Music!
Censorship
You might need a shovel to read this one...
Musk is not supporting freedom of speech. He's putting on a big show about not participating in the most obvious kind of political censorship, while quietly practicing censorship against the private, non-paying users who made Twitter worth advertising on. I hate when people treat Musk like a defender of free speech because he's not censoring Donald Trump, while in fact Musk is censoring them.
And that is why X is going down. As this web site has observed so many times before: if people want to listen to, watch, read only paid speech, they already had television. Twitter worked because it was a place for non-paying, private individuals who did not disclose their real names (or, necessarily, genders or species) to say anything about anything and choose what they wanted to see. To revive X, Musk will have to restore that feature. Without it, X is just another TV channel and the show is a choppy, chaotic format that doesn't make much sense.
Everyone. Must. See. Everything from everybody they follow, and very very little from anyone they don't follow. Ads need to go in a sidebar where they're easy to ignore. It doesn't pay Twitter directly bit businesses need to be forced to use Twitter in a Twitter sort of way. Not paying for time to make all the noise, as on TV. Using that free, interactive, random quality that people liked about Twitter to listen to customers and engage with them.
One day when I was three or four years old, Mother took me to a friend's bakery. We tried the lemon cookies. I said "I wish that cookie were THIS big!" For years after that Mother joked about me being a baby consumer advocate. "She listened! She did start baking bigger lemon cookies." Pizza-sized cookies had yet to be invented--I think the baker went from scooping cookie dough onto the pan with a teaspoon to scooping with a tablespoon. And there probably was some Tiny Dainty Portions fan in town who missed the tiny dainty cookies that made person feel virtuous, too. ("I only ever had the teaspoon-sized lemon cookies...I don't know why I can't lose these ten pounds..and actually I've gained a pound this year.") My point here is that Twitter gave businesses a unique opportunity to connect with customers in a new way--to find out how many people in the neighborhood of each specific store wanted more tiny dainty cookies, more palm-of-their-hand-sized cookies, and more pizza-pan cookies to take home. Or more lemon versus chocolate. Or more sweet cookies versus savory crackers. They had the opportunity to offer seasonal or microbatch variations to suit everybody. That could have made Twitter profitable if the company's owners and managers had given it time to grow.
But if X is just another TV channel...who needs? Might as well put the little square around the X. That is where people are going to click!
Music
For anyone who's interested in the approach to music that serious musicians were taking in the early 1980s, here's Chip Davis' Christmas playlist. Fusion was the word.
Two Christmas songs some Christians hate, because they're fiction: "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Do You Hear What I Hear." I can understand why people object to these songs. I've always loved them both. This is a wildly imaginative video to go with "Drummer Boy." Click only if you can stand pious fiction.
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