When the ANC assumed power in 1994, they inherited the most sophisticated economic engine on the African continent.
They were handed a deep-water port network, a highly complex rail system that efficiently moved freight from the interior to the coast, an integrated national power grid that generated some of the cheapest electricity in the world, and a professional, rule-bound civil service.
That system possessed underlying engineering and administrative principles that were globally competitive.
The historical task of the new government was simple: maintain the existing engineering standards, scale the capacity to include the black majority, and expand the productive tax base.
Instead, the ANC executed a 30 year masterclass in structural vandalism.
They introduced cadre deployment, incompetence, corruption, and political impunity, systematically replacing competent engineers, financial auditors, and institutional administrators with politically loyal party hacks.
The results are not ideological; they are physical.
It takes centuries of capital accumulation, spatial planning, and disciplined maintenance to build an interconnected civilization, but it takes only a few decades of deliberate neglect to destroy it.
You can see the rot in real-time.
The ultimate tragedy is that the liberation movement successfully decoupled its survival from the material reality of the country.
The ANC did not "decolonize" South Africa; they simply consumed its foundational capital.
They proved that an elite equipped with nothing but liberation slogans and an insatiable appetite for state contracts can liquidate 300 years of built infrastructure in just three decades, leaving the next generation to inherit a broken, unmanageable corpse.
Today, we’re launching Original Content Rewards.
The reality is that Revenue Sharing had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned. Creators should be focused on bringing net new content to the platform instead of maximizing payouts. We could have kept adding more rules and exceptions, but ultimately the better decision was to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality.
Original Content Rewards is the result.
This program is built around a simple idea: reward the creators who bring original ideas, expertise, creativity, and unique perspectives to 𝕏 -- not those who have become best at gaming the system.
This is just the beginning. We’ll continue refining the program, improving our models, and raising the bar over time. But we’re so excited to keep investing in the creators who inform us, entertain us, make us laugh, teach us something new, and drive meaningful conversations on 𝕏 every day.
To everyone who creates original content on 𝕏 and makes this a better platform every day: thank you. We’re excited to keep building for you.
In layman's terms the proposal here is to take
€10 billion of our public money, pile it up and set it on fire, in an obviously futile attempt to "catch up" in the data centre race with Silicon Valley, where ignorant trillionaire psychopaths are torching historically unprecedented amounts of money, causing irreparable harm to the environment and bringing about a financial apocalypse, in the delusional hope of finding a profitable business model for so-called "AI", a vastly overhyped technology that by now many of us are sick of, so that they can create a capitalist nirvana where they fire us all from our jobs and replace us with chatbots, and sell us subscriptions to slop they've recycled out of our common cultural and intellectual heritage, which they stole from us, scanned and then incinerated.
"Europe" does not want to "become the first AI continent."