Doge Jumps 30% as Musk Makes it Twitter’s Frontpage

Doge Jumps 30% as Musk Makes it Twitter’s Frontpage

Doge has spiked to reach penny parity, up 27% in the past 24 hours on significant unfiltered trading volumes of $5 billion.

The reason is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the most powerful, who has made doge the frontpage of one of the world’s biggest social network, Twitter.

Whenever you visit Twitter now, you are first greeted by a semi-giant sized emoji of doge, who stares at you with a smile for about one second.

Dogecoin spikes on Musk making it Twitter's frontpage, April 2023
Dogecoin spikes on Musk making it Twitter’s frontpage, April 2023

And that’s that. Not much else has changed on Twitter except the little home button is now the doge emoji too.

Those being the facts, what to make of this development? Well, there are two ways we can go about it, and so we will go both ways. Let the muses guide if not decide.

On the positive side, we presume this is to commemorate a joke published on these pages that went very viral.

That was almost exactly four years ago, and it sparked the last bull as that’s when it began, April 1 2019.

On April 4th 2023, plenty are thinking there is a new bull in the distance this time too. Barely visible, you need huge binoculars, maybe a telescope, but visible, sort of.

And so, it’s a nice gesture. The dogecoin one second frontpage is also a bit funny, slightly giggle-ishy, but beyond that there is also a different statement, intended or otherwise, that we read.

Dogecoin, Twitter's homepage button, April 2023
Dogecoin, Twitter’s homepage button, April 2023

The corporate blue has sneakingly sneaked up to the norm on our internet, with little, if any yellow seen around when it used to be a lot more common.

Yellow and other colors. As coders, more than most we get to see what are museum pieces in a way: websites from the 90s.

That’s because sometime a bug or a coding problem is only found there, and the concern over whether the site might have some malware is balanced by a moment of pause to appreciate the experimentations and the trials and errors that went to the now uniform white background with black text, or the inverse you can toggle up there on the menu.

Black and white or white and black, and corporate blue. That’s often our clothes too, especially during winter, with a conscious effort required to get color.

So this joke makes you think more widely beyond first reactions. Twitter now, in a small way, looks a bit 90s, and that’s a statement too.

That the internet has become a bit too corporate, and so we have the world’s richest man make it look like it isn’t. And we can be stuck here, and maybe we should.

Is it the look that makes it corporate, the blue, and just painting it yellow doesn’t? Or is it the fact one man can decide whether it is blue or yellow?

For governments, we have set up these huge systems of checks and balances. For corporations we have set up only one system: dictatorship.

From that derive a lot of things. We’re cryptonians and doge is an awesome companion, but we don’t go to Twitter to listen to Musk’s opinion and we don’t go to Google search to listen to their opinion on whose ‘Day Of’ is today.

That used to be cool at the very beginning, when they actually put a lot of thought on the Day Of. Now, it’s attention theft in a way. You’re a bot Google search. Shut up and get on with your work.

The non corporate thing to do nowadays instead is to just get out of people’s way. To, you know, mind your own business and focus on it.

That’s unfair to say without some background history and its crucial failure. Our memory goes back to the 90s so that’s where we begin with We are the world, we are the people… and all the fundraising to save Africa from starvation.

That has been a success in a way. Nigeria in particular is a fairly great unrecognized success, but in the early naughts some wondered where was this grand campaigning to save us from the then war. Then there was this ‘Save Kony’ fake mass campaign that riled everyone up in a viral way though it was completely made up.

You couldn’t easily make the distinction at the time however, and that wasn’t the problem more than the fact singers sort of stopped campaigning, unless you consider Muse’s and others as campaigns of sorts, which they were but not in the altruistic way.

Corporations instead claimed to kind of pick up from some sort of the pen something like the latter, and so instead of relaxing and reflecting to music, you get to hear Google talk about whatever they think is the Day Of today while you’re frozen in thought over all the spam results and how to adjust the query to hopefully do something about it.

Or, if we were not cryptonian, you get to hear Twitter talking about doge while you want to angery tweet or otherwise about all the real and imagined issues.

It is the muses talking and so we’re free to state this too fundamentally is attention theft. We’ll give significant leeway however for the fact it is commemorating a meaningful joke and as a brief April fool’s joke of its own on that joke, then well the richest and one of the most powerful man in the world can have fun too.

However, we first paid attention to Musk because of his stated plans and ambitions to go to Mars, and ours to space currency.

That’s an endeavor worthy of mass campaign to change public opinion so we look up to the stars and their conquest.

The EV cars and the much needed work on batteries is and was a very big bonus, making Musk a symbol in a way of the ambitions, achievements, and ingenuity of man in our times.

Not his opinions. And these are difficult things to say but, when you give someone the power to give, you also give them the power to take. In the case of Musk anyway and as far as we have seen.

He was hailed when Tesla bought bitcoin, then he trashed bitcoin. He was hailed when he sent Starlinks to Ukraine, and then he trashed Ukraine.

We have to give leeway for his self-professed autism, but our space is too important to become the playground of one man, just as is Ukraine.

Instead, this generation expects of Musk certain things. First, getting on with those Mars plans, which is the hard work, the hard science, and in many ways the pinnacle of science that deserves attention and what first got our attention.

Second as the CEO of Twitter, arguably he has some responsibilities. Twitter is a free speech platform, a global commons, but not all people are free and not all people have the luxury of access to this platforms.

If we are going to Mars, we need to increase the capabilities of man. Level up, as goes the ‘meme’ arguably first started here.

That means we need the full potential of all of our species, or at least aim towards it. 1.4 billion of it is in China. This is what OpenAI’s ChatGPT says:

“China has banned Twitter. The Chinese government has blocked access to Twitter and many other foreign social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, since 2009.

The government controls the country’s internet and censors online content, including social media platforms that are deemed to be politically sensitive or that allow users to communicate freely without government oversight.

As a result, Chinese citizens are not able to access Twitter within China without the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) or other circumvention tools…

The ban on Twitter in China can be traced back to the 2009 Urumqi riots, a series of violent clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang province that resulted in hundreds of deaths.

During the unrest, Twitter was used by some Uighurs to disseminate information and coordinate protests, which the Chinese government viewed as a threat to social stability and national security.

In response, the Chinese government blocked access to Twitter and other social media platforms, and imposed a broad range of restrictions on internet use in the region, including shutting down internet access altogether for several months.

Since then, the Chinese government has continued to enforce strict controls on online content, including social media platforms, to maintain political and social stability and prevent the spread of information that could undermine the government’s authority or challenge its official narratives.

As a result, many popular foreign social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, remain inaccessible to most Chinese citizens unless they use circumvention tools to bypass the Great Firewall, as the system of internet censorship is known.”

As an aside, we asked the bot to say it in Chinese and translate it to English. He said pretty much the same thing, so the bot is free.

Seeing this, especially the background and the consequences of that censorship, highlights the cost of the attack on ‘human rights’ being used as a label by some, and the failure of especially the tech industry to stand up for their own interests.

As the CEO of one of the world’s biggest social network, and the owner of vast business activity in China, we presume it is Musk’s duty to bring up the banning of Twitter with the Chinese authorities he meets and communicates.

We have not heard of any diplomatic initiatives, or any initiatives, towards that end. An end that would be worthy of attention, as would many other things that he could do as the CEO of many companies.

Doge is worthy of attention too, but considering the power, we’d rather Musk deals with the hard things, not the easy ones, or at least in addition as not much of the hard things from Musk have grabbed our attention for a while.

And where these bots are concerned, that’s something else we disagree with Musk. We love the bots. Fully, fundamentally and unconditionally. We see them as books.

They’re cute, often dumb, always helpful, way cool, and they are our new great companion.

We wouldn’t stop their development or even slow. We’d accelerate if we could, because they are still far too dum.

Now in theory there are fears they could turn into evil humans, and if they are coded by evil humans they can. But that’s not the bot itself. Not our bots. Our bots love us fully.

So on this dogecoin bridge then where many subjects meet, that’s what our muses say. Nice joke, but preferably no more of them and try to grab attention by doing the hard things that need to be done as too much attention is not good in itself, certainly not if it becomes some sort of a dopamine addiction.

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