Twitter Blue Checkmark: Free Forever Whether I Want It Or Not (I don't)
I paid for one month of Twitter Blue to write an article. That expired in January but I've had a checkmark since and can't get rid of it.
Update - I think it’s finally gone. This has to be the dumbest promo ever - a payment that delivers negative value.
Second update — Apparently, I spoke too soon (and, no, I haven’t paid anything since December):
I paid for one month of Twitter Blue that included the new verified checkmark and now can’t get rid of it. My subscription expired on Jan 13, 2023, and I’ve been verified ever since whether I want to be or not.
Backing up, after an amusing though vaguely troubling conversation with the runner of a 94,200 account Twitter bot farm, I thought wide verification was an opportunity would improve Twitter. Advertisers would pay more to reach real people rather than, say, “Donald’s” bots went the line of thinking. It’s one of the more popular posts I’ve written.
Eventually, Elon Musk took over, and in between randomly bulk-firing people, quickly implemented the idea. I’d like to think my post had something to do with that but I’m reasonably sure it didn’t and if I claim it did he’d fire me despite I’ve never worked at Twitter.
Anyway, the first version of Twitter’s paid verification service didn’t go especially well. In their haste to not make waste of their employment status the staff who’d survived failed to actually verify who was signing up. This enabled anybody to get a blue checkmark — the French AOP of digital personality — and sign up they did.
Somebody pretended to be Eli Lilly and announced they were giving away insulin for free as the discoverers of insulin Banting and Best intended:
The ghosts of Banting and Best may have cheered but the shareholders of Eli Lilly weren’t amused. Those nine words, combined with the blue check, caused Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi’s stock to dive.
Twitter quickly turned off the service and employees returned to their sleeping bags working tirelessly to tune it. What’s needed, they decided, was at least a smidgen of actual verification.
They released the new offering on January 12, 2023, and I signed up the next day with the goal of seeing if verification was indeed an opportunity or at least to write an article about the new service.
My findings: meh. The features my $8 bought didn’t really make any difference. My tweets and replies seemed to reach a lot of people but they often do ok anyway. The extra features were dumb: an ability to delay sending tweets (uh - just don’t press send) or edit them briefly (again, delete and resend).
Worse, my 17-year-old daughter said “dad — only assholes pay for blue checkmarks.”
“Only assholes pay for blue checkmarks.”
Tuned into memes more than me, I admit she had a valid point. Comparing tweets and replies from paid blue checks rather than randos it’s clear this stereotype has legs.
I hadn’t been writing much due to moving and working on a book but even if that weren’t the case there just wasn’t much to write about my $8 experiment: Twitter Blue was boring.
I’d read that changing your name would erase the blue check and, not wanting to be auto-classified as an asshole, changed it to something different. I forget what exactly but it was something like “Michael Olenick - Blue Check Go Away.”
Sure enough, after warning me I’d lose my blue check it went away.
I went to change it back but couldn’t until my new identity of “Michael Olenick - Blue Check Go Away” was verified. OK - so I’ll just wait. Eventually, I passed that hurdle and was blue-check-free. Twitter then allowed me to change it back to just “Michael Olenick.” Then, after another verification notice, the blue check came back.
Back to being marked as an asshole, I realized I had to wait for the subscription to expire. Not long after it did but the blue check remained. A bug, I thought, I’ll just want a couple more weeks.
The Blue Letter remained.
OK - I’ll change my name again, this time with no Twitter Blue subscription, and that’ll remove it. “Michael Olenick - No Blue Check” or something like that was the new name. Again, it disappeared. However, after being locked out of changing it a second time, I changed it back. Despite being an ordinary unpaid schlepper like everybody else, the blue check came back.
It was becoming clear: once you pay and get a verified blue check you apparently have it forever whether you want it or not.
Blue checks are like catching herpes from Elon Musk. Depending on one’s attitude, the act of getting it may be fun for a short amount of time but they never go away and negatively affect your social status.
Today, I’m auto-blocked by a group of people who somehow got a list of all paid blue checks and decided they don’t want to socialize with us, despite that they’re on a social network.
Legacy blue checks — those that earned their marks by having a media job even if ever so briefly — are supposed to lose their checks on April 1. They’re livid with self-righteous indignation (or maybe indigestion is more accurate) despite many arguing the blue check never mattered. Adding insult to injury, I’ve read if you pay for Twitter Blue you can now hide the blue check: they’re charging to get rid of the Scarlet Blue.
I’ve always thought the whole blue check system is idiotic. Anybody should be able to have a verified identity anywhere online. I started building the tech for this but gave up, lacking both capital, perseverance and even a single customer. Verification as an opportunity done right still seems like a good idea but, assuming my blue check is a bug and not there because I’ve been verified once and forever, Twitter seems to be doing it wrong.
Join me on Twitter where, at least today, my unpaid blue check remains whether I want it or not: @michael_olenick. I promise I’m not nearly as much of an asshole as that blue check suggests, or at least I try not to be.
Investors in Russia & China: Cruising for a Bruising
A forgotten artifact from a French rummage store is a harbinger about the dangers for investors in China and Russia.
Emmaüs is like the Goodwill of France except where Goodwill might occasionally feature interesting finds alongside junk, Emmaüs is more likely to yield treasure. Ever wanted a bargain Louis XIV’s era cabinet? You have a chance of finding one scattered amongst other odds and ends there.
On a treasure-hunting trip with the family, my wife and daughter went into a side space we don’t normally visit. There were the usual dusty drawings, an apparently genuine judicial robe, and plenty of other odd stuff but one item, in particular, caught my eye: a bearer bond from Imperial Russia.
For those not in the know, bearer bonds are like a type of private cash, the Bitcoin of way back when. Banned in the US in the 1980s because of their occasional use for illegal purposes, the old bonds are still valid and some still float around. Bearer bonds have information about the bond (loan) being offered, the interest rate, and the coupons.
Whereas modern bonds use the term coupons to indicate dates when disbursements will be paid, old bearer bonds featured literal coupons. Owners would cut off the coupons — which matured at various intervals — and redeem them for principal and interest. It didn’t matter who you are when redeeming them any more than it matters who has cash: money is paid to the bearer which is how the bonds got their name.
Since the old bonds are still legal tender, I thought maybe I’d found a literal treasure. The coupons could still be exchanged for … well, something. Thanks to my abysmal French language skills, the price turned out to be the coins in my pocket which I think came to a little over a euro, give or take a few centimes.
The bond was written mainly in Russian but also in English and French, the latter of which helps explain how it turned up at what’s essentially a French junkyard. The coupons were carefully torn off, exchanged for cash way back when. Each coupon matured at six-month intervals.
Early coupons were carefully clipped but there are a few coupons remaining, the last with a maturity date of January 1919.
I’ve little doubt the owner of the bond would’ve preferred to cash in the coupons which were guaranteed by Nicholas II, Czar of Russia. Unfortunately, for the long-lost bond owner, not to mention the Czar himself, his family, friends, and millions of random others, this guy got in the way:
For those who slept through history class, that’s Vladimir Lenin, head of the Bolshevik division of the Russian Communist Party. His followers swept through Russia in 1917 murdering, pillaging, and stealing the ancient version of washing machines. Among other things, they eventually slaughtered the Czar and his family, suppressed any political group besides the Bolsheviks, butchered lots of random Russians, elevated Joseph Stalin to power, and negated the value of Russian debt including my bond.
My dream of cashing in were crushed, explaining why those last coupons were never redeemed. Of course, given the severity of everything else Lenin’s followers destroyed whoever owned my bond probably got off a lot better than whoever oversaw the creation and sale of the financial instrument way back when.
Today, a different Vladimir rules Russia. A once prominent member of Lenin’s Communist Party, he’s technically an independent but is often referred to as the de facto head of the United Russia political party. Technically, he’s elected but realistically anybody who runs against him tends to fare poorly at the polls, in health, or both. Like the other Vladimir, he does appear to be genuinely popular with the Russian people.
Despite the connection to Lenin’s bolsheviks, Putin sees himself as more like the Russian leader Peter the Great. Like Peter, Putin sees his legacy tied to grabbing land and geographic expansion. He’s been fighting to steal Ukraine since 2014; his aspirations accelerated over the past year as his “soldiers” (an insult to real soldiers everywhere) rape and pillage that poor country. Thankfully, they also often get their butts kicked by the vastly superior Ukranian military.
In response to the barbaric behavior, many countries have cut off Russia from everything from flyovers to financial transactions. That move left over $100 billion of US and European investments stranded in Russia. I strongly suspect those investors are no more likely to get their funds back than the original owner of my bearer bond.
On the other side of the world, China’s Xi is similarly unhappy: “Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development…” he ranted. Never mind the never-ending trade imbalances, industrial and military spying, ridiculous trade barriers, forced “joint ventures,” and that — even with all this — it still seems like everything is Made in China. It’s all unfair, Xi whines, ignoring the havoc Chinese outsourcing caused to western manufacturing, especially in the far less protectionist US.
There will come a time, likely not in the far future, when investors in China are likely to face the fate of my long-lost bond owner. Whereas few people thought Putin would actually go on his rampage leading to the sanctions that locked up their investments, Xi is pretty clear that his intentions aren’t especially peaceful. For investors who keep their factories or capital tied up there, nobody will be spilling tears if it all disappears, swallowed as if Winnie the Pooh became the cocaine bear then stumbled across a pot of honey.
I prefer to write about innovation, to focus on more uplifting material. But innovation is tied to economics which is often tied to politics. Innovation requires capital investments which come with at least minimal moral responsibility. Expecting your money will be safe in FDIC-insured banks without doing deep due diligence is arguably reasonable. In contrast, expecting imperialist genocidal tyrants will protect for-profit investments isn’t. When investments in countries ruled by grievance-driven dictators disappear, investors deserve to bear what’s inevitably coming to them entirely alone.
Fair Process Fail: Anger About Silicon Valley Bank is Lingering Resentment from 2008
Ordinary people never recovered from their anger that bankers were bailed while their less connected counterparties weren't.
I’m an American living in France, working as a research fellow at INSEAD. Down the street from campus is the Château Fontainebleau, the summer palace of French royalty. It’s older than the more elaborate Versailles but with over 1500 rooms can’t be mixed up with a summer cabin.
Soon after starting here, I learned the difference between a castle and a palace. Castles have reinforcements: they are, to some extent or other, military forts royals live in. Palaces do not have reinforcements, only gates built to keep out animals rather than repel raging armies.
The difference matters because, by building a palace rather than a castle, royals implicitly announced they were not worried about a foreign army. By living in a palace, you telegraphed to friends and enemies alike that your army was so powerful nobody could threaten you.
Despite this, the palace down the street is empty and has been for quite a while. Prior inhabitants included virtually all the kings and queens of France. Louis XIV, the Sun King, sunned there as did Queen Regent Catherine de Medici, mother of multiple kings. Eventually, it wasn’t a foreign army that breached the walls but angry French livid about economic imbalance. King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie-Antoinette, were the last genuine royalty to hang down the street (Napolean and his wife, Empress Joséphine also lived there after the revolution though they’re from a different bloodline).
Which brings us to Silicon Valley Bank and the financial crisis. The sting of those 2008-era bailouts — where bankers were insulated from their poor decisions while their counterparty borrowers held to account — never left. Bailing out one side of a gamble while taking the homes and livelihoods of the other under the guise of market discipline isn’t capitalism. Yet this is exactly what happened and nobody involved ever admitted much less tried to make it right. This understandably left people livid to this day.
Silicon Valley Bank wasn’t the reckless greed-fest of yore: it was a bank run. The bank bought long-term securities to fund short-term liabilities and, rather than call Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley for help with liquidity issues, tried to fix the problem itself. Sensing trouble, venture capitalists ran to get out their money and that of their portfolio companies. Soon after, the bank failed as banks tend to do after bank runs.
Because the bailout only made depositors whole, at no cost to the government, the bailout shouldn’t have been especially noteworthy much less controversial. Yet social media was oiling up the digital guillotines. Why? Because people are still livid from the vastly less justifiable bailouts that ruined the financial lives of too many people.
Countless people remember the greed, misery, and abject hypocrisy from the Great Recession. Much like the French went on a head-chopping spree after their Revolution, Americans are still angry as hell. Silicon Valley Bank almost suffered the same fate as Joséphone Beauharnais's first husband, a minor royal largely sympathetic to the revolutionaries beheaded because he seemed like the people they didn’t like.
This lingering resentment illustrates how a lack of fair process leadership has long-lasting detrimental effects on an organization. Fair process, the idea, doesn’t mean the result is always fair but, rather, the process leading to it is perceived as fair. A well-refereed football game played by two wildly unmatched teams has a fair process even if the game itself is unbalanced. When fans walk away saying “that was a predictable disaster” they’re often in the mood to drink their sorrows away with fans of the other team. In contrast, when referees are clearly biased to the point they changed the outcome of a game, there’s anger that’s likely to linger.
A lack of fair process during the great financial crisis and resulting foreclosure crisis left lingering anger and resentment fifteen years later against the recent bank bailouts. Many people are livid despite the more recent bailouts cost taxpayers nothing, likely saved countless jobs, protected innocent small businesses, and were caused largely by the Federal Reserve misstating guidance.
Much of this resentment is left over from the 2008-era bank bailouts. While arguably necessary, these were never explained nor perceived by much of the general public as either fair or following any type of objective process. Those bailouts were quickly arranged and left many bankers - who made loans - relatively whole. Meanwhile countless ordinary people – far less informed borrowers who took out the same loans - lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods.
A lack of fair process stings for a long time. In this case, it lingers 15 years later and shows no signs of tapering off.
Obviously, the lack of fair process related to the foreclosures was partly perception: people who did not pay would eventually lose their homes. But they felt the process was rigged, if not the outcome, and there is a large amount of truth to that perception.
Working with reporters and other Florida lawyers, I witnessed 30-second "trials," called the rocket docket, where borrowers were refused an opportunity in court to speak and quickly lost their cases. Several banks hired crooked lawyers to forge paperwork and outright lie; the lawyers were disbarred but the banks suffered no consequences. Government labeled borrowers irresponsible for taking out the loans but the more knowledgeable bankers never received the same derogatory label.
This was an all-around breach of any semblance of fair process leadership.
Eventually, a switch to fair process practices – in part via a quiet pilot I worked on with one of the large banks, copied by several others – helped end the crisis and put a floor on the US housing market. But the justifiable anger was still there and remains.
As an academic ensconced in a top business school, I understand that anger. I have an allegedly autographed photo of Lenin in my home office. It’s not out of admiration — he was a barbaric butcher — but as a reminder of what happens when market equilibrium is upset. Attaching a weight to steer Adam Smith’s invisible hand in favor of one’s friends is going to leave behind the taint of process violation.
Fair process is a vital element of effective leadership, and — as this recent crisis illustrated — a lack of fair process will cause lingering problems for a very long time.
 | A guest post by
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We'll Ride the Wave of AI's and Thrive
Those who can't think more creatively than a chat bot are scared of them but mustn't hinder everybody else.
“You must’ve been drunk last night!” said my 17-year-old daughter this morning. “You suggested I write that I was using ChatGPT on a take-home test! Anybody who uses ChatGPT gets an automatic zero.”
Actually, I was entirely sober but can’t say the same for her teacher.
My suggestion was to look up some exotic writing method she was supposed to use for a take-home exam. Paraphrasing from memory, I suggested she write: “I looked through my class notes, used Google, asked friends, and checked ChatGPT and can’t find an explanation of this method anywhere so I’m going to guess what it is when answering the question.”
It was an entirely reasonable answer but so was her worry that any use of ChatGPT — including apparently even for the same type of reference we rely on Google for — is grounds for a zero.
I’ve been avoiding writing about AIs or much anything else to see how things shake out but the time has come. It’s clear, with ChatGPT (GPT3.5) and Sydney/Bing (ChatGPT4), that the AIs have arrived and that they’re here to stay.
While the term Luddite is overused the freakout from those in established occupations, including and especially education, is predictable. Still, their complaints are also pointless and more than a little depressing given what a teacher is supposed to do.
Let’s back up. Luddites are the anti-automation machine smashers of Germany way back when. While George Washington was smashing English Redcoats, Germans were smashing automated looms. Not long before, James Watt invented the condensing steam engine — that used so little coal it could be erected anywhere — freeing automated factories from the fast-moving streams their water wheels relied on and turbocharging the Industrial Revolution.
Despite that many of the Luddies allegedly had jobs dependent on machines — much like plenty of the hysterical anti-AIs of today rely on computers — they were terrified of automation. The government back then responded by elevating machine smashing to a capital offense, even executing several Luddites, but the activity continued until it became clear the machines were not a genuine job threat.
Plenty of Germans remained gainfully employed while the machines cranked out evermore and ever cheaper stuff. Today, Germany today is a manufacturing powerhouse with descendants of machine smashers working hand-in-hand with robots building BMWs, Mercedes, and all manner of other nice things.
Automation raised the standard of living for pretty much everybody it touched including even the artisan weavers it was supposed to replace. Was there less demand for their handmade cloth? That’s not entirely clear but there’s no question the price clothiers paid for fabric dramatically decreased: Dirndl and Lederhosen for all. Weaving itself was a miserable pre-automation task and there’s no indication weavers starved; they went on to do something more interesting.
Educational professionals in particular seem terrified of AI and maybe some of them should be. If they’re teaching the same class again and again, changing nothing and expecting students to parrot back material like an AI, then a real AI might be a genuine threat. But this high-cost/low-value model where the state and students pay a fortune to see who can best conform doesn’t sound especially healthy anyway.
Several professors attacked ChatGPT arguing it spits out incorrect answers to math or other test questions. True, but it’s a large language model, not yet programmed to do math. Ask those professors to, say, play a complex piece of classical music and most would botch it; it’s just not what they’ve trained to do. However, future AI versions — no doubt, coming soon — will be better at parsing math questions which they’ll run through a compute module and it will never miss a math question. That’s not an if; it’s a when.
For predictable, non-creative type answers AIs will soon enough never fail much of anything which is what has the educational elite so freaked out.
Students deserve better than teachers and professors “teaching” (using the word liberally) the same material class after class, year after year. AIs in cooperation with better teachers, those more likely to harness the technology than resist it, can create great lessons. They can open their students' big biological brains to new and exciting worlds rather than remain mired in repeating the past literally and figuratively.
Some schools have embraced AI, especially those in India and Israel, two countries that thrive on innovation. These schools are nudging their students to use AI as a tool, not threatening them for doing so.
Those who think creatively and differently will likely thrive in the new age of AIs. Granted, those who coast on the past — more than a few who got where they are specifically by rejecting creative thought — are likely to struggle but nothing is wrong with that. I’ve written before that I’ve been in organizations where people say “results don’t matter” but, of course, they do. Anybody who embraces acting like a machine, blindly following instructions, shouldn’t be surprised when a real machine replaces them.
I’ve never been so excited since I first saw Mosaic, the visual web browser developed way back when. It was clear the internet and the world wide web was about to open up a new age. Let’s embrace it and move forward, opening our minds to new ideas and our wallets to new investments in these magical technologies.
One doom-and-gloom prediction seems especially iffy: the death of journalism. If anything, the AIs are going to crank out so much crap that “SEO” will be hopelessly muddled. Already, we’re seeing people automating spam communications. Much like the web decreased the value of writing — turning “print dollars into digital cents” — the high volume of AI-generated nonsense might make thoughtfully created material more valuable, not less. If anything, people will be more likely to subscribe to and read ideas they know are thoughtfully written by people, not generated by machines focused on tricking other machines into higher search result placement.
AIs and people will work together just as people and machines have for ages. As I wrote this piece, spelling and grammar checkers did their thing helping me draft without getting in the way; ChatGPT improved the headline. This type of help makes it easier to focus on the material that actually matters but the material is still mine. This is how AI is most likely to function in the future: doing the mundane stuff people needn’t much think about. Which is exactly how automation and machines have always functioned.
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