I wonder if Elon Musk, given his passion for Mars – he repeated the other day that we’ll go there soon – knows the parable of Flaiano’s Martian. Because she can help him understand the reasons why his tweets make less noise, generate fewer reactions or less engagement, as they say on social networks. The parable is this: it is October 12, 1954 and a Martian named Kunt, in the story of the writer Flaiano, lands in Rome, in Villa Borghese. Everyone wants to see it in the hope that “everything will change”.
The last tweet of the Martian robot
by Riccardo Luna
The excitement never seems to end but instead at some point it declines. Within a couple of months the Martian becomes part of the urban landscape and as strange as it is, it becomes normal. In the last scene, as he crosses via Veneto from a small group of young people, one addresses him “A marziano…!” and a series of “plebeian” sounds start. Raspberries, probably. What does it have to do with Elon Musk? It has to do with it because the news of these days say that his main concern is the fact that his tweets are no longer as successful as they were a few months ago.
Musk, Twitter and the decline of social networks
by Riccardo Luna
On Sunday, on the occasion of the Super Bowl, even that old president of the United States beat it in terms of views (29 million against 9); and he first deleted the tweet of shame, as an offended teenager would do, then summoned all his engineers in the middle of the night to figure out where the problem was. Problem solved, now the Twitter algorithm shows Musk’s tweets first. After all, Twitter belongs to him, and he overpaid, he can do whatever he wants with it. Who knows if that will be enough. Probably not. A few days ago an engineer was fired for trying to explain that the problem doesn’t arise from the software but from the fact that Musk is a little fed up. Oddities and exaggerations have also become normal. Just like seeing a Martian in Villa Borghese.