Lies You Can Get Away With
And Elon Musk's biggest lie yet.
So, as any other concerned netizen, I've been reading about Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and the 5-star, ass-over-tits shit parade he's managed to pull off.
Emphasis on the video of Elon entering Twitter HQ carrying a porcelain basin as a visual "let that sink in" pun (really shows the man has put in the hours into that "Humor: An Introduction" course he bought on Udemy) and later making Elli Lilly's market cap plummet $15 billion by expiring everyone's 16-year-long trial period of the blue checkmark.
Man, what a time to be alive with zero money on stocks.
Even Stephen King got involved, officially making this whole story of the "supernatural horror" genre. It made me wanna hit the street wearing nothing but my Y2K glitch t-shirt and shout "THE END IS COMING" to disoriented main characters because it surely feels this is Twitter's season finale.
And it's been written by the two crayon-sniffing boneheads who showran the ending of Game of Thrones.
But Elon has a grand scheme mapped out on his vision board, apparently. Based on visual cues, I would guess he plans to go around chewing on important wires, pressing large red buttons with huge "WARNING: DO NOT PUSH" signs and praying to Cthulhu that a better, cost-effective version of Twitter will emerge once all the smoke dissipates from the server room.
And there lies the true conundrum for me.
He is a "free speech absolutist," he says. His mission, to make Twitter "the most accurate source of information about the world." Maybe it's cause I'm feeling dizzy — my brain hasn't been teased this hard since that photo of the dress that changed colours after all — but it seems to me those two things are mutually exclusive.
What the overclocked part of Elon's brain that is on the autism spectrum doesn't let him see is that, even if he gets rid of the Russian bots and spam accounts and somehow manages to make the platform so trustworthy you'd let it hold your newborn baby while you fix a shoelace, is that he will still have the humans to deal with.
And if anyone with less than half a dozen throwaway Reddit accounts and a genuine desire to be a functioning member of society knows one thing, it's this: climbing social ladders is all about learning just how much you can fuck around before you find out.
Case in point: my extravagantly short understanding of how climate change actually operates. Of course, I've seen Greenpeace commercials and David Attenborough documentaries, but I don't even know how the wind decides which way to blow, let alone explain how polar bears die of cow farts or why the hole in the ozone layer didn't make the Earth comically fly away like a deflating balloon.
I don't actually know how it all works. I rely on third-party expertise for the nitty-gritty. I just pretend I know, sort my trash, never fly in private jet and act as if I'm softly concerned we might make the planet's surface look like dry elbow skin before Greta Thunberg hits puberty.
And I do it because that is the price to pay for a membership card to "Grass-Touching Human Beings Who Interact With Each Other And Become Friends And Stuff." If you want to be part of the tribe, you're gonna be asked questions about the climate, the news cycle, your political affiliations, your opinion on capital punishment, and your take on Kanye West every time he goes feral online. And you will have a crippling lack of curriculum to answer any of them properly.
See, jumping to conclusions is a survival mechanism.
And that makes us, annoyingly clever people, no different than the dimwitted mouth-breathers who coalesce around the belief that the Earth is flat, or that the Holocaust was just a fictional, elaborate PR stunt to besmirch the good name of the toothbrush moustache. Some people will do a superficial reading on vaccines and decide — based on fuck all: the new and improved recipe with a smidgen of common sense, nothing else — that they're safe, and others will join a "Moon Landing Hoax" Facebook group because they saw that Neil Armstrong has an IMDb page.
But that's what extroverting is all about: finding out, through conversation, whether you and the other person smoke the same strain of high-grade bullshit.
When a match in worldviews happens, we call it "bonding."
The beauty of free speech is that you get to think and say whatever you want, and thus attract like-minded people like an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience attracts deep stoner talk and bro-logic. Birds of a feather. But that is also its biggest weakness; there is nothing stopping us from constructing an entire personality around the conviction that Area 51 is full of alien corpses getting aggressive colonoscopies and Dr Moreau-looking blokes trying to crack nanotech as seen in Honey I Shrunk The Kids.
Elon’s free-speech tweets are gonna age like milk, but social media was never designed for free speech anyway. It was designed for free amplification, and it amplifies whatever makes people stop their thumb-swiping cardio sessions to leave a mean comment.
If Musk Twitter has the slightest ambition to approximate the word "accurate" or any of its distant synonyms, they can't allow unhinged free speech to go rampant on the platform. They’ll need to suppress the spread of bullshit before Alex Jones puts on a tinfoil hat, evolves into his final form, and starts convincing people that unvaxxed sperm has officially become the new Bitcoin.
People will believe that.
Because more often than not, the truth is boring. So unless someone does something to contain you, those will be the kind of lies you can get away with.
Truth is subjective. Truth that requires “free speech” to survive doubly so.
The more subjective an opinion the more it will be a cause of dissent and concern. As soon as there are more people who disagree with a truth than those who agree with it, there will be calls to suppress it as misinformation.
Elon is a capitalist, not a philosopher. He will slap his own brand of lipstick on the twitter pig and attempt to make it profitable. It’s not like everything he is doing at twitter is necessarily wrong, but it’s clear that the essence of what twitter’s internal culture was has imploded upon his entry. Any organization both needs this disruption and can be harmed by it. When any company becomes dominated by people who only exist to keep the organization itself alive as an organization independent of its original function and who accumulate authority and power for their own purposes within the organization, the company begins to die. Twitter was dying. Some of the people who had already run away have published horror stories about some of the attempts to mine user data, not all of them reflect well. In the perspective lensed by their stories and knowing of the friendship between jack dorsey and elon musk, one might almost think of musk as a dark hero, a joker come to inject some sanity.
In that context, the sink makes perfect sense- and so does firing half of everyone. The rats flee the ship.
It’s important to remember that twitter in the end is only a website where you can publish blobs of text to a personal feed which is shared with others. Most of what it can do can be maintained by just 10 people, it takes a lot more developers and associated personnel to provide the nice user experience, mobile apps, and the business end of it of advertising. Those people can be lost and twitter will continue to be able to keep the lights on briefly- and elon needs runway more than he needs wings at the moment.
In this world full of critics, it’s important to sit back and relax and realize that. There’s always a way to look at any situation from any number of angles before deciding to be invested in it. I am not invested in twitter because I had long since realized twitter is for journalists, politicians, and brands- it is a pager system for the web. If elon kills it, a new pager will emerge. The only true value to twitter is to offset facebook and reddit as major centers for discussion and propaganda run by corporations- it keeps the notional competition in the market alive and balanced. I hope elon can keep it strong so it continues to offer some balance and choice, but i won’t bet on it soon. Let’s let him run out of runway and see if he turns twitter into a submarine or manages to put wings on it.
Yes, let's use his autism as an argument/ weird joke.