OPM - Censorship Edition
Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, recently threw the social media world into a frenzy by spending about 1% of his billions on Twitter stock. He is now the biggest single shareholder of the company, and now sits on Twitter's board.
Liberty-minded folks, aware that Musk is skeptical of social media's leftist-censorious ways, were pleased by the move. The self-appointed arbiters of truth, gatekeepers of information, and declarers of correctness... not so much.
Robert Reich, who routinely utters laughable pontifications on Twitter, coughed up quite the hairball in response to Musk's acquisition:
He sang quite the different tune a year ago:
I was particularly tickled by Reich's use of the term "oligarch." Musk is not an oligarch. Neither strictly nor colloquially, but I presume that neither Reich nor his Twitter followers care. The term is deliberately pejorative, and tells us that Reich is 'Not Amused' that someone who isn't of a Zuckerberg-esque attitude toward the flow of information now has influence over what's been called today's "town square."
I caught a snippet of commentary night before last on satellite radio that spoke of a related problem. The DJ, babbling a bit between songs, said something about $7 billion and how 'nobody needs that much money.' That this attitude has become common is a great tragedy, one of economic illiteracy and one of unchecked envy. True - one can live a life of near-infinite luxury for a fraction of that sum, but such money isn't about living the high life - it's about business activity.
Musk's billions are not sitting in a box somewhere.
His is not the way of Mexican drug lords, who sit on billions of actual US dollars.
His wealth is working, it's invested here and there. Idle cash actually costs money - even more so now that inflation is spiking.
But I digress.
The argument about being too rich - implied both by Reich and the radio DJ - is just the latest demonstration of people's unwarranted sense of entitlement to Other People's Money. Reich, and all the others who decry Musk's Twitter move, are angry that their support of Twitter's censorious ways might be undercut by someone with ****-you money. Their "stake" in Twitter - and here I give way too much credence to the "stakeholder" narrative that has also grown like a cancer - is put at risk by Musk potentially nudging Twitter in a direction they don't like.
As someone put it - shareholder trumps stakeholder.
Predictably, many Twitter employees are 'Not Amused,' either, judging by a slew of critical tweets therefrom. After all, the censor-gatekeeper behavior doesn't emerge from a vacuum. Lest we forget, Twitter put its thumb on the scale of the last election by blocking the New York Post's reports about Hunter Biden's laptop contents.
All this grump boils down to one thing:
People feeling entitled to control over things they don't own.
Up until Musk's moment, that grump was heard quite moslty from the Right, where people who normally argued for freedom hacked up their own "yes... but" hairballs about how Facebook and Twitter were too big to be permitted the liberty of controlling their own product. I argued against government involvement back then, and I continue to reject the notion that government should regulate social media. Nothing good can possibly come of it. Markets may not offer perfect solutions, but they are more trustworthy than politicians.
Here we have it - someone who's at least somewhat on the side of free speech making a move.
Musk may not be done buying. If his 9.2% stake isn't enough to cadge the company in the right direction, he certainly has the means to acquire a controlling share. The harder part will be breaking the "will of the woke" who work for the company. Corporate culture has its own life and its own inertia, and it takes a strong voice at the top to manage it effectively.
Be prepared for an onslaught of rhetoric (it has already started, of course) about how one person should not have so much say over the policies of a company. Watch for the "stakeholder" narrative to strengthen, for much sturm und drang regarding how dangerous it will be to "weaken" the gatekeeper role, and for all sorts of noise about how the company's employees must continue to be validated via the power of censorship.
There's you, there's OPM, and there are those who want to use OPM to control what you see, read, and hear.
A very entertaining fictitious rage-quit made the rounds on social media - one that I admit I fell for. I won’t reproduce it here, but it captured a sentiment that some Twitter employees have already voiced: their displeasure that someone might upset their applecart in the direction of liberty.
What's not fictitious is Substack's message to those disgruntled Twitter employees:
Substack, where you are reading this, not only emerged because of others' censorious ways, it is thriving as a place where people can voice opinions of all flavors - from full-woke to decidedly un-woke.
Freedom of speech requires we defend the right of others to say things we don’t like. Yes, a private person or company is not subject to the strictures of the First Amendment, but our society needs people to embrace principles of liberty in order to function. If our big social media platforms were more dedicated to the precept, instead of feeling a noblesse oblige regarding the ‘improvement’ of societal discourse, things might be a bit less polarized than they are. Sure, people will continue to vent garbage at each other, but dispelling the sense of entitlement some have over others’ speech and money by rejecting their calls for censorship removes the feedback that rewards such behaviors.
My previous installment of Other People’s Money, the Sports Edition, can be read here.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.
Love that substack tweet! Was not expecting that last sentence, ha!
Musk will succeed in opening up Twitter to free speech, after which a false flag operation of epic proportions will flood that platform with truly vile and hateful incitements to violence - probably from both sides, testing his resolve. Twitter employees will say "see? we told you so" as a result. How this progresses from there, we will see. But Twitter has marginalized itself as a platform already - only 2% of the population even uses it regularly - so I can hardly see the risk in taking the chance to restore freedom of speech to the platform. Probably Musk foresees all this, he's not stupid. The bigger question is how the other social media platforms will respond and what all that bodes for us regular people - the "products" of these platforms. What I'd really like to see? The radical progressives retreat to "their" platforms - like leftwing talk radio did(!) or MSNBC - with their tiny, marginalized viewership. Then the rest of us can enjoy the public square without propaganda ministers controlling our every word.