Elon Musk Yells “Squirrel” and Media Handwringing Begins
Reshaping the Global Order Through Clicks
E-car bossman Elon Musk took the reins on twitter over the weekend and there was pearl clutching all over. Neo-trolls flooded social media feeds with hate speech, the new bossman wrote polite letters to advertisers promising that things weren’t going to be that batshit crazy, and most of the company’s top executives were fired just days before their quarterly bonuses were supposed to kick in.
Concerns about misinformation were further amplified on Sunday as Musk posted a tweet linking to an article that made baseless allegations about the attack. THIS crap was his response to a tweet from Hillary Clinton rebuking Republicans for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories.” He later deleted the post.
Musk is all about Musk, and other people exist only to fulfil his wishes.
There’s been chatter about a bunch of users quitting Twitter. I doubt they’ll be missed. Other folks have talked about an advertiser boycott. After, no sane CEO would want his/her branding to suffer, right? Wrong.
First off, it’s all-but-obvious that the new owner of the social media network exists in a special space on the boundaries of sanity. It’s not just Musk; the detachment from reality is an affliction common to individuals with more money than common sense. And there are enough people around who’ve seen the man operate first hand to verify his unbound by social conventions behavior.
Dave Troy, who followed Twitter “closely since its inception and has had a chance to talk in depth about technical topics with Jack Dorsey and the company’s other founders over the years” has written an essay addressing what he says is the “overwhelming amount of well-intentioned but poorly-informed commentary and analysis.”
Written as a Q&A session, Troy addresses some of the common assumptions being made in reporting on the takeover. It’s fascinating stuff and well worth the read.
For purposes of this post, I’m just going to summarize the portions about the political implications because it’s obvious that the media obsession with Musk’s bad boy behavior ignores the larger forces at play.
Buying Twitter isn’t so much an investment decision as it is part of an ideological strategy.
Musk and his backers believe that the global geopolitical arena was being warped by too much “woke” ideology and censorship, and wanted to fix that by first restoring voices that had previously been silenced —and then implementing technical and algorithmic solutions that allow each user to get the experience they want. They think this can “solve” the problems that people cite about social media content. Making money, they figure, will come from the secondary effects of enabling “free speech” and the possibility of building other services like payments and replacing government on top of such an app. Plus the company’s social graph data is a goldmine for other businesses that may wish to benefit from detailed knowledge of the makeup of society.
At the core of Musk’s decision-making is the notion that societal problems can and should be solved with technological solutions. Think of it as the twenty-first century version of the discredited (thanks Trump!) political theory holding that …if the country was run like a business.
Algorithms and creative geniuses aren’t going to resolve the human factor in such schemes, and much of today’s billionaire class realizes the need for a new social and political order to achieve the techno-utopia they seek.
Musk’s stated mission, which he intends to fulfill in his lifetime, is to “make humanity a multiplanetary species.” The anti-democratic urge in longtermism is rooted in the belief that “mob rule” will lead to nuclear annihilation; we should, Musk thinks, be guided by “wiser” minds — like his and Putin’s apparently.
Tomorrow’s version of democracy must be “managed” according to today’s wannabe autocrats. Twitter (and/or Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky) are to be beta tests of the methodologies involved. Visions of a post-democratic “multipolar world order” aren’t set in stone. There will be trial and error, consequences be damned.
It’s wrong to think of what’s going on as a conspiracy or joint operation; we should see it as various entities working in the same direction. Putin and Musk, for instance, aren’t partners so much as they are classmates working toward their particular vision.
There is time for good people to intervene in this scheme, and there is a possibility that the fabulism and egos of those involved will lead to failure. However, the first step in solving any problem –in this case the destruction of democracy– is to recognize the existence of the problem.
Ultimately what we are dealing with is the fact that social engineering through control of the information environment is an inevitable reality—the only question is who has the means and moral authority to do it. (I’ve written a whitepaper about this set of concerns here.)
If democracy-minded people don’t seize control of the information environment, powerful sociopathic autocrats will do so instead. We leave a power vacuum open at our peril, and at the moment, Musk and Putin are the ones with the most will to fill it.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com