The Techno-Feudal Method to Musk’s Twitter Madness

[Elderberry]

Project Syndicate by Yanis Varoufakis 11/24/2022

Immediately after taking over Twitter and pronouncing himself Chief Twit, Elon Musk affirmed his commitment to safeguarding the platform as the “public square” where anything and everything is debated. It was a smart tactic, because it successfully diverted the public’s attention from what Musk is really up to.

Elon Musk had good reasons to feel unfulfilled enough to buy Twitter for $44 billion. He had pioneered online payments, upended the car industry, revolutionized space travel, and even experimented with ambitious brain-computer interfaces. His cutting-edge technological feats had made him the world’s richest entrepreneur. Alas, neither his achievements nor his wealth granted him entry into the new ruling class of those harnessing the powers of cloud-based capital. Twitter offers Musk a chance to make amends.

Since capitalism’s dawn, power stemmed from owning capital goods; steam engines, Bessemer furnaces, industrial robots, and so on. Today, it is cloud-based capital, or cloud capital in short, that grants its owners hitherto unimaginable powers.

Consider Amazon, with its network of software, hardware, and warehouses – and its Alexa device sitting on our kitchen counter interfacing directly with us. It constitutes a cloud-based system capable of probing our emotions more deeply than any advertiser ever could. Its tailor-made experiences exploit our biases to produce responses. Then, it produces its own responses to our responses – to which we respond again, training the reinforcement-learning algorithms, which trigger another ripple of responses.

Musk is perhaps the only tech lord who had been watching the triumphant march of this new techno-feudalism helplessly from the sidelines. His Tesla car company uses the cloud cleverly to turn its cars into nodes on a digital network that generates big data and ties drivers to Musk’s systems. His SpaceX rocket company, and its flock of low-orbit satellites now littering our planet’s periphery, contributes significantly to the development of other moguls’ cloud capital.

But Musk? Frustratingly for the business world’s enfant terrible, he lacked a gateway to the gigantic rewards cloud capital can furnish. Until now: Twitter could be that missing gateway.

Immediately after taking over and pronouncing himself Chief Twit, Musk affirmed his commitment to safeguarding Twitter as the “public square” where anything and everything is debated. It was a smart tactic which successfully diverted the public’s attention to an endless global debate about whether the world should trust its foremost short-form forum to a mogul with a history of playing fast and loose with the truth in that same forum.

More: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/musk-bought-twitter-to-get-cloud-capital-by-yanis-varoufakis-2022-11

[The_Reader_David]

A worthwhile read.  Varoufakis is one of the very few self-identified leftists for whom I have any respect.*  Unlike most, he actually understands economics:  his analysis of the European debt crisis and the "Greek bailout" (actually a bailout of Western European, mostly German, investors holding Greek debt, which rather than bailing out Greece further depressed the Greek economy) was spot on.

*The others, if you care, while they all still identify as left-of-center, are now functionally part of the Right, as they oppose the now-normative Left of the woke and/or the abuses of the security state even now that it is controlled by the Democrats:  Camille Paglia, and the substack journalists, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi and Bari Weiss.

[aligncare]

@The_Reader_David  Thanks for the information.