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.