Moscow Musk and the "new" Technocracy

Q: So this is why Musk seemingly “overpaid” for Twitter? He and his backers want to use it as a tool of information warfare, to kill off the dollar and help usher in Putin’s “multipolar world?”

A: Yes, that’s why they “overpaid” for Twitter. Because the end goals have nothing to do with Twitter or its ad model by itself. It’s merely a means to an end. Musk is likely to join forces with Trump’s Truth Social and Kanye West’s Parler to try to control much of the information space. And they’ve got the threat of Putin’s nukes to force the issue.
~ Investigative journalist Dave Troy, explaining Elon Musk's true motives for buying Twitter

Fourteen years ago, just ahead of the 2008 US presidential election and in the midst of a terrible global financial crisis, I published a post about the Technocracy movement, and I facetiously suggested Technocracy as a possible bailout plan for the modern day, or at least as a basis for the New-Wage scams I used to write about so much. In light of recent developments, perhaps it's time to drag that old post out again.

Technocracy had its roots in the years immediately following World War I, but didn't really come to fruition until the Great Depression, when folks were desperate for solutions to their financial misery. In essence, Technocracy proposed the control of society by an elite corps of technical experts, who would determine what was best for everyone else. Everyone would be taken care of, and all of their needs met, through the application of sound scientific and engineering principles. Yet Technocrats weren't motivated by altruism, morality, or ethics, and they scoffed at the idea of democracy. And although their stated goals included equality and fairness (by their definition of fairness, anyway), they were disturbingly elitist. At its core Technocracy, like the various forms of autocracy also scorned by Technocrats, was still about power and control in the hands of a few.

Technocracy was a raging fad among many elites and elite wannabes during the lean Depression years and even into World War II, but its star dimmed considerably in the prosperous years after the war. But Technocracy never really went away. In fact it could easily be said -- and it actually has been said -- that egomaniacal multibillionaire Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, is a Technocrat.

It would seem to run in the family. Musk's grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was very big in the Technocracy movement in Canada back in the day. From a November 2021 piece on the Business Live site:

Believing that science and technology could cure all ills, Haldeman campaigned for the capitalist monetary infrastructure to be replaced by a new universal currency, based on a unit of heat, to be known as the erg. The technocrats even wanted an end to prices, in the view that scientists could handle distribution within society far better than the market.

Such concepts seemed dangerous to the Canadian government, which banned the movement over its opposition to World War 2. The belief system faded away with the growth of prosperity after the war. But similar ideas are inspiring the current excitement over meme stocks, cryptocurrency and the man who now calls himself “Technoking”.

To [Harvard University historian Jill] Lepore, Musk’s ideology seems to flow from these outlandish — and outmoded — views. In Lepore’s words, his ambition is an “extravagant, extreme” even “extraterrestrial capitalism, driven by fantasies that come from science fiction”.

Professor Lepore's theory is that Musk's stated mission to colonize Mars is a reflection of Technocratic philosophy. That makes sense. What also makes sense is the notion that Musk's recent takeover of a popular social media platform is rooted in Technocratic philosophy, among other related motives that are even more disturbing.

"The bird is freed" (and even if it crashes into a window, Musk will probably get fatter on the splatter)
As almost everyone must surely know by now, Elon Musk's deal to buy Twitter finally went through this past week. This was a hotly discussed and debated topic for many months, and I even tackled it on this Whirled, though in a broader context than the basic will-he-or-won't-he-go-through-with-it debate.

Not surprisingly, the right wingnuts and conspiranoids and hatemongers have been giddy with delight since Musk liberated the bird: they are rolling over and wetting themselves praising their Overlord as they celebrate the "return of free speech" and the "end of wokeness" on Twitter. Many have expressed their great joy by reportedly flooding the forum with the N-word, just because, like naughty kindergartners, they can. The Neo-Nazis and their ilk seem to be having a field day too.

Many others, not so happy, are just waiting for Twitter to fail, and are taking great gulps from their chilled bottles of schadenfreude because they believe Musk made a laughably horrible deal, paying far more for Twitter than it is worth. Many are also vowing to leave Twitter, perhaps migrating to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's nascent Bluesky forum, as if that'll show Elon.

I'm holding off on the schadenfreude myself, because I think Musk is invested in a long game that has little to do with the success or failure of Twitter, by conventional standards of success and failure (e.g., ad revenue and whatnot). And I plan to stay on Twitter -- after all, I'm pretty much of a nobody there anyway, and everyone just leaves me alone. I certainly have no plans to hop onto Bluesky. That would only be helping the dude who played a key role in Musk's deal to take Twitter private, and who happens to be good friends with Musk rather than his rival: Jack Dorsey.

Everyone who is at all concerned about Twitter, the future of actual free speech (online and off), and especially about the future of democracy, should read investigative journalist Dave Troy's October 29, 2022 piece on Medium, 'No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating.' Troy explains that he has 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. Accordingly, he has views that differ from the "well-intentioned but poorly-informed commentary and analysis" that we've seen all over the media.

To those who think Musk's purchase of Twitter is crazy because he's sure to lose tons of money, Troy counters that Musk and his backers have far broader goals than making a profit.

The goals are more ideological in nature. 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.

And that's where the Technocracy angle comes in, where Twitter is concerned. Dave Troy believes it's completely naive to think that there is a technical solution to harmful content, which is likely to lead to more radicalization and cultish behavior.

...they are being willfully ignorant of the harmful side effects of content. It is a kind of tech fundamentalist solutionism that posits that for any difficult problem, there must be a technical solution. Many sociologists and cultural scholars would argue differently.

But the Technocracy aspect goes far beyond Twitter, and out into the further reaches of Space. Troy points out that back in April of this year, Dorsey wrote:

In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

Wow. That sounds pretty spiritual, especially for a sociopathic ego-tripper like Musk -- although, come to think of it, this blog is littered with posts about sociopathic ego-trippers who talk a good game about "light" and "consciousness" (this guy and this guy, for instance), so never mind. In any case, Troy explains what Dorsey really meant by "the light of consciousness."

This is a reference to “longtermism,” the heavily marketed philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William MacAskill that asserts the only thing that matters is humanity’s future in space, and that the only goal of the living is to maximize the number of future humans alive, as well as the number of artificial intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future. This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth now. Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn’t likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars. Longtermism is heavily influenced by “Russian Cosmism” and is also directly adjacent to “Effective Altruism.” 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.

What it all seems to boil down to is that Elon Musk is a Technocrat of the worst sort, putting all of his faith in technological solutions to everything, but caring far less about applying those solutions to the suffering masses on Earth today than to future generations of multiplanetary humans. And making him an even worse sort of Technocrat -- and human being -- is his malignant narcissism. All of his grandiose plans and pronouncements seem to be chiefly a means of drawing attention to himself, enabling him to suck all the oxygen out of the room, much like another malignant narcissist we know of promised, in so many words, to do years ago. (That guy has fulfilled his promise, or rather his threat, many times over, of course.)

In any case, Elon's Mars thing is in the future. Meanwhile back on Earth, in the present day, Moscow Musk is cozying up to Vlad and the MAGAs and other foul characters.

Musk also seems pretty interested in helping advance Putin’s “multipolar world order,” which is why he plays footsie with QAnon and MAGA accounts, and pals around with Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. “How are things going in Bakhmut?,” Musk asked Medvedev.

Nice guy.

Troy ends with a warning to all of us:

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.

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.

Again, I urge you to read Troy's entire piece on Medium. Here's that link again. Read it. And don't forget to vote, if you're eligible and registered.