I think the jury is still out on the impact of all the other social networks.
If the connection between fast falling birthrates and smartphone addiction is proven, the total global loss of life (in this case, never born life) due to the products that many of us here helped craft into perfection may rival that of Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan, and Twitter/X is hardly the worst offender in that group. Even Twitter's impact on the balance of left/right politics in the world is relatively transient and small when judged against this horrible development whose aftereffect will stalk the world for a century.
Yes, it wasn't an actual intent of people like Zuckerberg, but as far as catastrophic failures of civilizations go, they don't have to be intended.
Then there is the role of Starlink terminals in an actual war.
The losses caused to the Russians by drones using Starlink for connection are pretty painful, and when SpaceX switched off non-whitelisted terminals in the theatre of war, the Russian army was thrown into disarray due to sudden failures of communication between their units. AFAIK they haven't yet fully overcome that problem.
The Russians certainly wish to have something like Starlink right now, in 2026.
In the first weeks of the war, Russia targeted communications infrastructure in Ukraine. They performed cyberattacks against Viasat, rendering thousands of satellite modems unusable. They performed destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine government and telecommunications targets. Cell towers and fibre optic lines were targeted, as well as electricity infrastructure. And they started aggressively jamming wireless communications. Much of this was disastrously effective.
Starlink was one of the only reliable ways Ukraine had for remote military communications, without which Ukraine would have not been able to defend its territory nearly as effectively. Though it's impossible to know, it's plausible that Ukraine might not exist today but for Starlink.
Personally, I don't think so, but let us at least try to be consistent.
"If an unpopular person's corporation C succeeded at activity X, it is the success of the regular employees and everyone but him, but if his another corporation D failed at activity Y, it is solely his responsibility and shame (if not a proof of outright fraud)" is a classical emotionally charged double standard.
Do you think there's a single Apple fanboy who thinks that Steve Jobs ever had any novel insight in programming, or had any novel insight in circuit design?
Now, with that answer in mind, allow me to contend that there isn't a single Elon fanboy who thinks that Elon is personally inventing automotive and rocketry technologies out of whole cloth.
What both men did well is identify promising unconventional technology pathways and steer capital investment towards them. Jobs had a knack for understanding computers as a consumer product, and for communicating the value of new products. Musk has a knack for understanding the limits of physical engineering, and the wealth (and appetite for risk) to spam the right "build" buttons endlessly.
Beyond a narrow range of remarkable competencies, neither are particularly interesting persons. I wouldn’t look to either of them for takes on sociology, politics, biological sciences, philosophy or chord progressions.
If the connection between fast falling birthrates and smartphone addiction is proven, the total global loss of life (in this case, never born life) due to the products that many of us here helped craft into perfection may rival that of Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan, and Twitter/X is hardly the worst offender in that group. Even Twitter's impact on the balance of left/right politics in the world is relatively transient and small when judged against this horrible development whose aftereffect will stalk the world for a century.
Yes, it wasn't an actual intent of people like Zuckerberg, but as far as catastrophic failures of civilizations go, they don't have to be intended.