You know, megalomaniacs
Alexandra Petri sees shades of “The Madness of King George” in Elon Musk’s post-purchase antics on Twitter. The Doge of Mar-a-Lago must be grinding his false teeth to nubs over the attention the reported world’s richest man gets lately. Musk’s banning of multiple journalists from the site last week created more of a stir than a Donald Trump rally featuring assaults on protesters or post-rally Covid outbreaks. So, here we are, like the mad king’s doctors, spending “considerable time and effort to squinting at the contents of the king’s chamber pot” to fathom Musk’s motives.
Of all the things to which Musk might aspire, he’s chose to be a Twitter troll, Petri laments, and not even a funny one.
“Maybe if we are lucky Musk will start doing more of the fun caesar things, such as trying to get a horse into the Senate, and will stop his mission to turn Twitter into a hateful cesspool! But somehow I doubt it.”
But we don’t have to examine Musk’s stools to find the source of his antipathy towards journalists, the New York Times’ Max Fisher explains in a series of Tweets on Musk’s new $44 billion-dollar toy. Fisher’s new book, “The Chaos Machine,” examines how social media impacts human culture. His tweet thread extracts passages relating to Silicon Valley moguls’ vision of a technological utopia.
“People really need to understand how mainstream it has become in some tech VC [venture capitalist] circles to argue that journalism itself is dangerous as an idea and should be abolished, and that it will be up to the tech world to carry this out,” Fisher begins. “It comes out of a Valley utopianism has said since the 90s that all legacy institutions are ultimately barriers to progress, but that the enlightened minds of the tech world, guided by the pure science of engineering, will one day liberate us by smashing the old ways.”
Musk is simply one of many techies holding such views, Fisher argues. “The idea of rejecting institutions to build a purer society on the internet, in vogue in tech in the 90s, by the 2010s had become a mandate to abolish and remake those institutions in big tech’s image.”
Programmers would be “the new counterculture vanguard, kung fu rebels who would break the chains of human bondage.”
“We offered the world order!” — Khan Noonien Singh
People like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg would be one. And Musk another. PayPal co-founder and Republican mega-donor Peter Thiel would do it.
“The politics of PayPal founders leaned severely libertarian: socially Darwinian, distrustful of government, certain that business knows best,” writes Fisher. Peter Thiel decided only tech firms could safeguard liberty if “unshackled from ‘politics,’ which seemed to mean regulation, public accountability, and possibly the law.”
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel famously wrote in 2009. “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’”
Fostering rejection of democracy may be, in part, what makes Thiel a Republican mega-donor.
Thiel, Fisher adds, “backed projects meant to bring about corporation-run floating cities and colonization of space, all outside the jurisdiction of any government. The sci-fi fantasies merely exaggerated an old idea in the Valley.”
“Engineers and startup founders knew better. It was their responsibility to tear down the status quo and install a techno-Utopia in its place, just as the 1990s manifesto riders had foretold. If government or journalist objected, it was just the old incumbents clinging to authority that was no longer theirs.”
Shades of Khan Noonien Singh, don’t you think?
James T. Kirk: Who the hell are you?
Khan: A remnant of a time long past. Genetically engineered to be superior so as to lead others to peace in a world at war.
You know, megalomaniacs. Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel and more, “claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits,” as the blurb for Fisher’s book says, plus limitless power. And here we are with no Captain Kirks in sight.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.