The Map, the Territory, and Twitter
How Musk messed up
Charles Johnson’s account vanished (again) from Twitter, he tells me that he did not deactivate. He is already involved in litigation with some of Elon Musk’s associates.
This is a good time to talk about how Musk messed up. I think a lot of people get Musk wrong. More or less his only successful company is SpaceX, and it’s the one that’s closest to the feds. Tesla cars are not really very good, and it’s Musk’s big China problem. The Boring Company’s only successful project has been building a taxi tunnel for Las Vegas casinos, which tells you a lot about the way the new Silicon Valley network is tied into the old West Coast one. The Las Vegas power structure is Mormons owning the land, mobsters running casinos.
Most of the time Elon Musk is flying around, socializing and doing drugs, it seems like a bit of a fiction that he’s substantially running any of these, much less all of them. Musk is a character in the mold of the Mormon prophet machine, and that makes sense because his top lieutenant, Jared Birchall, is Mormon.
Musk’s first big payout was PayPal, which was substantially comprised of South Africans with a history with the apartheid government. These are all people who would have an obvious interest in technology useful for moving money quickly. Some of the most sophisticated money launderers are white South Africans.
The Musk family business is mining, and in his family you find a number of cult issues, like Technocracy. He’s a man of the world like most rich Canadians, but only seems to knock up women from north of the border, in what feels to me like tax avoidance. Surely there are less pleasant ways to dodge the taxman.
The Twitter purchase is his most substantial move into the terrain of public discourse, and given his cultural background it might have been expected to be the arena in which he would fare most poorly, as indeed he has.
The old Twitter was infuriating. The impenetrable left-liberal consensus, the enormous dogpiles from the most annoying Something Awful posters, and the way everyone had to pretend the two weren’t connected through people working in media jobs. Most of these people have had, in the last couple of years, a very bad record of predicting things. But too much schadenfreude can be unhealthy and prevent you from seeing reality.
This is a good moment to consider how you can think for yourself, when all our information platforms are having a moment of well-deserved distrust. How do you know the things you think you know? What are your values, and how are they being catered to in cynical ways? Are you obtaining information from many different places, and how are you checking them against each other? This can quickly become a full-time job.
Kamala Harris’s vibes-based campaign has left a lot of young leftward-leaning people with blue balls. They bet 100 percent on a culturally-driven campaign, because Harris herself had no record and was unwilling to run in a way that distinguished herself from the unpopular incumbent. It turns out a party’s ability to dragoon the American people with millions paid out (through various sub-rosa means that can be plausibly denied to be payouts) to various rich and famous people is limited. That should increase our faith in the American people, not decrease it. They have expressed substantial independence from the zeitgeist machine that’s been in operation since Obama’s presidency.
However infuriating the old Twitter was, under Jack Dorsey, there was at least an effort to map the territory. Verifications, the hated blue-checks, were handed out slowly and with a degree of human intervention. It tracked not credibility or anything like that, but mostly institutional affiliation. One unanticipated consequence of this is everybody else who was not so affiliated saw that there was a governing consensus that didn’t really resemble the American people at all. The blue-checks all looked and talked a certain way, and they happened to believe mostly the same things. I have no particular brief for these people, except the recognition that I am one in a lot of ways.
In other words Dorsey’s Twitter, whatever its flaws, created a fairly accurate map of the terrain. What Musk did is take the big mountain in the center and say, mostly to his backers but he flattered himself to think he was talking to the American people, wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t there? So he painted a new map without one, but what the mountain represented on the previous map hasn’t gone away. DOGE is Musk’s sop that allows him to pretend he’s actually going to bulldoze the mountain.
As a business proposition, Musk promised to make Twitter profitable, by allowing people to get paid based on engagement (at least that’s what he says he’s doing, there’s some evidence that what he’s actually doing is paying out selected influencers, who just happen to have promoted his acquisition). Thereby Musk, the greatest of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, promised to do what most VCs fail to do—make one of these companies that’s really a long-game lossmaking play for scale into an actually profitable company. It’s not going to work.
The valuations for all these companies are based on the information they obtain about people. Twitter under Dorsey was a very effective human intelligence map, and it would be fair to argue, I think, that had a lot to do with its value. This is exactly what Musk is destroying.
In the bigger picture, highlighting the disinformation and psyops on the one hand while speaking of the American public/voters as though they're unaffected by them is quite a disconnect. Seems to fall into the category of self-justification.