Thanks to Elon Musk, we’re now in the presence of pure absurdity. Right-wing advocates of small government and free markets fret about the dangers of corporate monopolies and try to dictate how a private company spends its money, and left-leaning liberals root for a tech monolith most famous for selling criminally overpriced phones that are deliberately designed to become unusable every few years.
Yes, the billionaire’s recently launched “war” on Apple just keeps getting weirder.
In fact, last week’s ridiculous fake referendum on unbanning suspended hate-mongers, after which Musk declared that a 1.3% turnout meant the “people have spoken”, is starting to look like dignified statecraft compared to this week’s shenanigans.
I mean, I don’t know a lot about schmoozing advertisers, but I like to imagine that if I received a sizeable proportion of my income from one company, and that company had started worrying about my plans to allow a large number of right-wing hate-mongers back onto my platform, I’m not sure I’d post a meme of Pepe the Frog — the online mascot of far-right white nationalism — as Musk did on Monday.
Likewise, if my main source of income was worried I’d fired all the people who used to weed out fake news, and had just heard that I was no longer policing the sharing of fake news about Covid-19, as announced this week, I’m also not sure I’d post a fake CNN headline on Monday, and then, when CNN objected, reply with “Lmaoooo”.
To believe that Musk is a champion of free speech, or even understands its nuances and responsibilities, is severely self-deluding.
Of course, Musk’s supporters would argue that he was laughing at the increasingly discredited CNN clutching its pearls about truthful reporting, but still, it does look an awful lot as if parody is only allowed on Twitter if Musk is doing it.
Luckily he can always dash off another one of his referendums of the 1 Percent, as he did on Monday, asking his fans if “Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers”. Once again, a minuscule proportion of Twitter users voted — 0.9% — and once again he followed this result with a triumphant “The people have spoken ...”
To be clear, only a fool would believe that Apple has the best interests of humanity at heart. It’s possible Musk will reveal some extremely unsavoury details in the coming days, or at least evidence of sweeping hypocrisy on the part of Apple.
But to believe Musk is a champion of free speech, or even understands its nuances and responsibilities, is severely self-deluding.
This week, in a display of megalomania that will surely go into the official histories of this era, Musk tweeted that his fight with Apple was a “battle for the future of civilisation”.
It isn’t. Instead, it’s a fight over ego, turf, and who gets to sit where on the spaceship when the billionaires have strip-mined the last acre of Earth to make the last shiny gadget and are leaving for Mars.
And yet even as they blast off, their adoring fans will blink up at the sky, tears glistening on their cheeks, and whisper: “Those guys really get me...”
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