Coming in with a more somber take on the whole Musk/Twitter situation. Maybe Elon wants freer speech on Twitter so the platform can't be used as a weapon against him, but I suspect there's more to it. Perhaps his real goal is essentially to save the propaganda machine from itself.
An important function of Twitter is to draw the line between "acceptable, mainstream" and "unacceptable, fringe" ideas. The ideological inbreeding inside the organization has pushed it to the point where "mainstream" thought is defined according to a strict orthodoxy held by PMCs living in US coastal cities. This is a tiny sliver of the population but their ironclad narrative control makes it appear they they're the majority - and no one is convinced of this more than they are.
Narrowing the "mainstream" so much has caused huge numbers of people to fall outside the mainstream and become amenable to "fringe" ideas. The Twitterati don't care about this, because they simply ban anyone with unacceptable opinions and then that person doesn't exist any more as far as they're concerned. If those nasty wrongthinkers can't reply to their tweets they don't matter. Unfortunately for them, those banned people still exist in the physical world where they can do things much more impactful than replying to tweets.
It's possible that Musk sees where this is going and wants to head it off. The elite opinion-makers are suffering from "epistemic closure," where they exist in such a completely sealed echo chamber that they've lost the ability to understand how people outside the bubble think. If this cycle of inbred thinking continues, there's a risk that the entire intellectual foundation of the neoliberal globalist order will collapse, as they'll be unable to influence the majority of the population.
The core ideas behind this order have always been distasteful to most people, but in the past its enforcers have had to engage with contrary views and develop ways of dealing with them - diverting their attention, making false promises, confusing the issues, etc. The advent of the Internet has dulled their rhetorical abilities, allowing them to toss out their argumentative toolkit in favor of the "Ban User" button. If Musk takes this tool away it may force them to start refining their arguments again, which will help the agenda of the blue checks even as they wail and gnash their teeth.
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branchandroot
Musk wants free speech?
Date: 2022-11-15 11:59 pm (UTC)An important function of Twitter is to draw the line between "acceptable, mainstream" and "unacceptable, fringe" ideas. The ideological inbreeding inside the organization has pushed it to the point where "mainstream" thought is defined according to a strict orthodoxy held by PMCs living in US coastal cities. This is a tiny sliver of the population but their ironclad narrative control makes it appear they they're the majority - and no one is convinced of this more than they are.
Narrowing the "mainstream" so much has caused huge numbers of people to fall outside the mainstream and become amenable to "fringe" ideas. The Twitterati don't care about this, because they simply ban anyone with unacceptable opinions and then that person doesn't exist any more as far as they're concerned. If those nasty wrongthinkers can't reply to their tweets they don't matter. Unfortunately for them, those banned people still exist in the physical world where they can do things much more impactful than replying to tweets.
It's possible that Musk sees where this is going and wants to head it off. The elite opinion-makers are suffering from "epistemic closure," where they exist in such a completely sealed echo chamber that they've lost the ability to understand how people outside the bubble think. If this cycle of inbred thinking continues, there's a risk that the entire intellectual foundation of the neoliberal globalist order will collapse, as they'll be unable to influence the majority of the population.
The core ideas behind this order have always been distasteful to most people, but in the past its enforcers have had to engage with contrary views and develop ways of dealing with them - diverting their attention, making false promises, confusing the issues, etc. The advent of the Internet has dulled their rhetorical abilities, allowing them to toss out their argumentative toolkit in favor of the "Ban User" button. If Musk takes this tool away it may force them to start refining their arguments again, which will help the agenda of the blue checks even as they wail and gnash their teeth.