FBXL Social

Once you get into an organizational structure, there's an important thing to understand: Even people in power only have so many levers. I became a supervisor where I worked once, and the workers thought I had all this power to tell everyone from the CEO on down to the customer to fuck off, and the reality is I had the power to do exactly what both my bosses and my staff would let me do. There was some latitude, but you can make decisions within a certain range of options, you can't just do whatever you want and expect to stay in charge.

The same applies to a CEO, even of a private company. Being a CEO doesn't mean you're God. It means you have a lot of power, but it also means you have the power to really break things.

So if you take over a big tech site, you have a lot to balance. You have an existing userbase that we know will leave if you mess things up too much. You have advertisers can easily leave. You have business partners that are essential, everywhere from real estate companies to datacenter providers to ISPs to payment processors and employee support companies such as insurance companies and paycheque processing companies. Even employees, to a degree. You an fire some of them, but you can't fire everyone. At some point someone needs to actually accomplish something, and at some point someone needs to know the proprietary information about how the site works. Then there's the government, the sword of damocles that hangs on a particularly thin thread when we're talking about global megacorporations that are not loved by anyone -- Once you end up in the government's crosshairs, good luck.

To me, this means we shouldn't expect that much from #twitter as #elonmusk takes over. Continuing to fight for decentralized libre solutions is the only way we can be assured that the people who run our services have our best interests in mind, because we will be those people.