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KulakRevolt  2yr ago (anarchonomicon.substack.com)   1822 thread views

DEAR ELON, This is How you Make 10s of Billions Off Twitter

anarchonomicon.substack.com

An in depth proposal for how Elon can brute force the Problem of Identity to make 10s of billions off of Twitter Verifications.

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FWIW dude I really like your substack and it’s now one of the blogs I’m most happy to see updates for!

The examples for identities of Wendy's might have included this guy who runs a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the Netherlands causing Wendy's to not be able to use it's branding in Europe.

Yes thats what the big brands and personalities would like, but they're not nearly coordinated enough to actually pull of or prevent the switch if Elon starts divide and conquering them and slowly changing the norm.

I said it would be a battle and that I have a part 2 coming that deals with exactly how to implement it in a way that will be very hard to prevent.

Be patient its a 3-4000 word plan of attack

Why would it require the brands and personalities to coordinate, though? It seems to me the first time a news headline comes out saying something like "Brand refused to pay extortionate fee to Twitter, imposter promptly takes over handle" that will be the end of most Twitter users beliefs that any brand is who they say they are on Twitter. When blue checkmarks ceased being a way to tell who was verified or notable I became aware of that fact in probably less than 24 hrs. Why won't similar information about which brand handles have been taken over by imposters spread similarly quickly? And once Twitter users cease believing brands are who they say they are without extra-Twitter information, what the hell is Twitter selling?

Well that's the thing. Verifying who's who isn't actually the issue. The internet is full of gags and impersonations. The Verified account that posed as GWB and said he missed killing Iraqis wasn't a pr problem because anyone actually mistook him for Bush... It was a PR problem because it was embarrassing and hurt the prestige of the former president.

Brands aren't buying identity verification they're buying prestige verification. The Value of Wendy's maintaining their verification and not letting them lapse to Wendy the porn actress, isn't that people will think "Oh guess they swtiched from hamburgers to adult entertainment"... Its that it will hurt the restige and brand value, that it will shift the cultural meaning of what "Wendy's" means to people and hurt their brands going forward.

This is why the argument governments should regulate it under trademark law would be so laughable. If it was just impersonated products it wouldn't matter, the real threat is its true parody and satire, and is exactly the kind of culturally relevant speech that should be protected, and thus is exactly the kind of speech that is corrosive to brands.

Brands get around the corrosive power of culture by pouring billions of dollars into shoring up those brands. Sure every sexual, political, moral, racial, and cultural norm might have changed since the 50s... but Coke is still coke, because the cocaCola Corporation spent billions each year shoring it up... and brute forcing something permanent in the impermanent world of culture...

Take some of those support sturctures, or start facilitating cultural shift by actively selling those support structures to the new interpretation and a major brand can die as fast as disco.

Like the hypothetical porn actress wendy could theoretically become more famous than the resturaunt itself if she played her cards right... in 10-15 years there could be people who didn't know the Restaurants preceded the porn icon and think it weird there's a burger joint named for her. Mothers would avoid the restaurant to keep their boys from interacting with such a degenerate brand ...

It sound absurd now... but such cultural shifts have happened before and very very fast.

Trademark law tends to apply for business use. So Pepsi or some startup couldn't use @cocacola without infringing. Dilution is a better fit, but its central examples are still concerned with defendants making a profit. There is some case law in domain name squatting. Still, that's usually run as a business.

Twitter auctioning this would absolutely fit the mold.

A private citizen who's just using it to tweet commentary or something...maybe could get away with it? It'd be a terrible idea, and would invite a horde of lawyers to pick over one's every statement for evidence of commercial gain. And I think there's an argument that building one's own brand on social media is its own sort of product, and thus dilutes the trademark.

Well that's the Beauty... you'd probably set off legal alarm bells directly selling "Coca Cola"... but most brands are neither that specific nor specialized.

Even taking Coca-cola if Twitter felt it couldn't resell that verification it still is under no obligation to enforce the verification. So you'd get millions of CocaCola impersonator accounts all fucking with the brand.

Meanwhile every Coca-Cola related term and brand that can plausibly be sold would be "Coke" "Sprite", etc. The company has hundreds of brands, most of which twitter could sell off the verification for with enough plausible deniability that it wouldn't set off trademark law.

Sprite for instance has dozens of possible meanings, digital, fantastical... the only reason Twitter would ever enforce one meaning or verification against all the others that even might be brands in their own right is CocaCola paying them to do so...

Coca cola will not pay so much to keep "Sprite" handle from being used by some 2D artist, and uses confusable with Sprite drink are blocked by their registered trademarks.

I am glad I am not the only one who thought this. As soon as we got to questions of "what companies can refer to themselves using what terms and in what contexts" the parallels with trademark law seemed obvious.

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