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Antitrust fines are being SLASHED; fines are at an all time LOW; get fined while you can! | Elon Musk’s text messages are something to behold

Achievement unlocked: this week, I have my first EVER migraine. Protip: never get migraines, they are a scam.

Now it’s Friday morning and I’m just going in raw and hitting send as soon as I’m done writing. The errors in spelling and grammar are now YOUR problem — not mine. Sorry that’s just how it is.

I guess we could say that this week was sort of okay? 🤷.

It’s tough, obviously I was too ill to pay proper attention but I think there’s a lot of room for misdirected outrage: e.g. it’s looking like Elon Musk will indeed have to buy Twitter. He obviously didn’t want this, but I guess it’s cheaper than getting sued. Maybe he should pretend to buy Boston Dynamics next??

One: Elon can own Twitter. Who cares. Let Twitter be passed around by billionaires who are indistinguishable from each other. Two: my casual joke about him buying Boston Dynamics could have very easily been a serious text message from one of his ‘friends’ — if you don’t know what I’m talking about, as part of Elon’s ongoing legal dispute with Twitter, the courts released emails and texts between him and others regarding the Twitter deal.

Just looking at these texts confirms what we always feared: things are much worse than they seem. The most powerful people in Silicon Valley broker deals and come up with feature ideas for their multi-million user platforms in the same way that we decide where to get dinner. Messages are a cringeworthy soup of tech hype and different versions of, “well Q2 is almost over, so 💅”.

The texts explain why Elon can do whatever he likes with little or no consequence. There are men out there who you might deem just as ‘successful’ as Elon, within the narrow parameters of what ‘success’ is to a hyper wealthy capitalist — but they idolise and fawn over him like degenerates. One guy (I don’t know who he is and don’t care), after being told directly by Elon how embarrassing he is, admits that this deal has “captured the world’s imagination in an unimaginable way”. Bro… shut up and stop being such a loser, literally. My god. ← This is the misdirected outrage I was talking about at the beginning there.

In other news relating to the futility of trying to enact change: the French authorities have massively reduced their antitrust fine imposed on Apple. It went from 1.1 billion Euros to 372 million. The reason: it was disproportionate, and the new figure should be just about enough to teach them a lesson. This is of course wrong — I honestly don’t see the point in fining Big Tech firms anything less than $5bn. They literally won’t even feel it other wise.

An Apple spokesperson defended the decision, saying that "The decision relates to practices from more than a decade ago that even the (French authority) recognised are no longer in use.” I didn’t realise that’s how it worked; that bad actions from a decade ago become irrelevant and have no effect on anything happening today.

✨ That’s all I’ve got time for this week. I’ll end with saying that I’m giving a talk about what the metaverse is (lol) on the 19th of October in London. If you’re around and would like to die of laughter via my thought-provoking analysis on why the metaverse is a stupid pile of crap that doesn’t need to exist, then please come!

Bye, love you x