The Twitter Drama Isn't Going to Happen Right Away

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Twitter has been pretty bad at making money, but it could just be good at doing what people wanted to do. I'm very convinced that you can't have a good internet plus this type of capitalism like a capitalism in which everything is aimed not just at making money but at making exceptionally large money. The incentives once money gets exceptionally large All gets skewy and screwed and bad. Like facebook would be lovely and I'd probably visit it three times a day And it would make way less money There's actually I think probably a profitable version of facebook does what facebook does. But in the attempt to make big money They end up ruining twitter.

Paris Marx is joined by Dave Karpf to discuss Meta’s misguided attempt to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, how Wired Magazine has evolved, and why the tech billionaires are destroying the world.

Dave Karpf is an Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He’s also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Follow Dave on Twitter at @davekarpf.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Dave wrote about the history of WIRED Magazine’s future predictions and why VR never dies.
People Make Games made a video looking at what’s going on in VRChat.
Meta’s legs demo wasn’t real.
Douglas Rushkoff’s new book Survival of the Richest looks at how the rich are trying to protect themselves from the crises they’re making worse.
Science fiction books mentioned: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral.