@cwebber @spritely

Isn't that XMPP?

@futurebird @carrideen

I get that in _theory_ being surrounded by people who are only interested in your wealth or your power could be lonely, but that would require a degree of introspection which the wealthy and powerful don't seem to have a lot of spare time for, between the red carpets and the yachts and so forth. Instead, they seem quite happy to surround themselves with people who help them normalize whatever craziness they're prone to.

I keep remembering that, in the thousands of emails that got dumped into the public domain when Musk was prosecuted for the Twitter acquisition, there wasn't a single one pointing out that it was a stupid idea. They were all like, "genius, man!" And he clearly believed them.

@skinnylatte

San Francisco and Seattle and now Minneapolis. Changing targets, or adding to the set that constitutes the rhetorical "other."

@skinnylatte

I think of 2001 as being the turn-over point... the bursting of the dot-com bubble making so many people start living their lives in hardscrabble panic mode, and the advent of the surveillance economy.

The irony being that we're now at a point of symmetry... The Internet had 25 years as a communist economy, nine years as a capitalist economy, and now 25 years as a surveillance economy.

@skinnylatte

I remember being astounded when I moved to Hong Kong that housing prices anywhere could be higher than in San Francisco... but total cost of living was lower, and quality of life was higher, since so many things (like Michelin-starred meals) which would have been unaffordable and inconvenient in San Francisco were cheap and easy in HK.

@skinnylatte

Tricky, tho. On the one hand, not the apocalyptic whatever Fox News is trying to promote. On the other hand, a pale pablum reflection of what it was in the 19th and 20th centuries.