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Comments and opinions expressed on THE KNIGHT SHIFT are those of Christopher Knight and not necessarily those of subjects discussed in this blog, of advertisers appearing on it or of any reasonable human being. Any correspondence/irate letters/lawsuit threats/Nigerian e-mail scams can be sent to theknightshift@gmail.com.
The past three weeks in American life have been extraordinary, to put it mildly. There hasn't been this much history made in my lifetime since the collapse of communism. In some ways there are parallels between the two. The Soviet Union fell because of Gorbachev's reforms in the face of that country's unsustainable bureaucracy. And what some are calling American Revolution 2.0 is now transpiring as a consequence of even worse bureaucracy in the United States at last being made accountable to its people.
What President Donald Trump and his administration, and especially Elon Musk and his crack team of boffins at DOGE, are accomplishing just might be the second most dramatic "kicking over the tables at the temple" ever recorded. There will be volumes written in years and decades to come about the winter of 2025 and the shaking up of the American government that has transpired in less than a month. It's been a beautiful thing to behold... and I am of the mind that it's going to get even better.
In Treasury's basement, fluorescent lights hummed above four young coders. Their screens cast blue light across government-issue desks, illuminating energy drink cans and agency badges. As their algorithms crawled through decades of payment data, one number kept growing: $17 billion in redundant programs. And counting.
"We're in," Akash Bobba messaged the team. "All of it."
Edward Coristine's code had already mapped three subsystems. Luke Farritor's algorithms were tracing payment flows across agencies. Ethan Shaotran's analysis revealed patterns that career officials didn't even know existed. By dawn, they would understand more about Treasury's operations than people who had worked there for decades.
This wasn't a hack. This wasn't a breach. This was authorized disruption.
It's a helluva read, well worth recommending to anyone with even a passing interest in information technology or constitutional government.
This line from the 1983 movie WarGames has come to mind in the past couple of days:
Except right now it's Elon Musk instead of Dabney Coleman. And instead of the WOPR computer the problem is that Twitter is, at the moment, complete junk.
A few years ago I embedded the timeline of my most recent tweets on this blog, in the right-hand column toward the top of the page. It gradually came to be a great complement to the blog proper. Instead of making a post about anything that I found interesting enough to share, I simply tweeted it and it would also come up on the blog. It had become a "secondary spinal cord" of my humble website.
Well, as you can see, the timeline is gone. There is just a link to my individual Twitter page and you can see some of my tweets there. I say "some" because Twitter owner Elon Musk has limited how many tweets you can see per day. And oh yeah, you MUST have a Twitter account and be signed into it if you want to read tweets at all.
Mr. Musk, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO US?!?
Musk claims that he's doing this to keep Google and ChatGPT and whatever other systems are out there from automatically sucking up information from Twitter.
What Musk has done instead is make Twitter absolutely FUBAR and completely useless so far as any meaningful work goes.
It's the proverbial "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". Speaking of babies, why do I now think that had he been in Solomon's place, Musk would have gone ahead and cut the little infant in two?
"Mr. Musk, after very serious consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your microblogging service sucks."
Well, there's only one thing that I can think about doing, in light of these circumstances. That being: I'm going to stop using Twitter at all, for the foreseeable future. If Elon Musk reverses course and rolls back all of these limits, I will gladly come back to Twitter and forgive its owner and anyone else responsible for doing this to us. But I need my embedded Twitter feed back to normal.
Nobody of sound mind does this to his or her customers. It's like the phone company limiting your calls to two hundred seconds per day. That's how insane these new policies at Twitter are.
Maybe Musk will get the point if enough people complain. Because right now it looks like he's sabotaging his own company. If there's a financial angle to that, I've no idea what it could be. But he needs to fix this, immediately.
