STR/NurPhoto via AP
A question for my peers: Do you really want to discourse on a medium owned and operated by Elon Musk?
I acknowledge at the outset that this is a lot easier for me to say than it is for you, as I seldom use social media. I tweet rarely and only when I think I have a one-liner I want to share. My last tweet linked to a New York Times story about the discovery of the remains of an entire Neanderthal family in some Russian cave, to which I added, “And Putin drafted the males and sent them to Ukraine.” I have the luxury of having other forums, like this one, on which to unload my opinions and I readily concede that many of you don’t, that many of you have been told by your publishers and editors that your job includes sharing content on social media, that many of you like both to share and read what other thoughtful (and sometimes thoughtless) folks have been tweeting, that many of you have completely internalized these practices and have trouble imagining life without them. I also acknowledge my general geezerhood, which enables me to remember what life was like before social media and has doubtless made me more resistant to its charms.
All that acknowledged, we who rail at the effects of Rupert Murdoch’s investment in neofascist propaganda have reason to be concerned about the far richer Elon Musk’s investment in damn near everything. A private citizen who could cut off Ukraine’s means of communication clearly has too much power, just as a private citizen who could flood America in still more hate speech does as well. Like the Hitler-friendly Henry Ford, Musk made his fortune in cars, and while there’s nothing as systematic in his apparent beliefs as Ford’s antisemitism, there is a kind of knee-jerk nihilistic rejection of the notion of social responsibility and a laissez-faire indifference to (and, with his Paul Pelosi tweet, personal embrace of) fake news and to viciously bigoted Trumpian, Putinesque neofascist outbursts and the violence that increasingly accompanies them, so long as he can classify them as just bad-boy excesses.
We are awash, however, in viciously bigoted neofascist outbursts, and far from declining to give them wider distribution, Musk wants to let ’em rip. We don’t have to participate in such a venture. We need an alternative and we need to take a walk from his.
