Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 2

Forever

The first website my colleagues and I created was for “Batman Forever” (1995, d. Joel Schumacher), starring Val Kilmer. That website changed my life and career. I never saw “Top Gun,” but Val Kilmer made a brilliant Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.” Rest in peace.

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Who turned off the juice?

Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.

The whole 90 minutes, my brain’s shrieking, “You’re having a panic attack!”

And maybe I was.

I could rattle off my diagnoses, but the simplest way to state it is that the ordinary setbacks of life fill me with dread. Always have. For over a decade, I self-medicated daily. And nightly. And afternoonly. In 1993, with help from others, I changed my life’s trajectory. But removing the booze didn’t make me “normal.” Step work healed some old wounds, but I’m still deeply anxious on my best days. And this was not shaping up to be one of them.

Look, if recovering from alcoholism during the Clinton years didn’t magically cure me of the rest of my problems, you can imagine what it feels like, being me during these dark days of fascist overreach. And, hey, maybe you don’t need to imagine. Maybe every blank unholy news day feels scary, wrong, and depressing to you, too. No need to apologize. Some days, just showing up takes courage.

Even the positive things, like the kick-ass job my daughter did applying to colleges, come with deluxe boxed sets of anxiety for folks like me. Then factor in an IRS audit, medical debt, and various friend and family traumas unrelated to the ongoing assault on decency.

Got all that?

Now, take away my electricity (and therefore my internet access), sit me down in the dark beside an iPhone with a low battery (Will it die before I finish this call? I can’t charge it, I have no electricity!), and tell me to get on the phone with the utility company that just shut off my power.

You may expect me to show up, but not to glide serenely through.

Look, I wasn’t abducted by ICE or fired without cause after years of dedicated civic service. But, for Mrs Zeldman’s little boy, loss of light and power and 90 minutes of antipatterns are grounds enough for a panic attack. (Besides, nobody tells you it will take 90 minutes to speak for 60 seconds to a human being who’ll take your debit card number over the phone. It might have taken longer. In another timeline, I might still be on hold.)

Yes, they have a “pay your bill online” website. No, it doesn’t work on my phone. Yes, it semi-works on my desktop. But a desktop needs electricity to run and to access the web. And they had cut off my electricity. It was call them or stay without power.

(Footnote: Later, when everything was resolved, I discovered that their website also doesn’t work. I use Google’s Auth app for two-factor ID, which signs me in. But when I try to see my bill, the Con Ed website asks me to sign in again, and rejects the two-factor ID. Instead it needs to send a different code to my cell phone. Why a different code? Why not the Auth code? I assume because the developers worked in siloes and were forbidden to speak to each other when creating the website. So I give it permission to send the code to my phone, and then it never sends it. I tried four times. And yes, they had my correct phone number on file. It also says, if it keeps failing to send a code to my phone (so they obviously know they have a problem), I can have it send a code to my email address instead. Except that there is no affordance to do so. It’s like if I said you could win a prize by touching this sentence. Heckuva UX, Brownie. It’s almost like they want you to have to call their overworked, underpaid, understaffed support staff. Because you can’t use their site. To rub it in, every five minutes the bot that thanks you for being a customer is interrupted by a bot that tells you to use their website to pay your bill online, which, as I just explained, you can’t. But I digress.)

As the Muzak ground on, during the better moments when I was able to focus on breathing, I pushed down the panic by telling myself I’d take a personal day as soon as the call ended and my lights came back on. Why take a personal day? I love my job. But I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to put in a day’s work after 5400 seconds of “your call is important to us, please stay on the line.” I reckoned I’d be wrecked.

But here’s the thing, and it’s why I bothered tell you this: the instant the lights came back on, I was fine. Utterly, totally, calmly, and completely.

More than that: when the modem connected and told the router the news, I pounced on my desk and got back to work, a happy cog. As if I hadn’t just spent 90 minutes in the stench of my own fear and gloom.

Am I becoming slightly more resilient with age?

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This Years Model

There’s a new AI model that can render photorealistic people and products, including text and logos.

Geisha With Walkman is something I tried to draw 40 years ago, but my rendering skills were simply too poor. The Reve Image 1.0 preview allowed me to do it instantly this morning with a single, basic prompt.

P.S. I retro-updated the Walkman with an iPod to “modernize” the concept.

What will you create?

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Your opt-innie wants to talk to your opt-outtie.

Here’s a fact: “Opt-in” is great for programs a platform controls, but meaningless when that platform has no control.

Take, for example, oh, I don’t know, let’s say AI companies scraping web content without your permission. The heart wants to make content scraping permissions “opt-in,” so people who post content online are protected by default.

Except we won’t be. Smaller, “good” AI companies may comply with “opt-out” notices; big ones surely won’t. Scrapers gonna scrape.

So why even bother with an “opt-out” setting? Because companies that continue to scrape opted-out content may find themselves on the losing end of major lawsuits.

Of course there’s no telling how these lawsuits will work out—not with ketamine supervillains and their GOP enablers willfully violating consumer, worker, and climate protection laws here in the benighted States of America. But even so, an opt-out notice is a red line, and most corporate legal teams are cautious and sober—at least during working hours.

An opt-out notice is *something.* It smells funky, but has a chance of working.

Of course opt-in feels better. It’s how we’d do things if we had control over third-party scrapers. But we don’t have that control.

Which makes opt-in for AI scraping a feel-good but basically performative gesture. And we don’t have time for those.

However pretty it might be to think otherwise, something imperfect that might work beats something pure that won’t. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful. I’m only here to tell you what we both know in our souls.

Your AI sponsor,

z

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash.

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My Glamorous Life: The Unexpected Samples

A whinnying horse. A blaxploitation sample. A female instructor saying Chinese is the easiest language to learn. These three brief audio samples regularly interrupt my late-night headphone music listening.

I’m not tripping or having a medical episode. My bedroom faces the rear of the Chinese Mission to the UN. I can’t be certain that these unwelcome late-night audio interruptions come from there, but it’s a theory. If you’ve never fallen gently asleep to a bespoke playlist of jazz ballads, only to sit bolt upright in terror an hour later because a horse is shrilly whinnying in your ears, you should try it some time.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

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A Jewish Joke

Two Jews are standing in an open cattle car en route to Auschwitz. The train pauses on a bridge overlooking a river. Directly below them is a transport ship.

“Look!” the first Jew excitedly tells his friend. “Now’s our chance! That ship down there is delivering war supplies to the port city of Kaiserberg. If we jump down to the deck now and hide in one of those tanks, maybe we can avoid Auschwitz and ride things out in Kaiserberg!”

The second Jew thinks a moment.

“What if Kaiserberg’s worse?” he asks.

Disclaimer (only read if offended):

I don’t like to explain jokes, but if this one offends you, consider that I’m Jewish myself. The joke came to me fully formed while I was chatting with a friend about something unrelated. It felt like a perfect distillation of Jewish pessimism. Not that Judaism as a religion is pessimistic, but after two thousand years of, you know, we can be a bit touchy. I’m sorry if this disclaimer ruined the joke for you. I did say not to read it unless you were offended.

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Far from the bullying crowd

The bullies who beat and mocked me in eighth grade were cruel and stupid. They despised intelligence and worshipped violence, although they would settle for athletic ability. The school blessed their thuggery by scheduling dodgeball. It was good preparation for Viet Nam, the country where I expected to be blown apart if I managed to survive to eighteen. 

If you were smart in eighth grade, you were also a fag. I don’t even think they meant you were actually queer. I think it was just one of the worst things a bully could call you before pounding on you. Indeed, it lent an aura of righteousness and inevitability to the beatings that got doled out to you. Surely all red-blooded American boys would want to beat up fags! And who could blame them? Not the schools. Not the churches. And certainly not the cops. Why, it was practically a young man’s duty to rid the world of insufficiently macho peers. A kind of post-birth eugenics, if you will.

The other word the bullies used for me was pussy, because they could imagine nothing lower than a woman, I suppose. They even called me Zeldwoman. 

I’d been picked on in the seventh grade, in Connecticut, too, but that was mostly by my pals, who were possibly just busting balls, something they’d have learned to do (and I had not) over the previous year’s summer break. My friends’ taunts once made me cry in school, which was unforgivable in a boy, so I would have been destroyed had we stayed in Connecticut, anyway. But we moved.

And the Pittsburgh of those years was worse for me. In the end, I survived eighth grade in Pittsburgh because I could crack jokes and write and draw what were called underground or head comics at the time, and one of the toughest kids in the school thought I was funny and let me hang out with his gang. They were called the Garage Gang, and they probably had roots in preadolescent group onanism, but by the time I joined as a sort of amusing mascot, they were mostly about smoking, shoplifting, stealing beer, making out with girls, and buying and selling pot and psychedelics. Eventually I would become a dealer myself, and hang with the freaks instead—smart kids who made art and got high a lot. This enabled me to survive until I was old enough to go college and reinvent myself.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things again lately. It’s not like America’s most vulnerable citizens are being targeted by a hostile, mentally retrograde government. Not like bullies, racists, and homophobes everywhere have been set free to revert to their ugliest selves by a mentally deficient ringleader who knows how to whip up a crowd and feed their hunger for violence as a screen behind which he robs us all. Of our money, of course. But more importantly of our rights, our dignity, our ability to accept one another and celebrate our differences instead of masking them. Most of all, the bullying crowd is robbing us of the more perfect union many of us hoped America was beginning to achieve. But, hey. How ’bout that Gulf of America. Winning.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov.

See also “How my grandfather came to America.”

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My weekend project

It’s Sunday; I’m playing with my music collection, content as a fed-and-burped babe. Let me explain.

I realized last night that, in tracking my shifting musical tastes via my Last.fm Pro account, I’m basically remaking “Pardon My Icons,” the creative project I launched on this very website in 1995, back when it was still at a tilde address (it did not become zeldman.com until ’96), and which first brought my work to the attention of other creatives who were also discovering the early web and making it their own.

Me, collage, and music

Although I was not serious about it, I started making collage art when I lived in Washington DC in my 20s.

Back then I was serious about composing and producing. I used an Akai 12-track recorder, a rack of synth modules commanded by my Yamaha DX7 with a custom E! card, and a PC running Personal Composer MIDI, arranging, and composition software. I also had an old Selmer Bundy flute, an African reed instrument whose name I forget (and whose “reed” turned out to be a dried locust carcass, as I would discover, to my horror, when the instrument broke), Fender amps, mics, and a variety of percussion instruments with which I made music in my Washington, DC-based recording studio. But that’s a whole ’nother story.

I did not expect to earn a living as a composer, and in that negative expectation I was more than amply fulfilled.

So I scrounged up a day job at a local advertising agency as a naively optimistic copywriter.

And a night job as a stringer for The Washington Post’s Arts section.

Music journalist by night

The paper’s arts section editor in those days was named Richard. I’d gotten his attention without soliciting it after creating “Khz” for City Paper. Khz was my weekly music column. I covered the emerging go-go and hardcore scenes, as they were what was happening in DC, and the whole country would soon be listening. Naturally, the Post made me stop writing about that interesting and relevant stuff, and instead paid me $40 per to crank out anodyne concert reviews of mainstream artists like Kenny Rogers when their tours came through DC. (I was comped to the ticket but paid my own travel and gas out of the 40 bucks.)

I typically had 30 minutes from the time the headliner started to call in my review, which meant I had to write it in my head while watching the beginning of the performance, then run to a pay phone booth (kids, ask your parents) and dictate it aloud to someone on the copy desk, before the concert had even begun to build up a head of steam. This wasn’t fair to the artists. I did the best job I could under the circumstances, taking pride in how quickly I could structure and ship a news story. Richard fired me before I could quit, but that, too, is another story.

Most importantly at that time, I lived with a girlfriend. She was an artist and architect who had left that career to study computer programming. We were social (many friends, drinking was often involved), and serious about our art—which, in my case, was music, even if I earned my living writing concert reviews and crafting passable but hardly brilliant ads.

Through all of those ups and downs, and to the side of those major efforts, I kept at the collage for years, putting in several hours a night making the things. When each was finished—and deciding that any art product was finished was damned tough for my restless young mind—I would carefully frame it behind glass, and mount it on the walls of our apartment.

Was it art? Just a hobby? Who knows? It made me happy.

And then gradually, as I put more effort into my music and ad careers, I set the collage-making aside, for a time.

New career in a new town[image error]

Ten years later, I was a New York art director and copywriter, two years sober, and no longer in that same romantic relationship. That’s okay, I was in a new one.

I’d packed my music studio equipment—now obsolete because Akai stopped making the proprietary multitrack tape format that their 12-track unit ran on—in a storage unit. Eventually I’d give away all that music and recording equipment (keeping only the multitrack masters), but that, too, is another story.

Cutting-edge for a day

Then in 1995, one of our ad clients asked the agency if we could make them a website. Like many of you, we lied and said, sure. And then we figured out how to actually do it.

The client was Warner Bros., the project was “Batman Forever,” our visionary client was Donald Buckley, my partners were Steve McCarron, Alec Pollak, and Doug Rice, and the website was a huge hit, attracting half the people who visited the early web. (Alec’s “Flashback 1995: batmanforever” shares screenshots, which are great, although they cannot convey what a breakthrough the site was in March, 1995.)

With 3 million people using the web in 1995, the site got 1.5 million visits a day for over a year. Not bad.

Pardon my icons (1995)[image error]

I immediately set to work creating a personal site (this one), and Pardon My Icons was one of its first “entertainments.”

As is often the case with my creative efforts, I made these tiny, Warhol-inflected bits of art as a protest against what I saw as the mediocrity of the icons in general use on that early, early web.

(Similarly, my friends and I would later start The Web Standards Project in protest against the dumb ways most folks were being told to create websites, e.g. using proprietary tags instead of W3C and ECMA standards, because browsers didn’t properly support those. Having lost access to my musical master tapes because I’d invested in Akai’s non-standard and eventually discontinued tape format, I was kind of keen on not letting the internet fall victim to the same kind of nonstandard f*ckery. But that, too, is another story. We are gathered here to talk about icons and collage. So let’s do that:)

A mental break

I track my music on Last.fm Pro. Here’s my account. (But don’t look unless you, too, have a Pro account. I’ll explain why in a moment.)

[image error]Some of the artists I listen to, as shown on last.fm Pro.

Last.fm lists the artists you play, arranging them by the number of plays. Thus, if you were to play two tracks by Freddie Gibbs and three by Bill Evans, you’d have a collage featuring those two artists, with Bill preceding Freddie because he has one more play than Freddie.

In regular, free old last.fm, you can see other people’s artists as a list, arranged by number of plays, interrupted by an ugly barrage of ads.

Collage for days

In Pro, you can see their artists and yours as an ad-free collage that goes on for pages and pages. Plus, as a Pro user, you can choose which photo represents which artist—and even upload your own. When viewing your collection, you and your visitors will see a collage of your favorite artists, in descending order of plays, using artwork you not only select, but you can also create.

I like Pro. And even though the product isn’t exactly in what you’d call hyper active development—even though the server isn’t always fast, even though there are a few bugs that will probably never get fixed, even though new features are introduced rarely, and the company’s customer service department isn’t exactly the most active help desk in tech—despite those minor drawbacks, the site does things no other website can do. And at US $3, the Pro account isn’t exactly priced out of reach for most customers. (If you can afford a computer, internet access, a music collection and/or a music streaming service, you can probably scratch the 3 bucks together as well.)

How to collage on last.fm[image error]

By controlling what I listen to, and the order in which I listen, I’m slowly building an infinite collage of my evolving musical tastes.

By choosing or finding the artist photos (often post-producing them in Photoshop), I create my mood, my rhythm, and my shifting color palettes.

There are design rules governing where portraits should be placed. For instance, people whose face or gaze points rightward get placed on the left of the grid, so they lead the viewer’s eye from left to right, into the composition, whereas those who gaze to my left belong on the right side, leading the viewer’s eye back in.

To reposition someone, I may listen to a few extra plays of them. Or use last.fm’s Pro Admin to subtract a few plays.

As you may have inferred, an accurate count of everything I’ve listened to over the past years is no longer my goal in using last.fm; the goal is the endless collage.

It’s kinda spiritual.

(Reminder: the only way to see it is to be a Pro member of last.fm, which turns off ads and enables you to view your own and other people’s collections in a grid format instead of a list. If you’re a non-member, you see a list jammed with ads. Of no interest to anyone.)

If a tree falls, is it art?

Unlike the real-world collages I made in my 20s (which could be mounted on a wall), and unlike 1995’s “Pardon My Icons” (which could be viewed in any browser connected to the web), my current art-making/hobby activity is not publicly viewable except by last.fm Pro users. And that’s okay. ’Cause I’m not designing this for anyone besides myself to enjoy. I mean, if you see it, cool. But if nobody ever sees it, engaging with it will still make me happy.

Which makes this collage business—what? Therapy? Gaming? (Just of a different sort than anybody else?) A form of stimming? It definitely helps lower my general anxiety, providing a space where I can make pretty pictures while listening to my favorite music, which, driven in part by the desire to expand the collage, is widely inclusive and always expanding.

The hunt for fresh collage material also helps keep me interested in new music. (Readers who feel stuck, take note.)

I do this activity every weekend when my more normal friends are biking or baking or dancing.

Is this activity, into which I’ve now poured many hours of my life, artistry or autism? Who cares? The point is that it’s escapist and harmless and we all need some of that in our lives, however we can grab it.

However you grab your moments of calm, meditation, and happiness, never be ashamed of taking care of yourself.

See also…

Rediscovering music: If Spotify exposes you to new music other people are listening to, Last.fm helps remind you of great music in your existing collection that may have slipped your mind.

For love of pixels: Stroll with us down memory lane as we celebrate the pearl anniversary of pixel art creation’s primary progenitor, and some of the many artists and design languages it inspired.

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Valediction.

I started using Twitter before the dawn of the iPhone. Back then, in 2006, it was a fun, funky, fully functional (if barebones) beta messaging service used mainly by The People of the Web—the kind of folks who attended the SXSW Interactive conference and probably spoke on the panels. 

You know. You were there. You were one of us: Designers. Developers. Pioneers. Writers of blog posts, trade books, and all the little guide texts that websites depended on to attract and serve their users. People who, in casual conversation, might use words like “digerati” unironically and without intending to be pretentious. 

We believed in the power of the web to highlight unheard voices and evolve a more just society. If we were naive, and we surely were, at least we were on the side of the angels. Turns out, not everybody was.

A new skill

Years before Slack, the early 140-character Twitter served as a kind of private pre-Slack for the digitally awake and aware.

Back in those days, if you’d asked me or my conference-going fellow bloggers and designers who that first, rudimentary Twitter was for, we’d have said it was for us. For people like us, who’d spent years mastering all manner of skills and technologies simply to communicate online. Who saw value in the act of putting words together, so long as there were people to read and react to those words.

(After expressing our feelings of pride and ownership in the Twitter community, of course, the more Ted-talk-y among us early users would have waxed rhapsodic about microblogging and its potential to improve the world. More about that in a moment.)

With the birth of Twitter, when we wanted to pin down something that was twitching about in our heads and transmit it to other heads, the skill we needed wasn’t CSS or HTML or art direction or back-end wrangling. It was the ability to edit our thoughts down to a glittering trophy built with 140 characters or less. A new skill to master!

How much do people like us love showing the world what we’ve learned! This much: Even after Twitter no longer relied on wireless carriers’ text messaging services, so that the permitted character count was consequently doubled, many of us would-be Oscar Wildes continued to whittle away at our tweets, limiting them to 140 characters or fewer on principle.

After all, if we could deliver fully functioning website in 10K or less, we could surely craft deathless sentences from a tightly constrained character count. Right? Of course right!

Only connect

Years later, with a huge international user base, the idea persisted that a globally connected free and open messaging network like Twitter could help humanity do less evil and more good.

If you wanted proof, you could look to the first Arab Spring, to Me Too, to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—movements that were greatly abetted by the busy, worldwide network. 

Of course, while many cheered and participated in these activist-driven movements, others saw them as threatening. Some felt the world was changing too fast, and that their views on social issues, like their once-good jobs, had no champion among the ruling classes. We all know how that turned out. 

And now a brief digression about power and megaphones:

How I got over

Nearly two decades before Bluesky and its sweet starter packs, Twitter hired creatives to recommend selected  users to newcomers. Some of the coolest people I know did that work.

Web design was at its peak, so quite naturally the in-house team put together a list of influential designers, developers, and writers for new users to follow. And for a variety of reasons, I was among those early recommended follows. (I may still be listed there, if the current X still welcomes newcomers with follow recommendations.) Which is how, at my Twitter peak, I ended up with a blue checkmark and 355,000 followers.

Even now, on wretched “X,” where I no longer post, I still retain 305,000 followers. At least, that’s what the stats told me when I popped in just now to find out. But are there really that many folks following me there?

How many of my current Twitter/X “followers” used to participate but have since quit quietly, without bothering to close their accounts? Lots, I reckon.

Some may avoid the site but keep their accounts open for strategic reasons, such as preventing someone else from hijacking their name (not that the owner can’t take over your account whenever he feels like it—but I digress).

Mainly, I’m guessing a lot of folks lost interest in the site but forgot to close their accounts. In other words, the data says 305K, but it’s probably less than half that many active users at most, few of whom would even see my tweets if I still posted there, as the algorithm throttles texts from folks like me.

Who cares, besides me? Nobody. Nor should they. And, besides, except as a temptation to stay, my follower count is beside the point.

Come play with us, Danny

The point is that the former Twitter has become a hateful cesspool, not simply mirroring but amplifying its owner’s profound insecurities, god-awful beliefs, and self-serving lies, and forcing that insanity into the public consciousness, whether we avoid X or not.

Thus, millions of Americans who don’t use Twitter/X nevertheless believe conspiracies that the owner and his favorite acolytes use the site to broadcast.

And there’s no doubt that, in consequence of the above, X helped determine the results of the last US presidential election. (I use the phrase “last election” here to mean “most recent election,” although I fear it may come to mean more than that.)

So, in the interest of not supporting fascism, do I abandon these readers? Thanks for asking! Pretty much, yeah.

If you like my longer-form writing, you can find it here on zeldman.com, at A List Apart, and in my books.

If you like my chatty posts, news bytes, and occasional brief confessions, join me on Bluesky.

Good luck to us all in the coming year.

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Domain harvesting and the Twitter long game in retrospect

If you have a website that gets steady but diminishing traffic, and whose domain registration dates back at least a decade, you may encounter offers to buy your domain. These used to come mainly from pornographers, on the premise that your readers, upon encountering nudity instead of the morning farm report in their web browsers, would be momentarily confused—but at least a few of them would stick around to become customers.

Over the years, tricking people into seeing unexpected content and converting a small percentage of them into customers has proven to be an effective business tactic. Mindless, sure. Depressing, you bet. But effective. If all you want to do is make money, this is a way to do it. See also the penny rounding error crime from Office Space (by way of Superman III). It’s a numbers game. Make an infinitesimal profit a gazillion times, and it becomes a healthy profit. Buy skrillions of popular domains at a low enough cost, and rake in double your money in subscription fees and paid downloads.

These days, of course, the lowball domain harvesters are not limited to pornographers or even human beings, but the point of the transaction has ever been the same: to ambush your community and convert at least some of them into customers.

What I’m working up to is that, for some reason, this morning I woke up recognizing that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a far more expensive—and destructive—version of that same old grift. It was conversion en masse. To seize a public commons shared by 600 million readers, writers, and keyboard adrenalin addicts, and to profoundly change the conversations they were having. A digital takeover with historic and deeply tragic real-world consequences.

For sale: personal, imperial power

Musk’s “folly,” it turns out, wasn’t the ego-fueled, soon regretted impulse purchase it looked like. At least, if it was that, it was not only that. It was also, as we can see now, a plan to buy not merely a U.S. presidential election outcome, but, with it, personal, imperial power. Whether that was always the plan, or only became the plan after Musk found himself stuck with the $44B Twitter deal and decided to make the best of it, the consequences for our world are the same. And, from Musk’s point of view—at least until he and the man he helped put in the White House have their inevitable supervillain falling out—the plan worked.

A psychological detail here is that, in contrast to the lowballing sleaze merchants whose tactics he otherwise emulated, Musk appeared to have wildly overpaid for his prize. How could he be so stupid, we grinned at each other—and put him out of our minds. Which gave him that much more freedom to make his moves. Which, although evil, were not stupid.

As an unelected U.S. co-president in an administration in which two-fisted self-dealing will be expected, and will go unreported by a weak and cowering press, Musk will become his own Treasury Department in his role as a cutter of “government waste.” (End Medicare. Get a job, Grandma! Launch Medicare dollars into SpaceX. While we’re at it, let’s stop pampering our military veterans with health care. And so on, ad nauseum.) And if that’s not enough—and somehow it never is enough for these people—he’ll also rule over economic realms in which his companies compete for astronomical government contracts. Gee, I wonder how that will go?

Either Musk deliberately spent enough to make his enemies think he was an idiot, and stop paying attention to him. Which is evil-genius-level chess-mastery if it was, in fact, planned that way. Or else he overspent as a bluff, got tripped up in his own hubris, ended up stuck with Twitter, decided to wreck it while high on Ketamine, and somehow blundered his way into a revenge plan for the history books—if we’ll still be allowed to have those. Either way, the rest of us are in the same bad trouble.

All things considered, the Titanic sank quickly. Our democracy has just a tad more time. What can good people do today to give non-billionaires a fighting chance?

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