"OMG, how horrible that Elon Musk is buying Twiter!" Think again.
Progressives shouldn't pile on to the anti-Musk posse. Here's why.
The conventional wisdom, center and left of center, is that Elon Musk buying Twitter is an awful thing. Of course, Musk is not a man of the left. But then again the great Marxist-Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojeve had the wit to say of an earlier automaker: “Marx is God: Henry Ford is his prophet.” With his all-electric vehicles Musk is probably more a prophet of progress than was Ford (who was indeed much more, in all respects, a man of the right than Musk). Yes, I know about the enviornmental issue with batteries and that Tesla has been leveraged on regulatory concessions to promote electric cars. Still, Musk’s venture strikes me overall as on the good side of history, climate-wise.
Why would Twitter be worse off in Musk’s hands? Well, right now, folks like BlackRock and Elliott Management appear to own significant stakes in Twitter. Real progressives, right? Anyone followed their involvement in Argentina’s debt crisis?
Musk has called Twitter the virtual or digital public or civic square. He’s right. And so the issue for progressives should be whether concentrated private capital ought to be controlling such a global commons, a public good for democracy. I credit Musk for calling Twitter what it is because in fact he has opened, or should have opened, a broader public discussion about the control of media networks that are crucial to the functioning of the contemporary public sphere. Surely the concerns are the same about other billionaires like Gates and Zuckerberg. But a lot of the voices that are anti-Musk don’t buy into the progressive concern with the power of billionaires. They balk at Bernie Sanders when he makes those points.
While I’m not going to name names, quite a few of those who now profess to be aghast at the prospect of Musk owning Twitter are antipopulist centrists who-until Musk showed interest in it-downplayed the significance of Twitter to our political culture. They would say to younger folks in a condescending voice: real politics is not Twitter. (Usually, if you scratched the surface, you’d find envy of AOC’s massive Twitter following). These are people who ridiculed Trump’s pursuit of politics and diplomacy by tweets-and then when it turned out he was all too effective at it wanted him off the platform.
Now I’d agree that there were good reasons for a time out for Trump. All of the reasons are connected to his role in inspiring or worse abetting an attempted overthrow of our democracy. That’s a very unusual case (to say the least) and depending on the outcome of investigations of those events it may or may not be justified to give Trump another chance.
But let’s put Trump aside. Musk’s general position is that private media companies should not be censors. Musk, contrary to what is being said about him, doesn’t deny there might need to be limits on free speech. What he suggests is that the limits are those that ought to be established by law, made by democratically accountable legislators and/or policed by judges. Do we progressives trust hedge funds and vulture capitalists as umpires of the global public sphere? That is exactly the status quo that Musk is challenging.