Musk, Twitter, and Orwell

Let’s face it: ain't nobody wanna see a picture of Elon Musk's ugly face.

Curmie wrote a couple of days ago that he might have something to say about Elon Musk’s imminent purchase of Twitter. Turns out, he does. Somewhere between joy of seemingly everyone to his right and the terror of those to his left lies Curmie’s perspective. 

Musk, of course, fancies himself as a sort of Nietzschean übermensch, so superior to us mere mortals that he cannot be expected to abide by quotidian standards of integrity, much less compassion or empathy. Curmie, equally obviously, views him as just another wealthy and petulant narcissist with delusions of grandeur. Oh, and an asshole of the first order; mustn’t forget that. 

To be honest, Curmie doesn’t much care what happens to Twitter. He has two accounts—one, as Curmie, is used almost exclusively to announce a new post on this blog. I haven’t tweeted anything from my personal account in years. I follow only a handful of people I haven’t bothered to unfollow since I stopped being anything like an active participant on the platform. I do check in occasionally to see what’s happening at favorite museums, theatre companies, and the like, but I sure as hell don’t use Twitter as a primary news source. For these reasons, Curmie’s own world has more to fear from the intrusions into education policy of a self-important pseud like Bill Gates than from anything Elon Musk might do, whatever new direction of Twitter might take. 

Of course, it is never a good thing to have so many communications outlets—Twitter, Facebook, the Washington Post…—de facto in the hands of a single fatcat, but it’s difficult to mourn overmuch the transfer of power in news organizations and media platforms to single sultans from cabals of oligarchs. Musk, to be sure, has the economic power to do whatever he wants. There’s a meme out there that if you made $200,000 every day since Columbus sailed the ocean blue, you still wouldn’t have accumulated as much money as Musk proposes to drop on this single purchase. Curmie did the math; it checks out. Curmie isn’t convinced that Musk is the smarter and harder-working of the two of us, but grants that he might be. In all modesty, however, Curmie doubts that Musk exceeds him in those areas by the over 200,000:1 ratio of our net worths. No, he doesn’t inhabit the same world as you and I, Gentle Reader. 

So, even more than is his usual practice, Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow at Musk’s gallant knight on a white charger shtick. Musk claims in a recent tweet to be a liberal, but his fellow liberals have turned into… anarchists? communists? nothing but Woke Folk? Something awful, whatever they are. Let’s be real: there may be actual liberals whose net worth hovers at or near a billion dollars. (Side note: Bruce Springsteen and Dolly Parton combined don’t have a billion dollars.) But you don’t accumulate hundreds of billions if you care about anything or anyone but yourself. In other words, as his many costly vanity projects demonstrate, Musk is another boring and hedonistic super-rich guy. His actions are entirely by, for, and about Elon Musk. Yawn. 

But all of this dances around the core issue: Musk’s claim that he will restore free speech to the platform. Let’s start with whether that needs doing to begin with. The answer is… sort of? probably? I guess so? There was, of course, considerable brouhaha when the soon-to-be former management of Twitter kicked Donald Trump off the platform. Liberals of a certain stripe ignored the notion of free speech and rejoiced; conservatives of a certain stripe ignored the fact of Trump’s prevarications and erupted in righteous dudgeon. 

All of which means, if Curmie might resurrect a term that was very au courant in his grad school days, that the situation is vexed. Was Trump claiming as fact statements that are at best unsubstantiated opinions? Yes. Is shutting down the free flow of misinformation and disinformation a good thing? Ah, here’s where things get dicey. Obviously, for example, when a political figure with millions of followers (in this case) suggests a remarkably stupid solution for a deadly pandemic or pretends it will all just disappear irrespective of what the epidemiologists say, that’s not a good thing for the society in general. 

But falsehoods, even intentional ones, are legally protected speech provided they don’t cross the line into libel/slander or incitement. Denying access to a public figure, even a controversial and mendacious one (and what politician isn’t at least the latter), is of questionable constitutionality and even more questionable ethics. Curmie is enough of a civil libertarian to believe that the answer to bad speech is good speech rather than suppression, for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. 

And isn’t allowing the heretical preferable to suppressing what might turn out to be true? Remember, Galileo got into big trouble for suggesting, correctly, that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Minority opinions, even those of an infinitesimally small number of people, sometimes turn out to have more substance than initially believed. And one person’s fundamental truth is another person’s crackpot theory. Good ideas might take a while to supplant bad ones, but they’ll get there. And in practical terms, allowing any subgroup to claim victimhood with even a modicum of legitimacy is positive for neither the culture at large nor the corporate bottom line when those folks depart en masse. 

It’s also important to remember that conservative plaints about unfairness are simultaneously legitimate and exaggerated. Curmie doubts that any dispassionate observer would conclude that Twitter or Facebook have been entirely even-handed in their monitoring of users’ commentary. I mention Facebook here although it’s not directly relevant to the current situation because the same allegations currently being leveled against Twitter were once made against Facebook (they still are, but Twitter seems to be the Flavor of the Month). Indeed, many conservatives fled Facebook for Twitter a while back. 

As noted above, Curmie has little direct contact with Twitter, but Facebook did shut down the ability of Curmie or indeed anyone else to post a link to this blog for nearly a year. Curmie doubts that was because he was too conservative for the Zuck and the gang. Unlike Donald Trump, of course, Curmie has no platform from which to challenge the banishment, or even to ascertain what, precisely, he’s alleged to have done to violate the precious “community standards.” 

It’s also true that liberal friends of Curmie have been sent to Facebook Jail for up to a month at a time for posting political comments or memes that are no more problematic than what I see on a regular basis from conservative friends. Lefties aren’t the only ones who too often claim victimhood when the root cause is general incompetence rather than bias. They do, to be sure, but they’re far from alone. 

If Elon Musk wants to show how welcoming he is to disparate views, he’s off to a bad start, as this image demonstrates. Even in the unlikely event that Musk really is sincere about being a “1st Amendment absolutist,” welcoming even criticism of himself, of course, the process of opening up wider avenues of free speech across the Twitterverse will be met with as much opposition outside the US as inside. In particular, the European Union, unencumbered by constitutional protections for free speech, will be a significant barrier. They do like their regulations and their governmental intrusions, after all. And Musk’s assertion that he simply wants to follow the law runs into problems when the laws are fundamentally different in different countries. 

But the real problem will be in keeping twin promises: free speech and the elimination of spam. The chances Musk will obtain both goals simultaneously are precisely zero, not (only) because Musk is longer on braggadocio than on ideas, but because it simply can’t be done. There are half a billion tweets worldwide every day. There’s no way to monitor that much traffic without in some way getting computers involved. But that means somebody has to program them. And those people are going to have their own versions of what is acceptable and what is not. Moreover, there are always work-arounds: Curmie, hardly a technological wizard, couldn’t link to this page, but he could suggest on the Facebook page that Curmiphiles might find new stuff at “manjushri924 dot blogspot dot com.” Blocking all that spam? Not gonna happen. 

More to the point, it’s virtually impossible to program for all possible contexts. Can you set up a program to prevent certain words? Sure, but it takes a lot of sophistication to tell if the word “breast” signals the possibility of an accompanying pornographic image, the part of the chicken used in a recipe, or the process of moving a stage curtain out of the way. Curmie’s all-time favorite example of algorithm-induced silliness was The Case of the Sexy Onions, which he wrote about last summer. 

Moreover, the lines between truth, exaggeration, and untruth are thin and permeable. And that doesn’t even count the inability of computer programs (and often their programmers) to recognize irony or even humor in general. (Curmie’s written about that, too, in a post titled “Facebook and Other Censorious Asshats.”) 

What Musk proposes to do does in fact mean that there will be (slightly) less censorship (or whatever the corporate as opposed to governmental term might be) on Twitter. Liberals are probably right to be less than enthusiastic about this prospect in purely partisan terms, but conservatives ought to be cautious, too. Curmie thought Donald Trump was a narcissist rather than an ideologue; Elon Musk takes that concept to hitherto unimagined new heights. Musk likes the power his wealth allows him to wield. He likes the sound of his own voice. He thinks he’s Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one. He’s the very definition by example of loose cannon. Be careful what you wish for, GOP. 

Curmie’s initial thought was to close this essay with a quotation from the great 20th century philosopher Pete Townshend: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” There is much to recommend this sentiment. There may be a slight shift in what gets the censorial axe, but don’t expect much of a change qualitatively or quantitatively. There will still be a good deal of whimsicality and capriciousness in the decision-making, and some changes Musk proposes won’t ever get off the drawing board. 

Still, the process seems rather Orwellian. The trouble is that liberals are the end-of-the-book self-denying Winston Smith in 1984, content in the oblivion that comes from hearing only one point of view and accepting it as fact even when they have first-hand evidence of its falsity. Conservatives, on the other hand are the sheep, cattle, and horses from Animal Farm, naïvely placing absolute faith in the notion that Napoleon Musk and his porcine minions care deeply about them. Curmie would dearly love to be wrong about either of these observations. He fears he isn’t.

"Not the Path to Knowledge"

It’s been several months since Curmie wrote a blog post… or, rather, since he finished one. There have been a dozen or more false starts, but Curmie does write in what is sometimes called “long form”: seldom does a post fall short of 1000 words, and they’re often twice that. That means they generally take quite a while to write, and often don’t get finished in the couple hours available on a particular day. Then, with the passage of time, one (or both) of two things is likely to happen: either the issue passes out of currency, or someone (often, several someones) writes a piece that says what Curmie would, and at least as well. The result is that such an essay gets linked on Curmie’s Facebook page and everyone moves on. 

There have been a couple of near misses in the sense that I’ve written often fairly lengthy comments on the Ethics Alarm blog (a couple have been “Comments of the Day” in recent days), since I have yet to fully internalize the notion that my best stuff ought to go on my own page. Certainly, there have been ample opportunities of late to awake (not to be confused with becoming Woke) from my blogging slumber—the ongoing saga of Ron DeSantis vs. Every Strawman Ever Created, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, etc. I may yet return to some of these topics, but the story with which I emerge from hibernation is one I first encountered on Ethics Alarms. 

It’s also not by accident that the targets of Curmie’s… erm… Curmudgeonliness here are those who embarrass him precisely because he shares a profile with them. Curmie has been an educator by profession for over 40 years, and his politics are probably to the left of at least 80% of the American public (and 98% of his Congressional district). So when the idiocy of Woke Folk pseudo-educators brings shame to progressives and (actual) educators alike, it’s time to fall back on an over-used but not irrelevant declaration: we’re not all like that. 

Bet you didn't think this would be the 
center of an educational controversy.

So, here we go… An unnamed social studies teacher at San Francisco’s Creative Arts Charter School was discussing the significance of the invention of the cotton gin, surely one of most significant moments in the history of agriculture. To demonstrate her point, she brought in some cotton bolls, pointing out the sharpness of the edges and the difficulty of extracting the seeds. 

In other words, to show the importance of the cotton gin to the economic development of the country, especially the South, she showed students what the alternative would be. (Curmie remembers his own experience of cotton bolls when he was about 8. They’re nasty things to deal with by hand.) This might not be inspired teaching, but it is good teaching, and it ought to be applauded. Remember, the lesson was about the cotton gin. 

Ah, but you see, it was slaves who had been tasked with the job of rendering the bolls suitable for turning into fabric, slaves whose hands were injured in the process. So the lesson about the importance of a technological advance wasn’t really about that at all; it was… well, it was very, very, bad, whatever it was. 

Literally the day after that lesson the school director, Fernando Aguilar, was apologizing (!) for the “unacceptable, harmful” and “inappropriate” teaching that did not reflect the school’s “anti-racist, progressive-minded curriculum.” Oh, horseshit. Speaking as someone who considers himself both anti-racist and progressive-minded (albeit in the conventional meaning of those terms, not their Woke definition), do NOT, Idiot Administrator, link me to this foolishness. Actually, that’s not the right term. “Foolishness” implies triviality. This is an attack on the entire purpose and function of education. It’s a lot worse than merely foolish. 

Of course, the school manages to enlist testimony from professional victims grand-standing jerks parents and from the Wide World of Academe. Apparently teachers aren’t allowed to… you know… teach about slavery except as some abstract evil. No, actually it was a quite concrete, real-world, phenomenon. Providing students—black, white, or otherwise—with a tangible demonstration of one of the effects of that system strikes career educator Curmie as excellent pedagogy. 

Ah, but we might “trivialize the subject” or “traumatize the children,” according to Hasan Kwame Jeffries of Ohio State. He also fears “re-trauma.” Where the hell does that “re-“ come from? Junior high students today have never suffered from slavery, or even segregation. That prejudice still exists is undeniable. But it isn’t in the same universe as the conditions of the mid-19th century and before. And Jeffries’s objection to “any kind of simulation, any kind of re-creation” does not sit well with this theatre professor who deals with what Aristotle called “the imitation of an action” on a daily basis. 

Meanwhile, parent Rebecca Archer whines that putting raw cotton in the hands of black or mixed race students “evoke[s] so many deeply hurtful things about this country,” and offers the penetrating insight that students don’t need to have first-hand experiences with slave labor to have empathy for slaves. Sigh. 

Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim victimhood because your great-great-great-grandparent experienced slavery and simultaneously forbid anything that gives the slightest whiff of what slaves experienced. Nor is Curmie persuaded that holding a cotton boll for a few seconds is much akin to slavery per se. We either talk about slavery or we don’t. And Curmie is all in on “we do.” 

The object is not to make kids, whatever their heritage, feel bad about themselves—Curmie feels neither guilt nor shame for what happened over a century and a half ago hundreds of miles from any place his forebears lived; nor should anyone else, irrespective of their age, race, religion, or indeed any other demographic criterion. These moments in history are perhaps uncomfortable. That’s not merely OK; it’s a good thing, at least by the time a student is in junior high. Ripping off the scab of ignorance so the wounds can be disinfected is far preferable to allowing them to fester. 

One of the few voices of reason in the education establishment is Zeus Leonardo, who, in addition to having a remarkably cool name, is a professor in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He observes that “Being uncomfortable is part of learning, and part of the learning is in the discomfort.” Yes! 

Of course, there are those who need to be perceived as victims or they would evaporate like dew in an Arizona August morning. If they can’t complain that the real history of this country isn’t being taught, they’ll complain that it is. Naturally, the teacher in question was suspended for five weeks, and one can reasonably suspect that her subsequent apology was coerced as a condition of her reinstatement. It has all the authenticity of the fake confessions of American POWs in the Korean War. The problem here goes beyond punishing a teacher for doing nothing wrong. Her travails are the direct result of doing something right.  Humiliating good teachers for doing their jobs has become a blood sport.  This must stop.

If Curmie has learned anything in a teaching career that stretches over six decades, it’s two things: 1). Someone will always claim to be better at my job than I am…until they have to actually do it. 2). The real division in educational philosophy isn’t between liberals and conservatives, although it often appears that way. It’s between those who seek the truth and those who, thinking they’ve found it, attempt to impose their ideology on others. Curmie has known any number of excellent teachers from across the entire political spectrum; they’re from the former category. And there are plenty of doctrinaire bullies across the full range of political persuasion, too. Guess which category they’re from. 

The struttings of conservative yahoos who, for example, believe that romantic relationships between men and women can be “innocent” (a.k.a. asexual), but any same-sex couple is not only inherently founded on sexuality, but overtly about the act itself rather than the relationship: these people drive me crazy. But I’m most ashamed of those who have strayed so far from the the etymology of the term “liberal” (Latin for “free” or “unfettered”) that the description is precisely as apt as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” I just want to slap them all. (Note: snowflakes of all varieties being what they are, I hasten to add that I want to slap them, but have no intention of doing so. Don’t want to get sued or prosecuted…) 

Closing thought: Curmie and Beloved Spouse have been watching the old “Cosmos” series from 1980. Big quote from tonight’s episode: “The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or politics, but it is not the path to knowledge.” Yeah, what Carl Sagan said.