A bit of class analysis helps us understand the tone of quite a bit of the current coverage of Musk’s travails.
Karl Marx:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Just because Marx was yet another unhinged millenarian “prophet” in a long and sometimes lethal line of public nuisances doesn’t mean that he was always wrong. Well, not entirely, anyway. History is a shambles, “just one thing after another” (as various people have said in different ways at different times), so generalizing “rules,” such as the one by Marx cited above, have a way of running into trouble.
That said, looking at events from a class perspective can (sometimes) be a worthwhile exercise, as demonstrated by this tweet by Antonio García Martínez. For a bit of background, Martínez sold a business to Twitter some years ago (and became an adviser to the company), before writing a book — Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley — some of the content of which was to bring an abrupt end to his career at Apple.
Apple parted ways with a new employee this week after thousands of workers petitioned the company to investigate how it hired the man, who had previously published an autobiography they said contains misogynistic statements.
But back to García Martínez on Twitter:
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.
Yes and no, I’d say, but this is certainly an interesting way of looking at what is going on, and one doubtless colored by García Martínez’s experience at Apple. What drove Musk to bid for Twitter is a complicated question, but both the prelude to the bid and the way that matters have evolved since Twitter’s takeover was completed bear some resemblance to the sort of class struggle that García Martínez depicts.
He continues:
In Burnham’s formulation, this new managerial class would supplant the former business-owning bourgeois and even capital itself as the elite ruling class. Most woke ‘labor’ scandals in tech are an entitled middle-management class at odds with founders.
And not necessarily just founders. The struggle can be between segments of the middle-management class and the interests of shareholders more generally — interests, of course, that are also under attack by the enforcers of ESG corporatism. These can include some of the middle-management types referred to by García Martínez, but also any number of the denizens of the flourishing ESG ecosystem, from Wall Street oligarchs to “imperial” regulators, to activists.
Elon simply defenestrating the entire HR regime, the ESG grifters, the Skittles-hair people with mouse-clicking jobs who think themselves bold social crusaders rather than a parasitic weight around any organization’s neck, is an intolerable overturning of the social order.
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.
Musk has not (to put it mildly) done himself many favors by the way that he has been managing this situation. Nevertheless, follow the logic of the argument that García Martínez is making (while remembering where the media — or, it would be better to say, those who work in it — fall within his class analysis), and it becomes easy to understand the tone of quite a bit of the current coverage of Musk’s travails.
Food for thought.