Thank you Tim Wise for this excellent piece. So chilling. And horrifying what is happening. Musk is truly the face of late stage greed, extreme sociopathic narcissism, and evil. The underbelly of the obscene wealth of those like Musk, and the poisonous capitalist system that enables the brutal redistribution of wealth upwards, is responsible for profound and ever growing suffering, destruction, and death. Such incredibly dangerous times — and times in which it has never been more important for us to keep our minds, hearts, and souls open. And to counter the neoliberal narratives of the toxic status quo with wisdom and truth... again and again and again. — Molly
Elon Musk, Image by DonkeyHotey, Flickr, Creative Commons license, Attribution 2.0 Generic
An unmoderated free-for-all is an invitation to bullies,
bigots, and trolls that will further toxify social discourse
By Tim Wise
April 16, 2022
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and poster child for narcissism, is looking to buy Twitter.
Not just the 9 percent of shares he purchased last week, but the whole thing.
First, because as the world’s richest man, he can do things like that, and as a gigantic asshole (which comes with both the narcissism and the money), he figures why not?
Companies and other people are playthings to him.
So much so that his threat to buy Twitter might be little more than a PR ruse he thought up while staying awake for days at a time, as he’s rumored to do.
He gets off fucking with people this way.
It doesn’t matter to him if his words tank a company’s stock, boost it unrealistically, or lead investors astray.
It’s all for the lulz once you have billions to play with.
Some years ago, Musk started believing his press and the adoring puffery of online acolytes — like whatever idiot first likened him to Tony Stark — and it’s all been downhill from there.
It’s not like it wasn’t predictable.
Any guy who advances or indulges the notion that he built his empire based solely on genius and hard work, conveniently overlooking that he was born white in South Africa during apartheid, is pretty much telling you he’s a dick who’s going to do dick things.
He makes self-driving cars that don’t work (unless the goal is to get people injured or killed), regular cars that sorta suck considering how much they cost, and he treats people like shit.
He forced employees back to work in the middle of a pandemic, causing hundreds of them to contract COVID.
He refuses to designate hazardous areas in his plant with industry-standard yellow markings because he doesn’t like the color yellow. And, surprise, surprise, when he’s not fudging the numbers, Tesla regularly has higher injury rates than other automakers.
Oh, and he did nothing while Black and brown employees at his California plant were subjected to an abusive, overtly racist environment.
Apparently, you can take the boy out of apartheid, but you can’t take apartheid out of the boy.
So, if he buys Twitter through a hostile takeover bid, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, everything.
Elon Musk is one of the very few people on Earth who could make Twitter — an all-too-toxic platform, even after the purging of large numbers of Nazis, QBalls, and COVID deniers — substantively worse.
With his insistence that Twitter should be an unmoderated forum, allowing maximum free expression, with virtually no guardrails, Musk would steer Twitter onto the rocks of ever more abusive online behavior.
It’s the way hyper-libertarian, futurist techno-bros think, though.
“No rules, just right.”
Which is fine as the motto for Outback Steakhouse but pretty terrifying for human societies.
Unless you have billions of dollars, of course, or at least enough millions to protect yourself from whatever dystopian outcome obtains.
This fascination with maximum freedom — a word the Elon Musks of the world understand in only its most childlike sense — sounds great at 2 a.m. in your dorm room after a half-dozen bong hits, binge-listening to Joe Rogan.
But in the real world, it’s a recipe for disaster, which is why no society has tried it for very long.
Sure, one can disagree with how tech platforms have sought to constrain speech. It’s been clumsy, inconsistent, and often arbitrary.
But to think the answer to bad moderation is no moderation — a digital wild west where anything goes — is like saying that since FDA guidelines are cumbersome, we should junk them and let anyone who wants to make meds in their garage have a go at it. Then, let the buyer beware.
Which, come to think of it, is also something libertarian asshats believe in.
Maximum unregulated expression actually stifles speech in the long run
If Twitter moves towards no meaningful moderation — save for perhaps banning kiddie porn, which even a douche like Elon Musk would agree is a necessary limitation of “freedom” — America and the world will be the worse for it.
In an environment like that, where the most racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and just plain mean-spirited trolling would be allowed, the loudest and cruelest voices would always win.
Those willing to bully, and allowed to do so in such an unregulated space, would inevitably push out those who have better things to do than being abused for their views or just because of their race, sex, gender identity, sexuality, religion, nationality, or whatever.
The idea that unregulated speech will allow the truth to emerge as good speech pushes back on the bad is a libertarian fantasy.
If that were true, 4chan and 8chan would have eventually become paragons of enlightened discourse rather than permanent playgrounds for anti-social bottom-feeding incels. That didn’t happen.
And it wouldn’t happen on Twitter.
Good speech can’t compete in 280 characters with unconstrained cruelty.
Good speech involves nuance and depth, which are hard enough to come by in such spaces as Twitter. But they are especially unlikely to edge out unregulated shitposting, which goes straight for the amygdala, hijacking reasoned discourse in favor of nihilistic sadism.
Ironically, the only way to make Twitter a place for true maximum expression is to ensure that the trolls who spew venomous hatred, dangerous pseudoscience, and conspiracy-addled nonsense are either banned or at least have their content flagged as bullshit.
With those folks removed or restrained, the extremes are modulated, and a broader range of reasonable voices can be heard.
Without that moderation, Twitter mobs (on the right or left) will suck up all the oxygen in the room.
It already happens too often.
Without moderation, it would only get worse.
The result: unregulated digital speech would reduce the variety of viewpoints heard. The substantive flowering of free expression would be diminished, not enhanced.
* * *
The ego-driven ventilations and vanity projects of people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel aren’t all bad, though.
At least they demonstrate, beyond any doubt, something some of us have known for a long time: that libertarianism is and has always been an ideology for the most aggressive, predatory, greedy, and all-around-shittiest people in the world.
Those who lack moral restraint, empathy, or basic people skills (like Elon Musk) love it because it lets them act however they want, whenever they want.
Like all children prefer.
But the world requires the guidance of adults, not only in chronological but also in emotional terms.
Elon Musk has demonstrated that however rich he is, and however bright he may be, in that latter regard, he is at best an adolescent. His emotional regulatory system is missing some essential parts.
And no, this is not an ableist critique. It has nothing to do with the fact that he has Asperger’s, as he informed us on SNL.
It’s because he’s an asshole.
Twitter already has enough assholes using the platform. The last thing we need is one owning the entire thing and remaking it to suit his personal vision.
This is not to say I don’t wish Elon Musk well.
I hope, for instance, that his vision to colonize Mars bears fruit.
I hope he can help bring forth the technology to make it happen.
I hope the rockets work.
And I very much hope that he’s on the first one off the pad.
Please go here for the original article: https://timjwise.medium.com/elon-musks-vision-for-twitter-should-scare-the-hell-out-of-you-33a8de172144
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