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.
