Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools

I. In the early 2000s, an old friend with a new business wanted me to design his website, but his partner balked: “I can get two websites made in India for half the price,” the partner said. “Sounds like you should do that,” I replied, ending the negotiation. Rude fools were not clients I chose to pursue. The rude, cheap partner was later part of the self-selected posse of suck-ups and hangers-on who advised Elon M*sk on his invasion purchase of Twitter. It was the rude, cheap partner’s idea to strip Twitter users of note of their blue verification badges and sell meaningless blue verification badges to anybody willing to pay $8/month for the privilege. So, no blue verification mark or algorithmic support for the tweets of Stephen King, but blue “verification” and an algorithmic boost for Joey Knuckles, First of His Mother’s Basement. M*sk must have dug the idea, because he implemented it immediately—proving, as if we weren’t already drowning in evidence, that people with bad taste…