Hello all, I’ve updated my publishing schedule. I’ll be posting on the 1st and 3rd Monday of every month, rather than on the 1st and the 15th of every month. I realized that most of us, including me, organize our routines around weekly schedules. I go to the gym Tuesdays and Thursday, regardless of the calendar number assigned to that day.
The Problem
I am on the email list for daily news updates from the New York Times, and my curiosity was piqued by the 4/26 update, “A billionaires’ world”. David Leonhardt, frequent writer for the NYT, covered some brief statistics about the richest .00001% of Americans, framing the perspective of wealth, power, and influence as a segue into a look at Elon Musk’s move to buy Twitter. He hands off the topic to a colleague of his, Andrew Sorkin, to elucidate the risks posed by Musk’s takeover.
While the article does get around to highlighting some legitimate concerns about Musk taking over Twitter, the primary revelation is this: Elon Musk is on NYT’s naughty list. The obvious dislike of Musk is a thinly veiled suggestion throughout. You can almost see the sneer on David’s face when he wrote the following:
Or they [billionaires] can buy a social media network when its policies annoy them, as Elon Musk is in the process of doing.
Though the obvious point of interest in the story about Musk and Twitter is one about the evolving dance between free speech and technology, the framing of the article begs for attention on another topic. Actually, there might be several. First, the article unfairly pigeonholes Musk. Second, the article is ambiguously subversive, afraid of clearly stated challenges and favoring veiled contempt. Third, there is an unspoken counter-narrative implied throughout, which can only be guessed at.
Elon Musk is a billionaire. Therefore, everything he thinks, says, and does must be a result of his status as a billionaire, right? Wrong, obviously. Pigeonholing is a logical fallacy wherein a single category is elevated to the exclusion of all other categories, implying that it is the only thing worth knowing about a person, place, or thing. While Musk is a billionaire, and that probably means something about him, he also shares in many other categories, some of which probably have more significance than his status of “billionaire”. Off the top of my head, Musk is a father, a husband, a programmer, an immigrant, a rocket engineer, a son, and has Asperger’s syndrome. Any one of these may carry more fundamental influence on how he sees the world and makes decisions. Did David or Andrew sit down with Musk to do an extensive interview, diving in to get a full picture of the human being that he is? Or, simpler still, did either of them spend a day listening to his countless interviews with other more noteworthy news sources like Lex Fridman’s or Joe Rogan’s podcasts (Lex 1, 2, and 3. Joe 1 and 2)? If anyone has spent time listening to Musk’s views on technology, the future, and humanity, probably one of the least profound observations one could make about his purchase of Twitter was that he did so because it annoyed him. In fact, such a petulant accusation is clear evidence that one has not spent any time trying to understand Elon Musk. Perhaps David and Andrew feel confident that their readership remain as uninformed as they themselves are.
I will take a look at why Musk bought Twitter, below, and the possible explanation for why David and Andrew cannot accept it.
Another dimension of the article that makes things confusing is the cloak and dagger style of writing. David’s introductory headline reads:
Good morning. The world’s richest person, unhappy with the policies of a major social media platform, is buying it.
He’s not wrong. But, why do I get the sense that there is a pointy knife hidden in the draperies and the cool dispassionate tone? I’m not sure I have much to say about this, other than that the style has that slippery feeling that someone is double speaking. Hiding behind apparently factual writing he can slip away without having made any bold accusations or open statements of hatred.
Did I say hatred? The last problem, before dealing with the actual problem, is that the article presents an overall cynicism toward billionaires, specifically Musk. Now, there certainly may be reason for skepticism toward billionaires, and scrutiny should be placed on how their wealth was gained. But, there is no indication that Musk’s method of wealth generation is in the crosshairs of David and Andrew. Instead, it is the mere reality of his wealth that is coming under fire. It is for his sin of being wealthy that he is under assault. Remember, from David and Andrew’s perspective, the only noteworthy fact about Musk is his participation in the category of “billionaire”. I wonder if David and Andrew have any aspirations to improve their financial situation? Would they be as distrustful of themselves if they had the luck and ingenuity to start and invest in companies that are changing the world? Would they scorn their own success if they had invented a product that had an enormous market?
The Process
It seems that one way a Billionaire can absolve themselves of their sins is to be charitable, to give away their money, to invest their money in endeavors that have no monetary return. I wonder if the articles’ authors count Musk’s payout to investors of Twitter as proper reparations for being so wealthy? He will pay $54.20 per share to investors and the stock is currently valued at 40.72. Musk is moving billions of dollars from his corner to the private caches of millions of people who currently invest in the company. I wonder if David and Andrew have stock in Twitter? I wonder if everyone who’s bank account gets that little boost from Musk is just that little bit more evil now that they have slightly more cash than they did before? But, I think that this exchange of value in the free market is to be seen as an extravagant display of inequality, from David’s perspective.
The deal is the latest example of how extreme inequality is shaping American society.
But, is it inequality? I think its actually inequity. Musk has, literally, more equity. If you have $10 and I have $1 that means you have more equity than I. However, importantly, the liberal idea upon which Western society is founded is that you and I are still equals. We have rights and protections under the enforcement of law and government. Our equality is not reduced to financial equity. Just because you have more equity doesn’t mean that you can get away with crimes against other people’s liberty. I am aware that, in practice, such idealism rarely holds perfectly. Wealth, power, and influence enable a lot of law bending, which, in the absence of that triumvirate, would never be allowed. Even so, the fact that the wealthy, powerful, and influential can work hard to twist laws to their favor is not to say that the definitions of “equality” and “equity” are synonymous. The law, explicitly, still aims to treat all as equals. Nevertheless, it seems that David has conflated the two concepts.
Andrew picks up the thread by saying:
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter will reignite big questions about the influence of the billionaire class and the power of technology over our national discourse.
Though the intended focus of this quote is to leverage a presumed aspersion against Musk, Andrew accidently touches on the real issue of interest. How is technology shaping national discourse? Will Musk himself be subject to the pressures of financial and political forces? Does AI, used to imitate real people, pose a significant threat to free speech? These are interesting questions; ones that we have a warranted apprehension of answering properly.
However, I can’t get to the those questions yet because it turns out that the subtext of this NYTs article is presenting more interest than I initially assumed. One word that stands out to me in the quote above is “discourse”. Is “national discourse” the same thing as “free speech”? Further on in the article Andrew writes:
Musk has said he wants more “free speech” and less moderation on Twitter. What will that mean in practice? More bullying? More lewd commentary and images? More misinformation?
It seems that there is a sub-narrative at work in Andrew’s writing, one which conflicts with Musk’s. I’ve been rereading the article to understand what the disconnect is between the stated purpose of Musk and the obvious dismissals espoused by David and Andrew. The quote above reveals a glimpse into what that difference might be. Andrew puts air quotes around the idea of free speech, like he’s adding an intonation of disbelief to the phrase. “Free speech”…. riiiiight.
But, why would Andrew doubt that that is an ideal that Musk actually holds?
The Discovery
I did some digging on the history of the word “discourse”, and found that the word makes a strong appearance in Karl Marx, with his use of the phrase “discourse analytics”. Discourse Analytics is a field of study that relies on language, practice, and social context for understanding ideologies and to “…raise the most serious objections (to ideologies) as they understand truth itself as a discursive product, resulting from powerful struggles of domination and exclusion.” (article abstract) Is it possible that the authors’ distrust of Musk’s ideology stems from a perspective that all truth claims are merely the result of powerful struggles of domination and exclusion?
As I’ve been thinking on this topic, I am beginning to see two vastly different ways of conceiving of the world coming into conflict. On the one hand, the discourse analytics of the new Marxist academic sees that all truth is purely contextual, and that speech is primarily about a zero-sum struggle for power. On the other hand, the traditional liberal believes that there are objective truths that remain fixed, regardless of our knowledge of or consent, and that free speech is the best method of collectively distilling them into our awareness. David and Andrew cannot accept that Elon believes that truth is objective. It isn’t merely that David and Andrew believe truth to be infinitely regressive, but that they cannot imagine that Elon doesn’t believe that. Hence, his claim to being a free speech advocate is really (hint hint) about his power struggle to dominate the political and social landscape. There is no such thing as free speech. There is only manipulative speech. There is only power.
This also seems, in my mind, to explain why misinformation, conspiracy theories, and bullying are so threatening to the discourse analytic tradition. Because there is no such thing as truth, statements on Twitter present varying degrees of threat or support to any given narrative frame. I hope I don’t need to point out that a whole waterfall of problems cascade out from this perspective. Who’s information is the right information, so that we can know what the misinformation is? Which current social trend is the right one, by which we can shut down other voices in accordance with the current power structure? And, how long will it take for the current hegemony to reign for new subclasses to push for their own special power revolution? There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the continual subduction and subjection proposed by this variant of Marxist ideology.
It is interesting that neither David nor Andrew comment on the fact that Musk has openly said that he wants people that hate him to be able to use Twitter, and to post things that he doesn’t like or agree with. It is a sin of omission, you might say. They can’t imagine that anyone would be given the power of a social media network, and not use it for personal hedging and power sequestering. But, the power of believing in such wild concepts as “objectivity” and “truth”, is that you understand that you might be wrong. You might be wrong, and someone you disagree with might be right, and you might need to change your views. You might be confronted with the reality that you are trying to hold on to a certain perspective or belief because you are trying to control your world, or others. You might need to learn to let go. You might need to change. You might need to submit. You might need to be transformed by the power of the truth.
Musk is buying Twitter because he believes that free speech is a key factor in how humanity discovers the truth about both itself and the world. While there are risks in some people being deceived by misinformation (or, Lord help us, disinformation), the truth isn’t at risk. There is enough truthiness outside of us to persist, whether we agree with it or not. And, by fostering a genuine search for truth via free speech, we maximize our potential to interface with reality in the most efficient, productive, and inclusive way possible. But, cut off our civilizations’ tools used to search for truth, and our ability to interface with reality will be diminished. If Marxist discourse has its way, the future will become what Marx always dreamed the past was. An endless bloody sea of power struggles between the oppressed and the oppressor.
Elon Musk & Twitter