Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

It doesn’t need to be profitable, let alone have every fraction of a cent squeezed from it.

To block AI from hoovering up all our data, without paying them.

That’s not how greed works, nor how reddit works.

The only time they’ll do something that reduces profits is when they’re confident it will mean more profits in the near future (and they can’t figure out a way to have both).

That’s why they were happy to platform mask off neo-nazis, the dangerously stupid and communities dedicated to getting as close to child pornography as possible without technically breaking any laws and why they waited until the last possible moment to pull the plug on them.

That’s the neoliberal secret – you have to play the game, no matter how immoral the rules.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He's looked at the number of users and said "what if they were dollars?".

But like you say, there's probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won't dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That's definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn't free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don't mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren't just trying to cover their operating costs, they're trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they'd still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they'd still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there's an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.

I think initially, he just wanted to do his duty as a right-wing reactionary and use his influence to shame Twitter for deplatforming white supremacists, likely having heard that Truth Social was eying up a plot next to every other dead social network that pandered to fascists.

But like every other figurehead of that crowd, below the bluster and bravado lies a very tiny dick and his preferred method of wearing shorts in the shower is spending millions of dollars in an effort to convince everyone he is the smartest man in the world.

So pretentious screeds about "free speech absolutism" quickly turned into self-aggrandizing posts about how he could do it better and before he even got a chance to call someone a pedo, he'd accidentally made some comments about buying Twitter that he was legally obligated to follow through on.

He tried to squirm out of it for a while, muttering about bots and whatnots, but it seems his lawyers informed him that yes, he had also bragged away his opportunity to back out and he was going to have to follow through.

And so a couple of months later, he walked into a mostly empty office with 4 goals in mind.

First, he needed to get far-right propaganda back on track. Too many people had started to see through the "we're not neo-nazis we just have the opinions, goals and pundits", plausible deniability schtick and the far-right funnel just wasn't flowing how it used to before all the domestic terrorism.

That kicked off a flurry of actions like unbanning mentally ill hip-hop artists, internationally embarrassing politicians and pseudo-intellectuals who'd spent decades striving to achieve mediocrity before they said something bigoted and were immediately placed on a pedestal.

Second, he needed to self-soothe after doing something so stupid in front of so many people. $44 billion dollars down the drain! That's not what the smartest man in the world would do! Especially not if money was the only thing that made him noteworthy in the first place.

So he marched around unplugging things and pretending he knew what he was talking about and wasn't just lifting key phrases from more intelligent people like a celebrity parrot.

It was an unconvincing show for anyone in the industry who quickly realised he barely had a junior-level understanding of a single moving part, let alone the hundreds that keep a site like Twitter online.

Third, he needed to claw back every penny he could, carefully balancing things like "gleefully firing all the heartbroken staff" with other important business like "indulging his teenage edgelord".

But each new idea is even more dogshit than the last. He bought a sinking ship and he's trying to bail out the water with every piece of cutlery in the kitchen. It's only a matter of time before the office supplies turn up on ebay.

And fourth and, probably most importantly: "Are there any women in this place worth manipulating into prostitution? I need everybody back in the office tomorrow for a face to face"

A lot of the WASM ecosystem is still pretty rough

I understand why people would hesitate to pay the price. Realistically, the Fairphone could have put in higher quality parts but that would have just blown their costs out further.

But exploitative wages – for both foreign and domestic workers – are at the core of many problems and I hate to see customers blamed.

The one in a hundred restaurant might be full of empty tables, but where would people eat if you doubled their wages? If there were two chocolate bars with identical taste, being offered at an identical price, except one of them used child slaves (and said so on the packaging), how many people “wouldn’t care” then?

Ethical choices shouldn’t be a luxury, unethical choices just shouldn’t be an option. If that means people can’t afford chocolate, they can take it up with the executives who have been pocketing their payrises.

And millionaires could afford to pay their workers fair wages, but apparently you’d rather blame the general public instead.

It’s not at all unreasonable for people to assume the goods they buy are ethically produced.

If someone gets food poisoning from a restaurant, do you blame them for eating there? Do you try and shame them for not reading through 800 reviews to check it was safe to eat there? Do you insist they should have gone somewhere that was twice the price for half the portion?

Of course you don’t. But apparently this deeply flawed logic is only used when it comes to corporate greed and only because rich people don’t run restaurants.

Isn’t it wonderful playing a rigged game?

Here is a phone that ticks many, many boxes for sustainable and ethical production. It’s the phone that “free market will fix it” neoliberals insist should bring the downfall of companies that just release e-waste.

But of course the free market won’t fix anything.

Neoliberals built a managed democracy and giant corporations were allowed to use outsourcing, slaves and environment-unfriendly manufacturing.

The influx of cheap goods subsidised by the misery of foreign workers and future generations made it harder to notice our shrinking wages. We could still afford to fill our homes with tat, just like our parents did.

But your grandfathers tools lasted 30 years and yours will last 3 (and be worse for the duration). Very few companies even bother offering good products, let alone ethical ones.

Because nobody can actually afford “good” any more. Not the consumers who want to buy it, nor the handful of companies trying to sell it. You have to buy crap. Companies have to be unethical.

It’s dug us a very very deep hole that’s going to be a lot of hard work to climb out of and it’s looking like politicians and billionaires are only interested in selling us new shovels.