In a post the other day, I looked at the way that Antonio García Martínez had analyzed the battle over Twitter as a form of class struggle.
In one tweet (part of a must-read) thread, Martinez had written:
What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies), and that same PMC (which includes the media) is treating it as an act of lèse-majesté.
To repeat what I wrote in that earlier post, I reckon (broadly speaking) that Martínez is right about that. Moreover, it’s important to remember that Martínez includes the media as part of that same professional-managerial class. More specifically, I think, he is not so much referring to the media (an abstraction) as to those who work in it, many of whom have not only been hit economically by the effect of the Internet on many traditional news sources, but also suffered a drop in status, in part for the same reason. One of the crimes of Elon Musk in their eyes is that he is a symbol of Silicon Valley. Making him more reprehensible still is the way that he makes no secret of the way that Twitter is bypassing the established media role as gatekeepers of information.
Twitter is like open-sourcing the news
Twitter *must* fail after the purge of such a former elite. For if Twitter does not fail, if in fact it manages to emerge stronger than before, then what sort of example would this set for every other organization similarly captured by this elite? Unthinkable.
Twitter may fail. If it does, that failure will owe quite a bit to the fact that Musk overpaid for the company, the application of Musk’s vintage start-up style to an existing business with an entrenched (and ideologically uncongenial) culture, and the crumbling of Twitter’s advertising-based model. It won’t fail because of media ill will.
Nevertheless, looking at some of the coverage, it’s not difficult to see hints that some members of the media class want this interloper gone.
To take one example, Austin Carr in Bloomberg, in a piece entitled “Elon Musk Is Running Twitter Like a Failing Newspaper Business” (note that it’s often the case that the author of an article is not responsible for its headline), writes:
Seen one way, the series of events is extraordinary and unprecedented: The world’s most successful technology entrepreneur buys one of the most influential social media companies, quickly sabotages some of its best qualities and drives out much of its brightest talent. Seen through a different lens, Musk is just the latest wannabe media mogul torturing his new plaything.
Now return to Martínez’s feed to find him commenting on a (remarkably pompous) tweet by CBS:
After pausing for much of the weekend to assess the security concerns, CBS News and Stations is resuming its activity on Twitter as we continue to monitor the situation.
Media source discovers who’s downstream of whom all of a sudden.
That goes too far. The relationship between Twitter and established journalism is a curious symbiosis (something that Carr discusses, but without, tellingly, dwelling on the extent to which Twitter is a source of news). But it’s hard not to see CBS’s comment both as a bit of virtue-signaling and an attempt to pull rank. In any event, CBS was back on Twitter after “much” of a weekend.
At the Spectator, Bill Zeiser watches the whole thing, noting that:
Musk has committed two great sins in the eyes of the left. The first is that he is supposedly a fascist because he does not believe in deplatforming figures over speech…He has disrupted the left’s relative chokehold on what is considered allowable speech on social media. But fascism? Musk himself tweeted that Twitter’s new policy is “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” Hate tweets won’t be found unless users seek them out, Musk said, “which is no different from the rest of the internet.” This should hardly be controversial.
Musk’s second transgression is that he is supposedly not competent enough to run Twitter. It’s hard to say whether this is true. Musk has axed a lot of longtime employees, but Twitter is bleeding money. He was derided for a new scheme to sell the coveted “blue checkmarks” indicating verified accounts, but it got people talking about the app. By Musk’s own admission, Twitter will do “stupid” things in the coming days and take chances. He is acting as a tech disruptor, an archetype once beloved by the left.
Leaving aside my doubts as to how fond the left really was of that archetype, Zeiser is surely correct when he notes that it is “hardly believable that a man who is spearheading private space travel is ‘failure incarnate,’ as [one commentator] called him, even if he can’t make Twitter work.”
Meanwhile, there are those in the media, opening up another front in the class wars, who are linking Musk’s Twitter travails to signs of weakness in Amazon, and the mess at Meta to suggest that the age of the tech tycoon is fading.
But that’s another story.