I don’t know when it was I first lost sight of Jack Dorsey, that inimitable wunderkind and Silicon Valley guru originally behind the universal blessing to public discourse known as Twitter. Was it after Jack went for a ten-day retreat in Myanmar to silently meditate in a cave, complete with photographs? No . . . maybe it was after he declared Bitcoin and cryptocurrency the undeniable future of finance. (Bitcoin is undergoing a “rough patch” as of late, currently down from its peak November 2021 value by a mere 62.8 percent.) Or maybe I finally checked out on Dorsey when he himself peaced out of the Twitter business, sold his stake, and encouraged an already-occupied automaker and space-exploration entrepreneur to pointlessly distract himself with it.
And now Jack is back, alas, but this time thankfully with minor news at best: Yet another man has climbed aboard the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsement train. For those who fear Dorsey’s endorsement of Baby Bobby might be related to, say, RFK Jr.’s stated belief that vaccines cause autism, or that Sirhan Sirhan was not actually his father’s assassin, then fear not: While neither of those was enough to disqualify Kennedy in the eyes of America’s most notably hirsute techno-futurist, the candidate has most likely earned Dorsey’s belief (as the man who “can and will” win the Democratic nomination) owing to his outspoken support of — you guessed it — cryptocurrency. The belief in alternate finance seems to be a near-universal lockpick to the money vaults of a certain type of Gen-Z “technologist,” though I assume the Kennedy mythos doesn’t hurt either.
You’ll see RFK Jr. coming to a “Twitter Space” this afternoon; one imagines that tech billionaires talk to one another (especially when, à la Dorsey and Musk, they happen to have swapped ownership of the same platform). To be fair, an alternative-media play like this was inevitable for Kennedy, as an outsider facing impossible odds. There is genuine discontent among the Democratic Party’s base with Biden’s age and frailty (it is impossible to miss in the polls). But minus a catastrophic event — which cannot be ruled out — Dem voters are not going to abandon him in the face of an oncoming Trump. At the end of the day, I’m pleased to see Dorsey remind us that, however bad and wonky the present management of Twitter is, prior management was just as flighty and intellectually unserious, albeit in different ways.