In my opinion, Twitter is an unmitigated garbage-fire of a service. I am not a user, and I can find no way in which Twitter can improve my life. The times I have seen it involves following links from other sites, usually from Naked Capitalism (which is a great site, go ahead and check it out). That was quite enough to realize Twitter does nothing of use for me.
I’ll go a step further. I think Twitter with its tiny character limits is the antithesis of intelligent discourse. Conversations worth having tend to be long form (like Substack), or at least need the ability to be long form. Add to that the culture of Twitter which inclines towards snideness and one-liners, and interesting conversation involving nuance becomes impossible.
This in turn has damaged conversation in our culture as a whole. The ability to be a complete jackass on Twitter, communicating in nothing but snide retorts and allegedly dank memes has bled over into the real world. I think Freddie DeBoer nails it in this essay.
Let me say it again: Twitter is an unmitigated garbage fire. Don’t use it. Subscribe to my Substack instead. Make this your Twitter substitute! Reply in as many characters as you want!
I am also not a Elon Musk fan. I trust him to be a guardian of free speech in the same way I trusted Donald Trump to be a champion of the working class. That is, not at all. Mr. Musk’s rhetoric sounds fine, but the proof will be in whether he lives up to it. I will be pleasantly surprised if he does.
But I’ll give Mr. Musk this - he cannot make Twitter worse. Which brings me to something that has provided me amusement during the past week or two: watching woke so-called “liberals” melt down because Mr. Musk claims he will bring Twitter more into line with free speech ideals.
The thing is, these so-called “liberals” are not liberals at all (see this essay for more detail). They tend to be members of and aspirants to the Professional Managerial Class (aka ‘PMC’) who are partisan Democrats. The term ‘PMC’ was coined by Barbara Ehrenreich to refer to the class of middle managers, consultants, and credentialed professionals. The prevailing attitude among this group thinks that they know best how to run the world, and the rest of us serfs should just follow their lead. Basically, think of every middle manager you ever fantasized about punching in the face. For them, freedom of speech serves only to distract us from their enlightened management.
A prime example of PMC fury comes from Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, writing this column in the Guardian. Mr. Reich starts out OK, stating that we should be skeptical of Mr. Musk’s true motive in purchasing Twitter. I agree; we should. But then Mr. Reich takes a weird turn into complaining about how freedom of speech will lead to tyranny. As Professor Jonathan Turley points out, “Reich lays that agenda bare in his column while condemning free speech advocates as petty tyrants oppressing people through freedom.” Mr. Reich claims that Mr. Musk buying Twitter will imperil democracy. However, reading Mr. Reich’s column leaves me with no clue as to what he means by ‘democracy’. Rather, what he calls “democracy” sounds more like “enlightened” technocratic rule by PMC experts. Mr. Reich’s primary conceit is that letting the people rule themselves can only lead one astray from the designs of PMC experts who know best how to run society. Since the people require free speech to run their own affairs, limiting what they can say will limit their ability to stray from the righteous path the PMC have laid out for us. Mr. Reich is free to hold this view, but its not democracy.
Which brings us to the illiberal woke left (aka ‘wokies’), there is a strong overlap between the wokies and the PMC. In true PMC fashion, the wokies, who are mostly white themselves, believe they have the one true way to bring about the end of racism. Wokies are the guys who talk about having a discussion about race relations, but by ‘discussion’ they mean a hectoring lecture about how you must think. If you refuse to conform to their philosophy, then you are a racist. They are the type of people who talk about listening to what people of color have to say, right up until that person of color says something the wokies don’t like. See, for example, Dr. John McWhorter and Dr. Adolph Reed. White wokies then cry that the person of color who calls out wokism is in fact the real racist.
In short, wokies are just the latest attempt by white members of the PMC to retain white control the civil rights discourse. But that’s a topic for another day.
Come to think of it, shouldn’t the wokies be ecstatic that Twitter is now an African-American owned business? (Zing!)
Wokies reject everyone’s right to speak their mind and discuss issues freely. A wokie in good standing will tell you they reject free speech because someone from a marginalized group might get offended if people can speak their mind. They usually back this up with the slogan that “offensive words are literal violence.” As someone who has been both punched in the face and insulted, let me say right now that the idea that words are “literal violence” is complete bullshit.
The real reason wokies also don’t like free speech because it inevitably puts them in a position where they have to argue in favor of their positions, or gods forbid, actually explain their jargon in plain language. Most wokies are incapable of doing either. Since they can’t win the argument on the merits, better to eliminate free speech so they don’t have to. Of course a wokie will tell you that “winning an argument on the merits” is a racist construct. How convenient for them.
Finally, free speech on Twitter means that journalists on the ground reporting facts that run contrary to Pentagon propaganda would no longer be silenced. See the case of Scott Ritter in Ukraine. According to Twitter, truth is misinformation when it contradicts Pentagon narratives.
The most delicious irony, as I wrote about earlier, is that a favorite attack on free speech by members of the PMC and wokies is that its OK for private companies to stifle free speech by privatizing the public square. They like to say, “if you want a forum dedicated to free speech, just buy or build your own, LOL.”
Looks like ol’ Elon took you up on your challenge, and bought out your preferred forum. How about them apples? Matt Taibbi documents the wailing of the woke here. He writes:
I spent a good part of the last four years warning that asking unaccountable billionaires to meddle more in speech would result in exactly such a table-turning episode, in which the political mainstream’s cocky censor squad would wake up one day to find the wrong tycoon in charge, at which point they would cry foul and howl suddenly about the evils of oligarchy. […] So it’s hard to do anything but chuckle at their anguish this week.
Indeed it is. Schadenfreude is a dish best served.
But in the end, I predict a small side of schadenfreude is the only thing that will come of this. I don’t believe Mr. Musk will prove to be any sort of champion of free speech. I encourage him to prove me wrong, however.
And I still have no use for Twitter.
On Elon Musk buying Twitter
I should share this on twitter