In the name of “cutting costs”, they can do anything?

Divert funds to whatever they want?

Explain how taking down open scientific and health data sets is “improving efficiency and transparency”. I kind of liked data.gov as a step in the RIGHT direction for government transparency!

Elon never mentions those things, of course. He has a direct connection to the people, bigger than FDR’s radio which helped him bypass the media, make sweeping changes to US society at the time and get elected to four times. He used to say of his opponents: “they are united in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred”.

The next step will be marginalize all the independent press, curtailing their access and making them irrelevant with phrases like “enemies of the people” and “you are the media now”.

We don’t have to go all godwin’s law about only nazis yelling “lugenpresse”. In fact, cooking up phrases to make people support unilateral decisions is the case everywhere.

“Islamofascism” (didnt stick)

“They hate us for our freedoms” (supported crackdowns on Muslims)

“Weapons of mass destruction” (supported invasion of Iraq)

“Unprovoked and Unjustified” (support war in Ukraine as unique and different than everrything that came before)

“Flatten the curve” (supported lockdowns)

And so on. In USA it was much milder compared to Canadan or Australia. “Vision Zero” in China was much stricter, locking down entire cities with no peep.

Authoritarian governments will always come up with slogans to make it easy to support their going around checks and balances, and marginalize their in their way.

Whenever you see people uncritically repeat a phrase verbatim, eg about the press, you know it’s happening.

Make no mistake, “You are the media now” is such a phrase. Twitter / X is not independent media. It is owned and controlled by a small group of people, not just the algorithm that surfaces tweets to everyone, not just the retweeting by the Information Launderer in Chief, but the bots and lack of enforcement. Neither is Facebook / Meta a free platform, as Zuck admitted it also worked with the government. But at least Zuck doesn’t run an agency that gets carte blanche IN the government with our taxpayer dollars.

To me the freedom of speech issue is crucial, to survive takeovers of our public discourse as a nation, so we can at least have genuine conversations about what happened and is happening, without being centrally manipulated by algorithms owned by the people in power.

This is why I believed so strongly for 10 years that we need a viable free open source alternative to Facebook and Twitter, and worked on it for 12 years, even braving ridicule from some HN denizens :)

I am getting ready to release it in a big way. (Obviously not just here.) See links to news articles in the README here if you want to understand what I think is the solution: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Qbix aims to do with Web 2.0 what the HTTP protocol and Web Browser / Server did with Web 1.0 (getting people off of AOL, MSN, etc.) And this may trigger some people, but I am saying that Qbix wants to do for Free Speech vs Big Tech in Web 2.0 what Bitcoin was going to do for money vs the Big Banks in Web 3.0 . Make a platform that is decentralized, isnt owned by people who end up working closely with government to push policies down the public’s throat. (The very policies DOGE cites to justify its own sweeping mandate.)

If anyone wants to get involved with building Qbix, email me or get in touch.