Let me control a nation's narrative and I care not who issues the money.
Wouldn't it be fun to own a social media platform?
Before Elongated Muskrat, the worst of all the ex-X-Men, decided to rename Twitter to X.com, subsequently getting banned in Malaysia since it sounds like porn even if that’s not what people mean by “Elon Musk sucks” on X.com, there was one other company which changed its name, though in this case it was to avoid its old name. Comcast changed its name to Xfinity… which incidentally also has an X in the new name which replaced its ex-name. You see, mutants and norms, Comcast was dubiously nominated as the worst company or agency, and was even less popular than the IRS. Yet, no one calls Comcast Xfinity and no one calls Twitter X.com unless they’re one of the lawyers who’s writing up a document for it, and even then I’m sure they go back to calling them Comcast and Twitter as soon as they’re out of that context.
Criticism of Comcast - Wikipedia
Credit to
’s Notes for showing me this.Why do people hate Comcast more than the IRS and now really hate Twitter too? The same reason that it makes more sense to protest outside CTV than outside the White House or whatever government building, or even the Fed. Whoever controls the narrative has the real power, not anyone else. Why did Orson Welles write a movie about William Randolph Hearst? Wouldn’t it be fun to own a newspaper? Or a social media company in the modern age?
Hmm, a guy who inherits the money from a mine, buys media companies, falls in love with a musician who isn’t very good, and (though this isn’t in the movie) is obsessed with comics… Where have I heard this all before? Now I’m just waiting to see if the base on Mars is named Xanadu, that starts with X.
8 Things You Might Not Know About Prince Valiant | Mental Floss
1. WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST PERSONALLY REQUESTED IT.
Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst—the inspiration for Orson Welles’s myopic character in Citizen Kane—isn’t usually thought of as a comics fan, but he was the one who insisted that cartoonist Hal Foster move away from his comic adaptation of Tarzan to mount a new strip exclusively for Hearst’s newspapers. When Foster delivered a Medieval epic titled Derek, Son of Thane, Hearst was overjoyed—except he hated the name. Retitled Prince Valiant, it debuted in newspapers on February 13, 1937 and has been running ever since.
The media matters, but one thing clearly matters more, or William Randolph Hearst never would’ve had to sue Orson Welles, and that’s who writes the fiction or sometimes nonfiction narratives people use as reference points. No one cares about Prince Valiant when there’s Citizen Kane, never mind just getting into Thor or Conan the Barbarian or something.
Speaking of poorly-written things causing problems for their authors, did you know the company TSR, the one made by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson which took a bunch of public-domain tabletop roleplaying game rules and copyrighted them as “Dungeons and Dragons” to cynically make money off a current trend, went out of business because they kept publishing terrible Dragonlance books? Yes, that’s really why. No one cares if you pour in all the money you have trying to copyright roleplaying games or short public online messaging if you end up basically destroying everything people like about it anyway.
GROGNARDIA: How Dragonlance Ruined Everything
A TOUCH OF WELLES: Orson Welles, American comic books and pop culture. | My Blog (wordpress.com)
Ironically, the one thing William Randolph Hearst definitely couldn’t do well was what Orson Welles grew up doing and that’s making comics/cartoons, and controlling the media in general. Buying all the newspapers and publishing terrible pseudo-historical Old World comics like Prince Valiant didn’t protect him from the horrible plight of having someone make a film about him any more than Chippy buying Twitter and naming it X.com doesn’t protect him from being the target of endless memes and satires. All the money in the world doesn’t give you the power to know or control minds even if you decide to name your brain chip Telepathy for whatever dorky reason.
Neuralink's Brain Chip Is Running in a Human. Your Skull Is Safe, for Now - CNET
Back in January, the Elon Musk-led Neuralink implanted its brain chip, named Telepathy, in a human for the first time. It was an early stage of a six-year study and just one step on a very long path to making the technology safe and useful.
The fact is, no, Chippy, it doesn’t work like you just go around dismissing the whole mental world as useless and then get to use it without making any profound changes you’re clearly not even willing to make whether you were able or not. You don’t go like “let’s smash everything with a big rock!” and then when that doesn’t work and you realize mind control is better you get that. Your money from the mine will only get you so far, Citizen Musk.
To Understand Elon Musk, You Have to Understand This ’60s Sci-Fi Novel (jacobin.com)
When revolutionary war breaks out, Mike’s technical superiority emerges as the deciding factor. Using electromagnetic catapults, the supercomputer hurls rocks at the Earth that impact with the force of atomic explosions. The Federated Nations of Earth are forced to grant their lunar colonies independence after this calculated show of force. In the end, the Loonies achieve political emancipation thanks to a gadget.
Even more fundamentally, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress reflects a prevailing dogma that promotes cybernetics as the key to understanding the universe. Under this belief system, everything from markets to ecosystems appear as information processors operating based on feedback mechanisms. Like a thermostat, they respond to changing circumstances without conscious human control. Because the economy is a self-regulating system too complex for anyone to understand let alone steer, the Californian ideologists suggest, it should be insulated from democratic interference by a global legal order developed by neoliberal experts.
Oh no, it’s the invisible hand of the market and other kinds of black magic again.
More from “To Understand Elon Musk…”
Musk has immersed himself in this ideology since his involvement with PayPal in the 1990s, and so it makes sense that he would be drawn to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He’s so mired in this way of thinking that he entertains the idea that all of reality is a computer simulation. In many ways, Musk models himself on Mannie the computer technician, the wisecracking rebel who only wants the government to get out of his way so he can make things work. When Musk encounters traffic congestion, he doesn’t see it as a failure of urban planning or a problem following from underinvestment in mass transit. Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to build a hyperloop. His solution to everything is an invention developed and marketed by rogue geniuses in the private sector. His faith in technofixes is so great that he imagines machines as potential overlords waiting to take over. There is more than a hint of Mike in his fear of an impending robot apocalypse.
This all ties into the fact I think political narratives are mostly just a distraction. Yes, I’ll quote Jacobin sometimes and Turning Point USA other times and not really care if I agree with what they happen to be saying because, just like the first article I linked about the protestors outside CTV said, all this political partisanship is really just a huge distraction. You should vote for the best/least bad candidate so Hitler doesn’t take power, but no one really builds their lives around these politicized narratives except people who’ve already failed at everything else. Most people build their lives around fiction, biographies, religious texts, and those kinds of things, not political narratives, and good. Let’s continue that and see eye-to-eye even if it results in people telling me the same thing they told Orson Welles ages ago, and saying that just reading, sharing, and adapting a bunch of pulps is bad taste or whatever. It’s really not, lots of pulps from 1984 to The Color Out of Space used to be considered pretty literary, though all the George Orwell and Ray Bradbury seems to have relatively recently been removed from school curriculums as the Old World sadly becomes the new thing and Americans spurn William James for Henry James and doubt their own novel-writing abilities once again. All I have to say to them is a picture of Doctor Manhattan blowing up politics, chosen to be as ironic as possible. <In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate communicating with pictures.> OK that’s how the book I’m quoting actually goes unironically.
Yet another Substack article I wrote that I think is rather short is over the email length limit again apparently solely due to pictures. Substack length limits will take their place among the fossils. Have some more pictures!
Credit to
’s notes for this meme. You know it’s true.Americans, know thyself!
One thing that really annoys me is everyone who keeps insisting Americans are anti-intellectual so we must be like the awful Old World. It’s true there’s a current of anti-intellectualism in American life, but that exists in every country, and America is actually significantly less anti-intellectual than probably any other country. Americans have all the superheroes, detectives, scientists, and spies because we’re not anti-intellectual, while other countries are mostly obsessed with knights and Prince Valiant pseudo-historical garbage (not that every mention of knights etc. is remotely pseudo-historical garbage.)
Let me control a nation's narrative and I care not who issues the money. The fact is I just don’t care about all the things people are going to tell me to. To reference a really old story, I’m going to make it so people can’t resist what I want from them at all, at least not without insanely harming themselves.
for a second i fell down a hole reading .. grew mildly uneasy that i’d again .. simply lost the plot..
need a reread .. or demag my compass rose .. eh ! 🦎🏴☠️🇨🇦
The first thing we teach in algebra is that X has questionable value.
X = ?