04 October 2022

2 Major Problems With Musk Owning Twitter

Elon Musk is moving ahead on his purchase of Twitter.

I have 2 problems with that.

1. This means he'll be playing CEO for 5 companies. How I imagine his schedule:
Monday: Tesla
Tuesday: Twitter
Wednesday: SpaceX
Thursday: Neuralink
Friday: Boring Company
Saturday and Sunday: spends time with his 9 kids.

2. Musk has promised to bring Trump back to Twitter. Musk is a free speech guy who doesn't see any need for managing content. A community has a lot in common with individuals. If you maximize for work or money or fitness or socializing or religious piety or relaxing you'll have a lousy life. Life is best when you have the good sense to tamp down any and all of those, alternating what you subordinate to at different times so that your life isn't taken over by any one of the pieces of your life. Any system needs to be subordinated to the goals of the whole system, not one part of it, whether that system is a life or a community. A community needs free speech but to pretend that we should subordinate every other community goal to it is silly. The consequence of abuses from misinformation campaigns, say, or slander or deceit or misleading advertisements or blatant lies is to subordinate too many other good things to an ideal that may hold in some Platonic ideal of a community but don't hold in some Pragmatic ideal of a real community. Musk owning Twitter raises the odds that the US will give way to plutocracy because free speech is a lie in this regard: in an age of platforms, amplification and mass media, speech is NOT free. The more money you have to spread your message, the more it will be believed. Elon's net worth is greater than about 150 countries' GDP. To pretend that his "free" speech has no more influence than mine or yours suggests a high degree of self delusion.

1 comment:

Abbie's Tree House said...

He may find himself constrained by the forces of capitalism. Twitter is barely profitable now. If it fills up with porn, nazis, white supremacists, and loudmouthed idiots, what company will spend its advertising there? I would think the pharmaceutical industry in particular would be reluctant to buy advertising surrounded by anti-vax zealots.