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Thoughts over my morning coffee:  Twitter and Musk's real game plan

ABOVE: created using DALL-E AI image generator. The prompt was: “a cartoon blue bird sweating and screaming, digital art”

5 November 2022 (Washington, DC) - Cosmically stupid or historically malicious? It's the unanswered, constantly repeating question, about Musk and Twitter. I am a cynic (it's genetic) and I pick "malicious". And to be clear is because Musk fired half of Twitter's staff, including 90% of Twitter's content moderation capability ... 4 days before opening up identity-confirmation-free verification to the whole website which will happen. And just before a major U.S. national election. The more Musk's actions did not make sense from a commercial point of view, the more I become convinced that this is about politics for him, specifically ingratiating himself with the American right and with Beijing. Granted: Musk has been courting the right for a while. He's not stupid. He knows exactly what he is doing, and for whom. It is always dangerous to underestimate adversaries as stupid. It only gives them advantage. Democrats have been making this mistake for as long as I can remember. NOTE TO MY READERS: and this Tuesday's election? The Democrats will loose bigly. In his speech this week, Joe Biden had it right when he said Americans “can’t take democracy for granted any longer”. There is nothing misleading about Biden’s diagnosis of the threat to the future of the republic. But you need to take the median US voter’s concerns as the starting point. America’s middle is preoccupied with “kitchen table” issues, notably sharply rising inflation, crime and illegal immigration. Not abortion, not Trump's crimes. Democrats did not treat these concerns with the seriousness they deserved. The dilemma is stark: a majority of voters agree that U.S. democracy is imperilled - yet in poll after poll after poll democracy does not rank high on their list of concerns. Musk seems to be on a mission to damage Twitter. He’s alienating both the most unique part of its user base - the journalists and others who make it the global public square - and the advertisers who are Twitter’s actual customers but who can’t stomach his erratic behavior. Why would he do this? It makes sense if you want to court a few specific groups: the American right, Beijing, and potentially other American adversaries. To understand the domestic politics angle, you have to understand how the right has become fixated in recent years on the tech industry and the (supposed) liberals who run it. Prominent right-wing figures now even talk of a kind of digital totalitarianism in which cultural norms are dictated by the (supposed) ability of tech companies to police online discourse. They badly wanted to see these companies displaced or forced to cater to the right. Which is exactly what Musk is offering through (a) his pledge to change how Twitter moderates discourse, to allow more right wing extremism (b) his culture war against blue checks, who in the minds of the right are the key figures in Twitter’s cabal of liberal thought police. The plan to charge for blue checks makes no sense otherwise. It will destroy the perceived value of the blue check and earn piddling revenue, for a platform which is primarily an ad business. Its only purpose is to win plaudits from the right by showing he shares their enemies. Musk must calculate that however many online liberals he annoys, the left will never fully turn against him. He’s the guy that made electric cars a real thing! He thinks he can use that space to court the right. Next up: China. Here’s a screengrab from yesterday's Wall Street Journal: 

At a time of great tension between Beijing and American companies operating in China, Tesla stays in their good books through actions like this. Twitter can help with that. It’s no secret that China often pressures Western companies to take particular stances on Taiwan or other issues by threatening to cut off market access. They want to control Western discourse through sheer market power. As the owner of Twitter, Musk must know that some of that pressure will come his way. It even gives him a great opportunity to ingratiate himself to Beijing by influencing how China, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, etc., are discussed on the platform. No coincidence, then, that while the deal for Twitter was closing, Musk suggested Taiwan give up its independence and become a “special administrative zone” of the PRC, drawing praise from Beijing. Looking at these and all his other comments – e.g. about Russia/Ukraine – many have asked “can he really be that stupid?” Maybe, but the alternative is worse: it’s an attempt at active courtship of the world’s worst dictatorships, exactly as he takes over the West’s public square. What is he going to do with this control? Twitter won’t make Musk richer – if anything, it will consume his money. But it is a tool which can be used to ingratiate him and his other businesses with the American right, Beijing, and other dictatorships. This is the real story. So while you consider how Musk’s moves look to be completely contrary to the long-term health of Twitter either financially or as a genuinely useful and productive forum, keep your eye on this picture instead. Twitter is now a tool of his ambitions, whatever they may be. The economic viability of Twitter as a business will be swept away. As the controlling owner of a privately held business, he can choose to merely take losses and cross-subsidize the company with revenue from Tesla. Yes, his decisions will prove terrible for Twitter's bottom line. But he's going to keep doing them anyway because of the power he will have in the culture war. POSTSCRIPT

Much of this is tied to the complete unraveling of U.S. society, the destruction of America's social cohesion, sacrificed to greed. It has been an inevitable process. The large currents of the past generation – deindustrialisation, the flattening of average wages, the financialisation of the economy, income inequality, the growth of information technology, the flood of money into Washington, the rise of the political right – all of these had their origins in the late 1970s. Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline. It is a period George Packer called "The Unwinding" in his 2013 book, one of 3 books I constantly cite in my posts and which I recommend to my readers, ad nauseam:

But in my view, this "unwinding" is just a return to the normal state of American life. By my deterministic analysis, the U.S. has always been a wide-open, free-wheeling country, with a high tolerance for big winners and big losers as the price of equal opportunity in a dynamic society. If the U.S. brand of capitalism has rougher edges than that of other democracies, it is worth the trade-off for growth and mobility. There is nothing unusual about the six surviving heirs to the Walmart fortune possessing between them the same wealth as the bottom 42% of Americans – that's the country's default setting. Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Larry Page are merely the reincarnation of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan. And Elon? He's just Jay Gatsby (he does have that fictitious edge, yes?) Much has been written about the effects of globalisation on economic America during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in American social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their normal behavior: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 20 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. Oh, there have always been isolated lawbreakers in high places. What destroyed social morale below was the continual, systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing. So it was no wonder more and more Americans believed the game was rigged, and the right saw the political payoff - and the American social contract was shredded.

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