The war of Elon's ego
You're not allowed to (easily) read this on Twitter
Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.― On War, Carl von Clausewitz
The War of Jenkins’ Ear is one of those conflicts that people say is “forgotten” but, at this point, it’s brought up as “forgotten” so much that it is far from it. The war — between Britain and the Spanish Empire — puttered on from 1739 to 1748 and was ‘triggered’ by Robert Jenkins — captain of the Rebecca — allegedly having his ear severed by Spanish coast guards who were searching his ship for contraband in April 1731.
The truth is that, like the Bay of Tonkin and the Vietnam War, the incident was exploited by politicians and military leaders who wanted conflict and needed an excuse for it. Seven years after Jenkins was force Van Goghed, opposition parliamentarians, and the South Sea Company agitated for war to ‘improve trading opportunities’ in the Caribbean and maintain Britain’s dominance in the slave trade to Spanish America (that’s why the Spanish call it, the Guerra del Asiento (the ‘seat’ war). British attacks on the ports of Cartagena and Havana in 1741 were a shit show and from 1742 on the ‘war’ was largely subsumed by the much more consequential War of Austrian Succession, which dragged in all of the major European powers and had better branding.
The War of Elon’s Ego began in October 2022 when the world’s most divorced and meme-obsessed loser purchased Twitter. Since then he has undertaken a series of disastrous raids on the site’s functionality while screaming like a spoilt child who doesn’t understand why everyone at his luxury birthday party hates him, even as he pisses on the jelly and ice cream.
Musk — a clown Clausewitz with a Reddit addiction — has focused his latest tantrum on Substack, after it launched a short messaging product called Notes (I’ve just started using it): Now Substack links are marked as malicious on Twitter and it is no longer possible to like or retweet tweets with Substack links in them. That’s a big issue for small publishers like me; a huge amount of readers found this newsletter via Twitter (you probably did too) and lots of people read it via Twitter without taking the leap to subscribe.
I’m taking remedial action to deal with this situation: I’ll be posting this edition on Twitter with a bit.ly link and a new custom domain is currently going through the arcane magic that is DNS propagation.
However, for a media critic, Musk’s sad antics are interesting. In an earlier era of the internet, the walled gardens were common and frustrating with AOL, Compuserve et al. attempting to keep their subscribers locked into a partitioned area. That broke down over time and we had a long run where the “open web” was ascendant. But even before Musk took over Twitter, things were shifting. Years before, in fact, Twitter stopped Instagram links from working easily on the site while Facebook and Google try extremely hard to keep you from clicking away from their properties.
It’s highly likely that Musk will reverse the Substack decision given how many of his VC chud friends are Substack users and, crucially, investors but it is going to hurt for now. Facebook is not a reliable source of subscribers — it doesn’t want links to get much attention unless the poster is paying for it — and Google is hit-and-miss as a means of getting people to visit.
I’ll be on Mastodon and whatever other social platforms emerge and finding workarounds to get these editions on Twitter is not horrendously hard but Musk’s rhetoric about “free speech” is revealed to be as reliable as his promises to ex-wives, Tesla drivers, courts, or the SEC.
Like the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the War of Elon’s Ego is not really about the stated reason; Substack would not destroy Twitter. In fact, Twitter needs to be a place where you can share links easily or its entire purpose for existing crumbles.
Musk bought a nightclub, covered the walls with pictures of himself, forbade the people on the dancefloor from going outside for air or a cigarette, banned the mention of other nightclubs, and replaced 'the good music with remixes of old meme ‘classics’ (“Chocolate Rain on the PA!”) and cannot understand why no one likes him. It’s a lesson most of us learn at school: You can buy popularity for a while but eventually, if you’re a dick, there’s no escape from other people realising that. Elon Musk is the world’s most embarrassing high school fraud.
There will be a proper edition of the newsletter later as well as the weekend recommendations tomorrow (with bonuses for paid subscribers).
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Thanks Mic - great read.
It’s clear that he had a genius for something; if memory serves, that was for taking other bits of good ideas and making them marketable.
It seems he’s made the classic monomaniacal miscalculation of believing his hype to be an unbridled talent, one transferable to any sphere.
At least in buying Twitter (of all the things to buy) he won’t be short of advice to the contrary.
If the word 'substack' is allowed can't people use the name of your substack and find you pretty easily? It won't be AS easy which I guess is bad!