The Last Days of Twitter

What Is He Even Doing?

I’m going down with the ship

I have to admit I was maybe a little bit wrong about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. I was under the impression that he had essentially adopted the reactionary tech ideology of his old business partner Peter Thiel and venture capitalist David Sacks, who is apparently part of his “war room” at Twitter. I thought he would essentially use the platform to wage a class war against unionizing workers and the “Woke” middle-strata of the professional-managerial class. Now I just think he really has no idea what he’s doing at all.

I am overly given to viewing things in terms of grand clashes of ideologies and social forces to the point that I can sometimes lose sight of the two dominating spirits of world-affairs: stupidity and vanity. There’s a great part of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup where Groucho says of Chico, “He may look like an idiot, he may talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you, he really is an idiot.” I let it fool me: I thought, like many others, Musk must be concealing intelligence, albeit of a cunning and nasty kind, that allowed him to succeed at business. But it now seems like he might be on track to tank Twitter in a matter of weeks and perhaps even damage his other investments. Brands above all want a sterile and nonthreatening environment for advertisement: they certainly don’t want to be associated with the kind of seediness that Elon’s fanboys hope becomes the dominant tone of the platform. Twitter has in fact been a great force for democracy, not because it helps us share ideas or rationally deliberate—God no—but because it shows the rich and powerful to be just schmucks like everyone else. All the sweaty jokes and lame memes, all the crude and harebrained ideas—that’s really him, that’s what he’s like, there’s nothing more to it!

I feel personally ambivalent about Twitter’s possible collapse or degradation (if such a thing as Twitter’s degradation is possible.) It’s part of how I make a living: there’s no way I could have the platform I have or found as many readers without it. I have met a lot of interesting people on it. But it doesn’t really bring out a good side of me. I can be terribly mean on it. It sucks up a lot of my time and attention. It’s alienating to know that doing stuff I later regret or just feel wasn’t a very good use of my time actually makes me money. What I do is a branch of the entertainment business and I suppose everybody has to do a little song and dance for their supper. There are way worse ways to make a living. It’s kind of sad to reflect that it’s become a big part of my life. In the absence of Twitter, our lives and the world as as whole may be better. Maybe we are actually hoping someone just finally pulls the plug on this whole thing.

Just one note about the issue of free speech. The problem with free speech is that it’s used to tell other people to shut up a lot of the time. Sometimes I think that no one really stands for free speech, what they stand for is their speech. Most of the behavior that’s called “cancel culture” or “wokeness” is the result of free speech: the fact is people have a right to accuse people (within certain limits) and call stuff racist and other people may agree. This may look like a mob to some, but isn’t a mob just a free association of citizens? Activists use speech to cause trouble. The right is quickly finding that the only way to protect their notion of free speech is to censor the other guys. And lot of what is called censorship on social media platforms is actually protected by the 1st Amendment. But despite all its contradictions and paradoxes, free expression and the free interchange of ideas are important values and vital practical institutions in a democratic society. In fact, they are what make it a democratic society. Musk may not think so, but free speech is actually a pretty complicated set of norms rather than a simple proposition.

Musk’s crudeness and irresponsibility may have serious consequences. The stakes are high. Things can move from annoying and weird to menacing and psychotic on Twitter pretty fast. The ability to disseminate propaganda today is unparalleled in human history. Social media has already been implicated in pogroms and massacres abroad. Usually our own mass murderers and stochastic terrorists get their ideas from some vile corner or another of the web. And, as mockable as the idea has become, foreign nations do really use social media to cause political dissension in their rivals. As the Intercept recently reported, our own government has tried to put the screws on what content is available as well. It would be a minor Dark Ages if the Internet completely became a vector for the secret police, pornography, scams, and propaganda, fully devoid of anything approaching genuine human thought. That kind of wasteland is exactly what many of the types cheering on Musk want it to become. He certainly doesn’t take it seriously. It’s tempting not to: there’s so much sententious garbage and moralizing puffery out there that the side of the trolls can feel attractive, especially when you aren’t particularly thoughtful or deep. The job requires a diplomat and a statesman: someone with discretion who can flatter and deflect and balance all the social forces that just want to dominate the medium for their own ends. Musk is not that. He’s just a buffoon.

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