Look familiar?
In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, the philosopher Richard Rorty included a prophetic warning of what might happen if America elected a “strongman” type figure:
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Well, it seems like Musk and the folks at Twitter are working very hard to make this come true!
Back in the Spring of 2022, I wrote that Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political move, the product of the growing class consciousness of reactionary tech capitalists who wanted to seize back control from what they saw as a “woke” managerial layer:
Tech oligarchs, like Musk, Thiel, and Marc Andreesen, resent the control of content moderation on social media platforms by what they see as overly “woke” members of the professional-managerial class in both the media and in the lower-ranking staffs of the tech companies themselves. Unimpeachable in principle, in practice “free speech” would likely mean a return to the platform of the kind of trolling that dominated the space in 2015-2016, during Trump’s election. There would probably be an increase in harassment of left-leaning journalists and activists and a general “flooding of the zone with shit.”
This has all essentially come to pass: the “blue-check” system—long resented by the mob—which once credentialed media figures and those with institutional roles, in general, has ended in favor of a pay-for-play free for all. Content moderation is basically nil: you have to threaten people physically for anything to happen and even then probably nothing will. Just this week, there was a rolling wave of harassment against some poor woman who had the temerity to share that she had finished her PhD.
I also wrote that Twitter would form a kind of model society for these people, a “concrete utopia” of what they wished the world looked like:
An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation. Just memes, nonsense, idiotic enthusiasms and fads, etc.
In practice, part of this experiment in social engineering is an absolute deluge of racist, misogynistic, anti-immigrant, and homophobic content. My friend Max Read wrote about this on his Substack in September: “It sure feels like Elon turned up the racism dial last month.” It sure does! There is zero transparency about what the “algorithm” is doing, but I’ve noticed a big uptick in the amount of hateful shit that’s fed to me in my “For You” tab. And I’m not the only one: I spoke to several people who complained that they tried to block the content that appeared or only engaged with innocuous things they liked to train the algorithm and stop such things from appearing to no avail. What’s so insidious about the content that’s being fed is that it appears organic and not particularly ideological, so a lot of it seems intentionally designed to make racist behavior and attitudes appear natural and normal. I’m gonna show you some examples of things that showed up either on my “For You” feed or the feeds of people I talked to during the Thanksgiving holiday:
What I’ve also noticed on top of this patent hate slop is other limbic content: an increase in images of guns, videos of fist fights, and soft-core pornography. Now, if I was inclined to paranoia, I might say there was a deliberate effort going on here to shape the minds of young men! Perhaps even an attempt at fascist subject formation. Or, if you’ll permit a more grandiose transport, an effort to reduce humanity itself to the condition of barbarism: making us all into drooling glandular cases who cannot do the deliberative work of democracy. You could easily see Musk justifying this as just a counterbalancing force to the influence of what he calls “the woke mind virus.” But the thing is if you say this, it does make you sound a little nuts or, at least, it’s easy to dismiss.
Many people have already decamped for Bluesky, the resist lib utopia, but if I find the tone on Twitter to be noxious and hateful, the one on Bluesky just seems, well, too liberal! It’s like tuning into the brain of everyone who’s tuned into NPR. That’s better than Radio Goebbels, but it gets to be a little much. I also think it’s bad to just abandon a platform that has functioned for better or worse as a proxy for the public sphere itself. That’s what they are trying to destroy! I don’t think the continued fragmentation of information and ideas is going to improve anything. My conclusion, of course, is the obvious Marxist one: the problem is that public goods are privately owned and then no longer serve a social function. Here is the most cartoonish depiction of the evils of capitalist ownership of the means of production: you don’t even need to talk about the irrationality of competition and the market, the inevitable crises in production and distribution they create, it’s just, “What if a bad rich guy bought a big factory and started using it to pump out toxic waste?” Well, what if! You’d want the government to step in right? Well, what if he controlled the government?
