Twitter and the War of Oligarchs
Geoff Shullenberger
April 16, 2022
Last week, the media hive mind reacted with horror to Elon Musk’s bid to purchase journalists’ primary base of operations, Twitter. The writer Jeff Jarvis captured the mood with his remark that “today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.” The Tesla boss, in this analogy, plays the part of Hitler, whose proposed takeover threatens to bring the blue-checks’ freewheeling fun to a shocking and brutal end.
While the rhetoric is hyperbolic, there is a real and significant power struggle underway here. At stake is the medium that facilitates an influential alliance between progressive professionals and like-minded oligarchs.
An innocent reader might assume Jarvis and other pundits feared that Musk would shut down the site or introduce harsh new restrictions on what could be said there. The reality was the opposite: What made Musk’s proposed takeover so terrifying was his “divisive rhetoric about free speech,” as New York Times columnist Kara Swisher explained. Swisher didn’t need to spell out what was so divisive about Musk’s demand to scale back online censorship; it is now a bien-pensant article of faith that support for free speech is tantamount to fascism.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich elaborated this position more fully at The Guardian. Musk’s free-speech agenda, he argued, would fulfill “the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on earth.” This is because relaxation of controls over expression would allow the internet to be “dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science, or the common good.”
What Reich left unstated is to whom Musk and the like are accountable under the current censorious dispensation. The implicit answer is “experts” like himself, who have managed to claw back a certain amount of power over the internet in the past half-decade by prevailing upon major digital platforms to censor and ban. Reich is partly telling the truth when he states, “This is not about freedom. It’s about power.”
Musk’s promise to end Twitter’s heavy-handed speech regime directly threatens the power of Reich’s own class of educated professionals, which depends on being able to silence dissenters and suppress narratives that conflict with their own.
As a mega-capitalist, Musk no doubt has his own material designs in seeking to control Twitter. That only underscores the problem with market societies in which a handful of wealthy men lord over traditional and social media, wielding outsized influence over what we get to read and how we think. But these aren’t the present terms of the debate. We are instead fighting over which billionaire or set of billionaires is more beneficial to our common life.
The leftist writer John Ganz was also being partially honest about this situation when he tweeted: “The PMC [professional-managerial class] has managed to struggle for some semblance of control over social-media platforms, and now capital wants to reassert control.” The crucial point he elided is that the powerful faction of capital that currently controls Twitter is aligned with the interests of those like himself, who are demanding the perpetuation of censorship; hence, their aggressive effort to thwart Musk’s takeover.
Ganz implicitly expresses the sentiment, now widespread on the left, that capitalist oligarchs are good so long as their politics are progressive. “The main enemy will always be the tech capitalist reactionary oligarchy (Musk, Thiel, Andreesen),” he writes, “who constantly plot intrigues day and night against the organized power of the working class and its allies.” In this telling, non-“reactionary” oligarchs are to be praised as allies of progress and friends of workers.
Those fretting about the world’s wealthiest man gaining control over their favorite site have scarcely objected to the fact that the media outlets, think tanks, NGOs, and universities they work for comprise a patronage network bankrolled by a handful of other billionaires like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Musk has done a service by exposing the function Twitter performs for this alliance of oligarchs and the professional classes, which Michael Lind terms “Progressivism, Inc.”
From the beginning, Twitter has been central to the agenda of this alliance, though that agenda looked very different only a decade or so ago. During the Arab Spring, for example, Western journalists, NGOs, and politicians rhapsodized about the democratizing potential of Twitter in much the same terms as Musk today. Indeed, many of the same reporters, bloggers, and columnists who now inveigh against Musk’s support for free speech hailed how free expression, enabled by platforms like Twitter, could bring down dictatorships.
At this earlier moment, Progressivism, Inc. saw social media as an opportunity to spread its values abroad: The free flow of information was seen as a way of attenuating the power of foreign governments in favor of a loose affiliation of Western state entities, NGOs, and media outlets that sought to expand their influence. More recently, in the face of the populist threats that emerged around 2016 at home, the same alliance has deployed censorship to reassert its hegemony. Thus, while elite ideological opinion on free speech has reversed, what remains constant is the attempt to control the circulation of information in favor of certain interests.
Both Musk and those who fear him position themselves as the defenders of democracy. In reality, the episode reveals how vacuous the term has become. In the final analysis, the conflict over Twitter is a war between rival factions of oligarchs. A less censorious Twitter is desirable in itself, as is the emergence of any meaningful challenge to the conformity that stifles cultural and intellectual life. But a less censorious internet also risks obscuring how power is really exercised in a world where the so-called public square is a patchwork of privatized ideological fiefdoms.
https://compactmag.com/article/twitter-and-the-war-of-oligarchs
April 16, 2022
Last week, the media hive mind reacted with horror to Elon Musk’s bid to purchase journalists’ primary base of operations, Twitter. The writer Jeff Jarvis captured the mood with his remark that “today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.” The Tesla boss, in this analogy, plays the part of Hitler, whose proposed takeover threatens to bring the blue-checks’ freewheeling fun to a shocking and brutal end.
While the rhetoric is hyperbolic, there is a real and significant power struggle underway here. At stake is the medium that facilitates an influential alliance between progressive professionals and like-minded oligarchs.
An innocent reader might assume Jarvis and other pundits feared that Musk would shut down the site or introduce harsh new restrictions on what could be said there. The reality was the opposite: What made Musk’s proposed takeover so terrifying was his “divisive rhetoric about free speech,” as New York Times columnist Kara Swisher explained. Swisher didn’t need to spell out what was so divisive about Musk’s demand to scale back online censorship; it is now a bien-pensant article of faith that support for free speech is tantamount to fascism.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich elaborated this position more fully at The Guardian. Musk’s free-speech agenda, he argued, would fulfill “the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on earth.” This is because relaxation of controls over expression would allow the internet to be “dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science, or the common good.”
What Reich left unstated is to whom Musk and the like are accountable under the current censorious dispensation. The implicit answer is “experts” like himself, who have managed to claw back a certain amount of power over the internet in the past half-decade by prevailing upon major digital platforms to censor and ban. Reich is partly telling the truth when he states, “This is not about freedom. It’s about power.”
Musk’s promise to end Twitter’s heavy-handed speech regime directly threatens the power of Reich’s own class of educated professionals, which depends on being able to silence dissenters and suppress narratives that conflict with their own.
As a mega-capitalist, Musk no doubt has his own material designs in seeking to control Twitter. That only underscores the problem with market societies in which a handful of wealthy men lord over traditional and social media, wielding outsized influence over what we get to read and how we think. But these aren’t the present terms of the debate. We are instead fighting over which billionaire or set of billionaires is more beneficial to our common life.
The leftist writer John Ganz was also being partially honest about this situation when he tweeted: “The PMC [professional-managerial class] has managed to struggle for some semblance of control over social-media platforms, and now capital wants to reassert control.” The crucial point he elided is that the powerful faction of capital that currently controls Twitter is aligned with the interests of those like himself, who are demanding the perpetuation of censorship; hence, their aggressive effort to thwart Musk’s takeover.
Ganz implicitly expresses the sentiment, now widespread on the left, that capitalist oligarchs are good so long as their politics are progressive. “The main enemy will always be the tech capitalist reactionary oligarchy (Musk, Thiel, Andreesen),” he writes, “who constantly plot intrigues day and night against the organized power of the working class and its allies.” In this telling, non-“reactionary” oligarchs are to be praised as allies of progress and friends of workers.
Those fretting about the world’s wealthiest man gaining control over their favorite site have scarcely objected to the fact that the media outlets, think tanks, NGOs, and universities they work for comprise a patronage network bankrolled by a handful of other billionaires like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Musk has done a service by exposing the function Twitter performs for this alliance of oligarchs and the professional classes, which Michael Lind terms “Progressivism, Inc.”
From the beginning, Twitter has been central to the agenda of this alliance, though that agenda looked very different only a decade or so ago. During the Arab Spring, for example, Western journalists, NGOs, and politicians rhapsodized about the democratizing potential of Twitter in much the same terms as Musk today. Indeed, many of the same reporters, bloggers, and columnists who now inveigh against Musk’s support for free speech hailed how free expression, enabled by platforms like Twitter, could bring down dictatorships.
At this earlier moment, Progressivism, Inc. saw social media as an opportunity to spread its values abroad: The free flow of information was seen as a way of attenuating the power of foreign governments in favor of a loose affiliation of Western state entities, NGOs, and media outlets that sought to expand their influence. More recently, in the face of the populist threats that emerged around 2016 at home, the same alliance has deployed censorship to reassert its hegemony. Thus, while elite ideological opinion on free speech has reversed, what remains constant is the attempt to control the circulation of information in favor of certain interests.
Both Musk and those who fear him position themselves as the defenders of democracy. In reality, the episode reveals how vacuous the term has become. In the final analysis, the conflict over Twitter is a war between rival factions of oligarchs. A less censorious Twitter is desirable in itself, as is the emergence of any meaningful challenge to the conformity that stifles cultural and intellectual life. But a less censorious internet also risks obscuring how power is really exercised in a world where the so-called public square is a patchwork of privatized ideological fiefdoms.
https://compactmag.com/article/twitter-and-the-war-of-oligarchs
