The Twentieth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The mayor of New York City, it’s a place, not sure if you’ve heard of it, has a podcast, or he did, but he hasn’t updated it since the FBI took his phone from him, and it’s unclear if those are related things, but it’s funny to imagine that they are, so we might as well believe they’re related. Werner Herzog has said that he makes films to reveal what he refers to as “the ecstatic truth” and I think that’s sorta what I’m talking about here. Not sure how Werner’s character in The Mandalorian fits in, except, that could also be evidence we’re living in a funny timeline. At any rate, up to the point that a couple aviator sunglasses aficionados handed Mayor of New York City Eric Adams a warrant on the street, the only person in the world who’d listened to every episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast was me, a dog walker in Queens, and I doubt that’s changed much.

We’re still clinging to the holiday season hangover, so not much is happening on the Eric Adams beat. He’s still not doing his podcast, but no one listened to it, so no one knows this, except people who listen to this podcast, hi. Reporters are just starting to get back to news gathering. The mayor hasn’t been doing a lot of news making outside of restoring some of the money to city departments that he’d cut at the end of the year. You’ll be shocked to hear that this includes the NYPD and as of this recording does not include libraries.

I feel like making a podcast episode for y’all though, and also I do have a little announcement about something I’m gonna try for those of you who stick around till the end of the pod, though what I’m gonna talk about for now is reasonably abstract and aesthetics focused, so if that’s not your jam, I understand if you bail and just keep an eye on your feed for the more that is to come.

Speaking of aesthetics and the holidays, though, it’s interesting how aesthetics can stand in for meaning. And then become their own force, and force is meaningful. Like I said, I’m gonna be a liberal arts major about that for the next little bit, which may be a word of warning for some listeners, but I feel like I’ve got a handle on my audience and what they’re up for, and I did just namecheck Herzog’s theory of the ecstatic truth, and you’re still here, so strap in, pals.

A good recent example of what I’m talking about is The Twitter Files, and god bless you if you don’t know what The Twitter Files are. Here’s a rundown. I’ll try to go as quick as I can, but it’s like trying to explain NFTs. If you don’t want watch someone’s eyes harden with concern for your mental state when you say things like “dozens of apes were stolen by blockchain hackers” you have to give them a certain amount of context.

Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter in 2022 and it has gone very smoothly. Shortly after taking the controls, while the website continued to work extremely well, Musk started coordinating the release of internal documents related to what he termed “free speech suppression” on the platform.

Most of what I’m relating to you is available on wikipedia, by the by. There’s no need to try to find other sources for The Twitter Files, especially not on Twitter itself, unless you have a high tolerance for guys who look like sourdough starter failures deadnaming their nieces and nephews.

When the owner of a company releases dirt about the company, that tends to undermine the company, so you’d think he’d anonymously go to a reporter and just hand the info over and walk away.

Musk publicly gave the files to several different people on Twitter, most of whom lack have what I’d call robust reporting credentials. Matt Taibbi was a reporter at places like Rolling Stone but then people looked into his old writing and this book of his where he’d admitted to being a sex creep and now he writes a self published newsletter. Also he wears a stupid looking hat. Bari Weiss was an opinion writer at The New York Times who resigned after people were mean to her online for op-eds she wrote, and this wasn’t fair at all since she was just defending the idea of using the American military to kill protesters who were upset about the murder of an unarmed Black man by a cop. Michael Shellenberger works for Bari Weiss and was a climate activist until he went, best I can tell, insane, and decided that the climate wasn’t changing but if it was it’s no big deal, wokeism and critical race theory are huge threats, and to tackle them he started running for governor of California over and over and now he’s the governor of California, so big get for Elon. Lee Fang is actually a reporter. He works at The Intercept and far as I can tell the worst dustup he’s gotten into was getting called out for being racist on Twitter. He apologized for it. He does have a cool name, and hopefully he’ll stop at one racism. Speaking of cool names, David Zweig is new to me, he’s written a handful of guest op-eds for The Atlantic and the Times, a couple books, and two self-released albums of music I won’t be listening to, thanks. He has about as many Twitter followers as my most popular Twitter handle ever had, and I’ll remind you that you’ve never heard of me. So, outside of him being the kind of ‘misinformation debunker’ who will angrily tell you that if you don’t remove your child’s mask he will be leaving the Chuck E Cheese immediately, why is this gadfly with no useful background or following that would be of any service to this effort getting these documents? Dunno, but there’s also a Canadian academic with the same name who mostly writes scholarly articles about China, and while I can’t say why any specific David Zweig wound up the recipient of a tranche of files from the ketamine addled CEO of a failing microblogging site, or which Zweig Musk thought he was giving them to at the time, I’ll encourage you to recall Herzog’s ecstatic truth here. The other guy who received Musk’s disclosures was Alex Berenson, and if he sounds familiar but you’re having trouble placing him, you might be thinking of his 2011 novel The Shadow Patrol, the sixth in his series about CIA super agent John Wells. More likely, though, you’re thinking of him in the context of the Atlantic crowning him The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man, or pre-Musk Twitter banning him for regularly violating its Covid misinformation policy.

Those are the people Musk released his files to. One actual reporter, a sex pest blogger, a few people who shout their opinions while claiming to be reporters, and a guy who once wrote an album called All Now With Wings, which is, I’m sure, terrible. Most of these dipshits had the smarts to shut the hell up about what Musk insisted they do in exchange for the files, but Taibbi was verbally diarrhetic enough to let the world know that he had agreed with Musk to “certain conditions” in order to publish; he wouldn’t elaborate further, again, I encourage manifesting the hilarious as a treat for yourself.

I’m sorry it took such a long walk to get ourselves off of this short pier but, there’s almost no there to the Twitter Files. The actual content shows that Twitter had messy moderation, and as someone whose life has been threatened on Twitter: can confirm. But I would also have been able to get all the evidence I needed if I’d just used Twitter for more than about five minutes. Twitter had moderation policies that allowed them to remove any number of things, including revenge porn, disinfo and posts where the poster is being an enormous piece of shit, and all of these were used to limit the reach of posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop, pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, posts by people who were posting Covid disinformation, and posts by people who were being enormous pieces of shit, like the then President of the United States when he tried to kill his then vice president. At times, official arms of the government, as well as both major 2020 presidential campaigns complained about certain posts to Twitter, and they did so with the typical grace and competence you’d expect. Twitter typically handled these contacts with the typical grace and competence that you’d expect, as well, if you’d spent the requisite five minutes on platform. Entities with skin in the game, like groups that don’t like it when people drown to death in their own lungs from a preventable airborne disease, apparently attempted to police Twitter’s content for disinfo and may have caused Twitter to suppress what would commonly be referred to as “murderous lies”. Censorious horrors abound.

One thing that didn’t get a ton of traction but that appears to be genuinely interesting and potentially actually bad, is that Twitter whitelisted US Government created accounts that were known to be running overseas influence campaigns. That’s the one Lee Fang reported, and it seems like actual reporting by an actual reporter was done there, so kudos, please don’t do any more racisms.

But the rest of it? Here’s where I finally get back to the point that kicked this off. The aesthetics of the reporting. These facts were presented by the folks I’ve mentioned in sprawling Twitter threads, and breathless substack posts. There was a, for lack of a better word, vibe to the whole thing. A vibe of revealing, of featureless folders being handed off without breaking step, of thumb drives being slotted while taking one last look over one’s shoulder, of ceiling fans that don’t move the dust and eyes widening in sudden comprehension. The reader was treated as if they were Woodward or Bernstein, and fucking Bari Weiss was Deep Throat. Everything was revealed, in sprawling Twitter threads, as one piece after another of a grand conspiracy to silence free speech on the platform and to harm conservative voices. The aesthetics took the place of the facts.

Remember, during the 2016 campaign, when Wikileaks started releasing email tranches from Hilary Clinton’s private server? Of course you do, if you were old enough at the time. It’s now oh my god it’s almost 8 years ago so kids who were 10 years old are approaching adulthood fuck what the fuck I have to lie down.

Anyway, now that I’m prone, the actual content of the wikileaks disclosures was relatively meaningless, at least in the context of determining who the better candidate for president was. It was the aesthetics of the release. I remember tuning into what must have be one of the last times I ever watched an over the air network outside of a being at the in laws context and seeing Scott Pelley lead off the CBS evening news broadcast by literally saying “Drip Drip Drip.”

The aesthetic became meaningful. The message wasn’t the message anymore. The medium wasn’t even the message. The inflection was the message. It was a meaningful part of the reason Trump became president, a meaningful part of the rise of Qanon, and all that followed.

The real world reasons for Clinton’s poor email hygiene, and the relatively banal nature of her emails weren’t important for the 2016 campaign. For the Twitter Files, content was equally unimportant. The fact that the “victims” of Twitter’s groping content moderation efforts were intentionally attempting to cause harm to the platform’s users, or people who like to not die, or the platform itself, that was not really a part of the reported fact pattern, nor did it seem to trouble the people who were “reporting” these breathless facts that the current owner of the platform - the guy who fed them this stuff - is a raging anti-semite and that Twitter is now a free speech haven in the sense that you are more free to be the target of slurs and to see unmoderated horror whenever there’s a mass shooting or someone decides to post child abuse images.

And that’s not particularly new, either. I mean, I’m of a certain age so I’ll just say that I’ve seen the unfiltered internet and I need you to trust me when I say you want a well moderated internet. You want a well moderated internet, of course, but a) content moderation is hard, and b) Twitter was barely good at being a website, let alone a moderated one. You only have to look at literally every other thing about Twitter to see that the idea that a conspiracy could be afoot there completely falls apart when it meets the reality of the site not being in any way competent. And look, as the status quo shows, and actually relevant to Eric Adams: when dealing with people with unpopular views, or who the powerful wish to oppress, the powerful don’t need a conspiracy, they just need cops. People do things like silencing people in public. They do it with the levers of state power. They use laws to stop people from accessing the means to medically transition or terminate pregnancies. They don’t need a fucking website.

What the fuck does this have to do with Eric Adams? First, as you have probably gathered by now, is where aesthetics stand in for action. This is Adams. The reason he gets nothing done is that he’s branded his mayoralty the swagger administration. Swagger isn’t a result, it’s a vibe.

Second is, the aesthetic only carries you so far, and only with people who are either already politically inclined to buy what you’re selling, or dim enough to swap aesthetics for content. 2016 was when I stopped watching network TV, within a year I no longer felt like I did when I was a vegetarian in Boston in the 90s, which is to say, it stopped being weird, and it was maybe a year after that when having network TV in your home made you the weird one in my circle of coastal elites. That’s roughly the timeline along which niche media became the norm. Now people who watch network TV are their own demographic, and the reach of the evening news is probably about as meaningful as a popular email newsletter. In the era where everyone’s mind is more or less already made up, that’s not enough people. We’re actually at the point where you need to add value or at least your audience needs to perceive that you’re adding value. Trump would have crushed Biden had he done literally anything about Covid or any of the “crises” that Donald had identified, some of which were even real. He’d have won if he’d added value. Instead, he posted through it. He’s the ultimate in aesthetics before content. He may even get elected again, but, just like in 2020, that’ll be more about the perception that the voting public has of the lack of value added by his opponent.

But also: I really liked Twitter. And I really like NYC. For all the problems both had, and there are many. So many problems that it’s tempting to leave either forever. When Musk took over Twitter, that is, in fact, what I did. It’s easier to walk away from a website than to uproot one’s life, and Eric Adams would probably not be the reason one would want to cite for doing just about anything. But.

Like I said, there hasn’t been much to talk about with Eric Adams lately, certainly not his podcast. So I’ve been wondering what to do with this, and I want to shout out a writer named Eamon Levesque. Eamon wrote an excellent post for a website called Byline, which I’ll link in the show notes, about one of the mayor’s very strange books, and in doing so, reminded me that the mayor has other content out there through which we can examine his personality. So, for the next little bit, I’m going to look at his books. Hopefully? Adams does get back to his terrible podcast soon, it is the most unfiltered look we have at him, but I’ve taken an initial scan of some of what the mayor has written over the years, and I think we’ve got a meaty little stew that we can fill our tummies with until then. Speaking of food, starting with the next episode, we’re going to be talking about Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses, written by Eric Adams, who isn’t a doctor or nutritionist but is instead a politician and cop.

As always, if you’re an NYC news pervert like me, read and support The City and Hell Gate. If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it. Rate and review it if you choose, but it’s not the choice I’d make.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

My thanks, as always, to John Coyne. Additionally, you may have noticed that I am not an especially normal person, so my thanks as well this week to my normal friend Noah, who sat there and listened and was normal while I said a bunch of stuff to him about the Twitter Files. Because he’s normal, even though he used Twitter, he’d never heard of the Twitter Files, and that was very helpful to me in dialing in how to communicate it to y’all, assuming that at least some of you are also normal.

See you next time.