Sometimes, when somebody comes right out and says it, we might wonder why anyone else needeed that part explained. And while social media is not the whole of everything, and thus most people aren't immediately caught up in the Twitter tempest, some things remain straighforward.
Robert Wright↱ suggests—
I think people are overdoing the Elon-Musk-is-a-hypocrite thing. I'm not saying he's not a hypocrite. It's true that he promised to make Twitter a haven for free speech and then, once he was running the place, started stifling speech he found threatening—speech about where his private jet is, about rival social media platforms, and so on.
But to dwell on this irony is to focus on a misdemeanor while a felony is unfolding in plain view. The biggest crime Musk is committing against the Twitter community (and against the American community and even, in a way, the whole world) isn't in his role as chief of Twitter but in his role as Tweeter in Chief. His ownership of Twitter has made him its most prominent user, and he's putting that prominence to destructive use. And this destructiveness is ominous in what it says about how he'll wield his power over Twitter policy.
Musk's approach to tweeting is roughly the approach you'd encourage everyone to adopt if your goal was to carry America's political polarization to new and horrifying levels. His Twitter feed is a case study in the psychology of tribalism, the psychology that is tearing the country, and to some extent the world, apart.
Obviously, his Twitter feed isn't the only Twitter feed that fits this description. Twitter has long been a machine that rewards the people who most egregiously exemplify this psychology; it gives the most tribal tweeters bigger and bigger followings and more and more clout. Its algorithm is a recipe for turning assholes into Alphas.
So why single this one Alpha out for special condemnation? In large part because, as the guy who's running Twitter, Musk is in a position to do something about the problem.
—and the thing is, there really isn't anything new about the general phenomenon; Elon Musk is a particular case, and extraordinary. It's one thing, for instance, if this or that comedian you've never heard of attempts to perform The Aristocrats, but the idea of an actual aristocrat actually taking it so far in an apparently genuine performance is somewhat new to our living generations.
It is, in fact, easy enough to disagree with Wright insofar as Musk is just another CEO, and some of what Musk is in a position to do is pretty much standard fare among social media CEOs,
i.e., "structural reforms—re-engineer Twitter's algorithm." It ought not be any surprise that the algorithms of social media, designed to trigger user engagement, amplify misinformation, bad faith, and wilful reprehensibility. Jack Dorsey could have defanged the algorithm, but Twitter, as a business, depends on poisonous injections.¹
Furthermore—
In retrospect, the clearest early sign that Musk wouldn't put his new pedestal to anti-tribal use was his decision to put it in the service of his political ideology. This actually surprised me. Under the influence of what now seems like remarkable naivete, I had thought that Musk might set aside his political tweeting once he was running the place—somewhat as a newly installed NFL commissioner would refrain from rooting publicly for his favorite team. Certainly I'd expect as much of any Twitter owner who was seriously concerned about the tribalism problem. So when, shortly before the midterm elections, Musk tweeted that undecided independent voters should vote Republican, my hopes for a new and better Twitter started to fade.
—this bit seems like something of a platitude. To be clear, "the clearest early sign that Musk wouldn't put his new pedestal to anti-tribal use" was the tribalistic temper tantrum in which he obliged himself to purchase the platform.
And the thing is, while it's easy to disagree with Wright, sure, people focus too much on the hypocrisy, his effort to temper his words, to present a façade of trying to be fair, reads strangely naïvely. At one point, he actually writes, "In fairness to Musk: One reason it's hard for him to set aside his ideology as he performs his duties at Twitter is that his ideology is tightly intertwined with those duties as he sees them." It's a great line, except he seems to actually mean it. That is, it makes a fine joke, given its subtext, that,
it's hard for Musk to separate the bigotry and make-believe from his business duties because the bigotry and make-believe because he believe the bigotry and make-believe are part fo his duty, but, in fairness, nobody is surprised that a hereditary relic of bigotry considers bigotry his duty. It may be "natural that his politics and professional duties are, in his mind, hard to separate," and, sure, "Still, it's unfortunate", but as a joke it's not even a matter of punching up or down. As a joke, Wright would be coddling Musk; as a serious discursive consideration, the paragraph is exemplary of a certain other problem.
An example has to do with wokeness and the destruction of society: Musk at one point posits a particular crackpot as exemplary of woke, and in his way Wright gets the answer correct:
The Times piece, after mentioning some other people who are concerned about our impact on the ecosystem, says, "But it is rare to find anyone who publicly goes as far as Mr. Knight." Yeah, that's because it's rare to find someone who privately goes as far as Mr. Knight—which in turn is because Mr. Knight is a nut! Yet Elon Musk is depicting Knight's mission—the extinction of the entire human species—as a straightforward expression of wokism.
But then Wright goes on to explain, "If you had to rank tribal Twitter moves in order of perniciousness, the one Musk employed here would have a shot at the number one slot." And he's not wrong,
per se, but there is nothing new about this rhetorical style; one of the only reasons it remains effective is because people keep pretending it's somehow new. The sleight in question "consists of finding an example of extreme and atypical behavior in the other tribe and depicting it as typical of the other tribe", and, let's face it, even in our own experience at Sciforums, this pretty much drives American conservative discourse. Using Covid and anti-maskers as an example, Wright sagely observes, "one thing almost all Republicans and Democrats have in common is that they never scream in supermarkets".
And Wright revisits political correctness, observing Musk's misrepresentation of Stanford University. It's one thing if Wright is "personally not shocked to see this guidance in Stanford's website style guide", and, sure, neither am I, but Musk's misrepresentation matters:
This may seem like a small thing—a minor distortion that has the effect of gratuitously deepening America's tribal divide by just a hair. But these little distortions, these incremental contributions to the morphing of truth into falsehood, happen zillions of times each week on social media, and they do as much damage to (if Stanford will pardon the expression) America as the big fat lies do. In an ideal world, the head of Twitter would be someone who is mindful of this problem, not part of it.
To the bitter end will Wright keep throwing bones.² As a general statement, sure, it might be "hard to say whether Musk is consciously dishonest or just careless and reckless", but "careless and reckless" are a different circumstance compared to Wright's suggestion, "in fairness to Musk", that "it's natural" that Musk's professional duties and personal beliefs are so utterly intertwined. By that measure, it would be "hard to say" whether the dishonesty is conscious or pathological.
But the Stanford example is, more than projecting a particular onto the general; that part is largely implicit compared to the misrepresentation. This form of misrepresentation dates back nearly forty years, at least; it is at the heart of complaints about political correctness and lamentations against thought police. The Stanford example first misrepresents the facts, first, in order to then project.
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Notes:
¹
See #95↑ above:
「The people you followed? What about the subjects you followed? That's a lot of tweets, and we might wonder if they should simply dump it all on a user, or how will they decide which posts to exclude. At that point, we are beyond any naked assertion of general free speech. In any case, Twitter doesn't even organize the tweets in chronological order without being told explicitly. It actually gets kind of stupid, but the more important point is that if Twitter simply piled all the posts from people and subjects followed, in chronological order, users would get sick of all the free speech.」
²
e.g., "… if Stanford will pardon the expression", an apparent joke that also misrepresents Stanford University and the example at hand.
Wright, Robert. "The Misunderstanding of Elon". Nonzero Newsletter. 21 December 2022. Nonzero.Substack.com. 24 December 2022. https://bit.ly/3WZtK15
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