On the menu today: One of the consequences of what Rush Limbaugh called our “drive-by media” is that voices who ought to know better make sweeping and grandiose predictions that don’t pan out, and yet few people remember to go back and ask why things turned out differently. Late last fall, we were informed by tech journalists that Elon Musk was running Twitter into the ground, and that the exodus of engineers would make the social-media platform unworkable. Meanwhile, The Economist reports that Starlink satellites are proving decisive on the battlefield in Ukraine, which brings me to some thoughts about the message of the film Glass Onion. And finally, we ought to recall another bold and confident prediction about 2022 that did not come to pass.
Hey, Wasn’t Twitter Supposed to Have Crashed by Now?
Remember a month or two ago, when Elon Musk was the root of all evil? Remember when every decision he made at Twitter was huge news in the media world?
Remember in early November, when, allegedly, so many key engineers at Twitter were quitting in response to Musk’s takeover that his critics contended the platform was about to stop working?
It wasn’t just fly-by-night clickbait websites contending that Musk was steering Twitter into a sudden crash. On November 8, ZDNet’s Steven Vaughn Nichols wrote, “Why Twitter will fail shortly.” The same day, MIT Technology Review ran an article entitled, “Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks.” Around the middle of the month, Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic lamented, “Twitter’s Slow and Painful End.” On December 2, Wired warned, “We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion.”
Twitter’s still working, isn’t it?
Maybe you like Musk’s choices, maybe you don’t. Maybe Musk’s choices will have more damaging effects in the long run. There’s no doubt there have been some significant bumps in the road — occasional glitches and error messages, a failure to pay rent, etc. Musk has said he doesn’t intend to stay on as CEO, and has also indicated he finds running Twitter to be a much bigger headache than he expected.
But Twitter’s failure, breakdown, collapse, implosion, and “painful end” haven’t happened yet, and as of this morning, the site is still humming along.
There is something more than a little troubling about how quickly, widely, and thoroughly the “Twitter is about to collapse!” narrative took root in the technology-journalism world among writers who probably should have had a little more wariness. It feels like a larger-scale and more consequential version of the pranksters who showed up outside the Twitter headquarters building with cardboard boxes and pretended to be laid-off engineers. A lot of people hate Elon Musk and want to see him fail. In fact, they hate him so much that they are convinced that he has to fail. So they will believe that Twitter is in the process of imploding, whether or not it is actually imploding.
Those of us who are on the outside of companies don’t really know how things are going inside. If we did, we wouldn’t be surprised by events such as the collapse of FTX. Was it plausible that the transition from the old regime to Musk was going to generate friction, new problems, and headaches within Twitter? Sure. Was it possible that the friction from a new leader and a company staff used to doing things the old way would become more and more difficult to overcome? Yeah. But it was always equally likely that the quitting or laid-off engineers were coping by telling themselves and others, “That place will fall apart without me. I am irreplaceable.”
If you want to function and thrive in this world, you have to try to understand the world as it is, not as you want it to be. Andrew Sullivan likes to cite George Orwell’s quote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle.” Not every person you dislike is going to be an idiot; not every person you like is going to be a genius.
I was reminded of Musk when I ran across this article in the Economist, titled, “How Elon Musk’s satellites have saved Ukraine and changed warfare”:
It is one of the wonders of the world — or, more accurately, off the world. The Starlink constellation currently consists of 3,335 active satellites; roughly half of all working satellites are Starlinks. In the past six months new satellites have been added at a rate of more than 20 a week, on average. SpaceX, the company which created Starlink, is offering it as a way of providing off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries. A million or so have become subscribers.
And a huge part of the traffic flowing through the system currently comes from Ukraine. Starlink has become an integral part of the country’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion. Envisaged as a celestial side-hustle that might help pay for the Mars missions dear to the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, it is not just allowing Ukraine to fight back; it is shaping how it does so, revealing the military potential of near-ubiquitous communications. “It’s a really new and interesting change,” says John Plumb, America’s assistant secretary of defence for space policy.
Now, the jury is still out on how Twitter will do with Musk as its new owner. Maybe the brains and skillset that are great for designing electric cars or sending rockets into space or developing a system of satellites that can bring Internet access to a war zone won’t translate well to running a social-media platform. Exceptional ability in one area does not always translate to another; Michael Jordan was the world’s greatest basketball player, but not such a great baseball player.
But the success of Starlink indicates that Musk — again, the world’s most dangerous and terrible man in some people’s minds — is still capable of bringing world-changing ideas to fruition.
Which brings me to the recently released film, Glass Onion.
(SPOILERS FOR GLASS ONION AHEAD.)
The contention that Elon Musk is an idiot is the not-so-subtle subtext of Glass Onion, the sequel to the wildly successful murder mystery, Knives Out.
Unlike Ben Shapiro, I enjoyed watching Glass Onion. There’s a big cast of talented actors who seem to be having a ball playing larger-than-life characters. But I realized there’s now a pattern to Rian Johnson movies: I enjoy them while I’m watching them, but then afterward, you think about them for a moment, and very little about what you just watched makes sense.
(Case in point: Here’s the very short version of “the Holdo Maneuver” problem in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If any ship going to hyperspace can turn itself into an awesomely powerful weapon by crashing, kamikaze-like, into enemy ships, then every other form of technology in the Star Wars universe is instantly obsolete. No one needs pilots anymore; just have a droid crash a ship into the enemy, or just program the autopilot to do it. The scene means that there is no shield powerful enough to deflect or defend from this kind of attack. No need to make the trench run on the Death Star or send a strike team down to Endor; just crash a ship into it. There’s no warning, no ability to dodge, no discernable limit to the range of this kind of attack. The Star Wars movies’ iconic shooting lasers and space dogfights are pointless if a force could just build an arsenal of unstoppable hyperspace missiles. “The Holdo Maneuver” means that, all along, any force with any spaceship has had the ability to inflict devastating casualties upon the enemy. In one scene, Rian Johnson completely blew up the established rules for spaceships fighting in a series called Star Wars.)
In Glass Onion, Edward Norton’s Elon Musk-esque tech billionaire is actually a near-drooling imbecile who’s too stupid to do anything right, but somehow reached the pinnacle of success, fame, and fortune by stealing an idea from an ex-girlfriend and business partner many years ago. (AGAIN, SPOILERS AHEAD.) Shortly after murdering that ex-girlfriend and business partner, he chooses to host a weekend party featuring a murder-mystery game for his old friends, the continuation of an annual tradition. But the woman he murdered shows up — it’s actually her twin sister impersonating her — and she brings along Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, a celebrity detective who is bizarrely famous for being able to solve all kinds of mysteries. At this point, the billionaire has every reason to say to both of them, “Get off of my private island.” Instead, he welcomes them and chooses to commit more murders.
Glass Onion is a lot of fun with all those twists and turns, but shortly after the credits roll, you realize the plot is driven by coincidences, flukes, accidents, and contrivances that pile up like a Dagwood sandwich. What if that character hadn’t had a deadly allergy to that common substance? What if he hadn’t mentioned it within earshot of Blanc? Why didn’t the gun-obsessive character notice his gun had been stolen from his holster? What if Blanc hadn’t had a bottle of hot sauce in his pocket at just the right time? How likely is a journal in a jacket pocket to stop a bullet? The plot is a series of million-to-one shots, one after another.
Anyway, Johnson sneeringly paints a hideously ugly portrait of a character who’s clearly meant to be Musk — he runs a rocket company and obsessively celebrates being “a disruptor” — and the whole message of the movie is, “Despite his carefully managed public image, this famous billionaire is really just a lucky, unscrupulous idiot.” Except . . . I don’t think Elon Musk is an idiot — certainly not an across-the-board idiot. Musk has his flaws, no doubt, but I don’t think you could do all the things that Musk has done in his life if you were an across-the-board idiot.
And in that light, Glass Onion starts to look more like a grand exercise in envy and resentment.
ADDENDUM: While we’re on the subject of things that were supposed to happen but didn’t, back in December 2021, John Gizzi, the long-time Washington correspondent of Human Events who has subsequently moved to Newsmax, offered the shocking report that the Vatican is secretly preparing for a conclave to select a new pope because “Pope Francis is dying.” Gizzi reported that, “Vatican insiders, including my source, do not believe he will survive past 2022.”
Well, 2022 is over, and Pope Francis is still alive and kicking.
As I noted at the time, Pope Francis is in his mid 80s, had part of one of his lungs removed many years ago, had surgery the previous July to remove part of his intestine and colon, and there’s still Covid-19 floating around. So the possibility of the pope passing away in any given year is far from unthinkable.
But with an entire year passing with no indication that Pope Francis is at death’s door, I think we can now say that Gizzi’s source was full of it. And I don’t think journalists do their readers any service by reporting a bombshell assertion such as “The pope is dying” without harder proof.