It’s beginning to look a lot like crisis. The BBC reports :
Twitter has told employees that the company’s office buildings will be temporarily closed, effective immediately.
In a message seen by the BBC, workers were told that the offices would reopen on Monday 21 November.
It did not give a reason for the move.
The announcement comes amid reports that large numbers of staff were quitting after new owner Elon Musk called on them to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.
The message went on to say: “Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.”
The Atlantic had a piece the other day about how tech is in a midlife crisis , but with Twitter and FTX it looks more like adolescence. One guy’s vibrating the furniture of the headmaster’s office while the other is trying to smirk his way through social expulsion.
And fair enough, maybe. Maybe these man-children got us to where we are because they were hopped up on a decade of free money; in which case we should probably be getting in contact as a matter of urgency with their responsible adults and legal guardians.
Elsewhere on Friday . . .
— A theme park crisis is wrecking South Korea’s bond market (Foreign Policy)
— A Q&A with Nouriel Roubiini (Project Syndicate)
— An FTX contagion chart (Molly White)
— How a lightly-sourced AP story almost set off World War III (Responsible Statescraft)
— “ Elon’s Musk’s BS in Physics is BS ” (Twitter)
— Tech firm ID.me overstated jobless fraud to win US contracts, house finds (Bloomberg $)
— Study shows cash transfers from rich to poor can increase happiness of the poor (Phys.org)
— “ I accepted every publicist pitch I got for a full day ” (Slate)
— We now know why some poos float and others sink (New Scientist)
— Cursed AI generated candy (AI Weirdness)