Kasia Reads 