I mean, with tech titan (and second wealthiest man on the planet) Bezos owning the WaPo, the moment the tech titan (and the wealthiest man on the planet) Musk will put his hands on Twitter hopefully will also be the moment of some "enlightenment" for the educated masses. Or maybe I'm just day-dreaming.
This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).
I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet, however it is likely that their corporate values system might change.
"I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet"
why even post this?
Why do you think he's doing neuralink eh? Wake up sheeple!
Billionaires own companies. That's what they do.
So they look for other things to own that will lose less value over time.
Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.
https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1514696106223022088?s...
Twitter and WaPo's staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn't call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn't want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn't celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn't call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it's totally okay for Khamenei to call for "eradicating" an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn't blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn't call a government Nazi who didn't even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.
Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.
One distinction I find helps is between "capitalism" and "capitalist". To me "capitalism" == "freedom to trade property, labor, goods, and services" (which, due to human nature, does lead to wealth accumulation), while "capitalist" doesn't mean "someone who believes in capitalism" so much as "oligarch" / "robber baron".
A colleague once put it to me like so: trust in capitalism, not capitalists.
Capitalists all too often rent-seek, and because they have accumulated enough capital to have outsize political power, they are a threat to their societies.
Capitalism, in so far as it produces capitalists, is dangerous, but if the alternative is less freedom for individuals lest some of them become tomorrow's capitalists -especially if it is significantly less freedom- then I'd rather stick to capitalism. Of course, this is a result of my definition of "capitalism", and you might well disagree, but forget what word we should use to name a system with such freedoms. The important thing is the idea that those freedoms are a good thing, and that not having them is a bad thing, and that the price to pay for them is the risk of oligarchs arising, and that we need mechanisms to deal with that problem that don't throw the baby out with the bath water!
Without researching or commenting on the bulk of your strawman army, I will posit this: Wishing for the death of a harmful actor with a lifetime appointment to political office is not immoral. If there were some avenue, some knowable end date of a terrible human's influence on a critical pillar of government, maybe it wouldn't be so. Alas, we have no term limits for this role.
https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...
Boycotting (the so called cancel culture by those it affects) is a fundamental and irreducible component of any “free” market.
At the same time, anyone is allowed to not participate on twitter or whatever and roll their own social network.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.
We have all seen how 4chan and 8chan turned out. We are in one of the most heavily moderated forums of the internet and we keep each other accountable to the system.
Lack of accountability and moderation will cause discussions to regress and devolve onto pointless dog whistles and virtue signalling.
While protecting speech is important, not all speech is important nor worthwhile.
There’s a reason we have concepts like published laws, a jury of our peers, appeals processes, etc. Replacing that with hidden arbitrary rules that are interpreted differently from one day to the next, by faceless IT oligarchs that have no accountability, no observable appeal process, etc is dystopian. You have to ask yourself, if you’re no longer using the law to make the speech rules, who is making them?
If we had what we have now over the last 150 years, where any viewpoint that isn’t aligned with the establishment in power is banned, we wouldn’t have racial integration, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana reform, all things the political establishment would have happily banned from discussion at one point.
We have multiple concrete examples where these IT companies have banned discussion of ideas that later turned out to be 100% legitimate. You were banned for discussing the lab leak theory, a year later Fauci comes out and says it’s very possible. The New York Post had its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop banned, possibly changing the results of the election, the NYT comes out later and says the laptop is real. Silicon Valley executives should not get to decide for society what is true and what is false and what we’re allowed to discuss.
The whole “private company” thing is fine when you’re not big enough to change the results of an election or steer the discourse of our entire society. Once you are big enough to do that, you need to be hands off, which is precisely why we have common carrier laws that legally ensure that outcome.
If musk makes this purchase it won’t centralize power any more, but it will draw attention to how centralized that power is. Which is a good thing
Which is still, IMO, foolish, given, among other things, the degree to which large swathes of the public have parasocial relationships with the particular celebrity oligarch in question, but it's not saying that making the problem worse will draw attention.
How can it make things worse when it has literally always been the case as long as there has been “mass communication”?
Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM's, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.
From my vantage point, it’s hard to see how Elon Musk is making any governmental policy decisions - and thus isn’t an oligarch. But maybe you have some examples?
Musk is extremely rich and can buy a lot of stuff. That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does.
> That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does
You’re making a mistake of your own by conflating oligarchy with tyranny. They often go hand in hand, with the former generally preceding the latter. So it’s probably better to cry oligarchy before it’s a given rather than afterwards.
On the other hand, enacted policy aligns quite well with the interests of large corporations, and I'm not aware of any causal explanation besides the obvious one.
If Elon steers Tesla and SpaceX, he is indirectly steering congress (or at least has his hand on the wheel).
Edit: also one of the perks for rulers on the worse regimes (authoritarian regimes, monarchies) is that law is not the same for the few that tule than for the rest, law is definitely not the same from the point of view of this wealth maxers
I’m still waiting for examples of how Musk has exercised his sovereign power.
The US economy flits around $22 trillion per year and the US budget last year was 30% of that. There isn’t a single trillionaire in the world. The US government has the historically unprecedented ability to project hard power around the globe within hours of deciding to do so. Musk has little more than influence, and congress doesn’t seem to like him very much.
You know there's a giant ball of platinum floating around just outside mars thats worth 1.7 Quintillian?
Today does not represent tomorrow.
The most recent figures I can find for Amazon's operating budget list it at well over $500B, which puts it within an order of magnitude of the single richest country in the world; it would end up in the top 10 if it were itself a country[1]
Keep in mind also that a large part of the US's wealth is derived from having these nation-state-level corporations within its financial jurisdiction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
Run that through alot of loops and eventually corporations aree biggeer than any nationstate Vec<Nationstate> by design of the system.
Dollars speak louder than words. Musk can say anything, anytime. What he does with his money demonstrates what he believes.