Morning Comrades.
Essentially, there are 3 separate but connected realities in the public sphere that have an impact on us all and deserve a closer look, for, if anything, potential plans and actions for everyones future safety and health, especially mentally. As a critical feature of capitalism this polycrisis and concepts like it, we are too quick to accept the world as it appears to us — as an impossibly complex web of ramifying crises — instead of asking, as critical thought should, what lies behind appearances. It’s a brute empiricism that projects onto reality what is in truth a feature of the concept itself: an inability to discern cause, effect, determination, or contradiction and hopefully this will shed some more clarity of what is going on.
The three interwoven stories are obviously Elon Musk’s take over of twitter, the most recent revelations that all US based social media and tech are working closely with parts of their government to shape the “cognitive infrastructure” of us all and the imploding reality of Meta, especially relevant for the majority of us that still use IG. As it stands and no matter how much we publicly throw our disdain at these social media and tech sites, the fact remains that the majority of us use them, often, and thus this, as previous discussion are ( sadly ) relevant.
Think of Twitter and Musk what you may1 but the fact that he bought one a very influential website that has a genuine effect on public discourse as well as material realities warrants a few thoughts. I cannot get into the business side of things as they not only pertain to my reality, nor do they interest me. I am not even sure his acquisition of twitter was or is a business decision but an egocentrical one in part, and in another part, a due paid for his continued work with US and other governments. More importantly,
“Elon Musk is the nominally privatized segment of the US security state and military industrial complex. His collection of fake companies, all reliant on public funding and tax exemptions, are everywhere involved in CIA and state department proxy wars and regime change operations, Twitter, like all Silicon Valley social media companies, is but an extension of the US security state and CIA propaganda efforts. If you're an Official Enemy, you're gone. If you're a friend, like the Israeli or the Saudi genocidal regimes or azov nazis, you're safe”
That, in my humble opinion, is what this acquisition boils down. Oddly enough, however, there is a seemingly fatal flaw in this flow of events - twitter, like all Meta companies and google for example, have to make money, and whilst they masquerade as “social media” platforms they are in their totality nothing but an advertising platforms. As Malcom Harris wrote: 2
“Facebook is much less than what the technofeudalists make it out to be,” Harris writes. “It's an advertising platform that wrings pennies out of users' scrap time—attention that would otherwise go to waste, at least from the capitalist perspective.”
This “problem” applies to twitter even more than meta’s shit show, as twitter is notoriously awful for generating advertising money. Nilay Patel nailed it when they wrote3 :
Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.
I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
That leaves us with a solitary decision process, one which applies to FB/IG also, what to do about it, if anything at all? Is global platform with genuine affect on political narratives and thus actions in the hands of a person such as Musk any better or worse than its previous owners? Arguably no, and much of the discourse to fuck with Musk is based on the individual dislike of his faux-cocky insanity rather than the reality of companies like twitter/FB/IG existing in their shape and form and that leads us to our last point, which I will get to shortly.
In regards to what you individually can do, here are a few options: Leave. Delete all your accounts and deprive them of your existence, and thus economic value. Secondly, platforms like twitter/FB/IG depend on advertising, so make the brand experience on these platforms hell for the advertisers. Be That Problem. Power is about Power and Money is Power in Capitalism so if you feel like you want a hobby, fuck with the advertisers on these platforms, hell, gang up, clone computers and really go to town IF you are looking for a ways to disrupt their fascist fetishes.
Coming back to the last but integral part of this reckoning however is a story that broke via the Intercept on October 31st that not only ties into the problems with tech companies on both a small and larger scale, the problems mentioned above but in totality, the core issue at hand.
The naivety to pretend that social media, or tech for a matter of discussion has had or ever will have anything to do with promoting made up concepts like “Free Speech” and other Hollywood ideas invented to give poor white men superiority complexes that were leveraged to make them willingly go to war with whatever country the capitalists wanted to extract raw materials from. What started, usually, as some sort self-gratifying incel vanity project quickly turned into billion dollar business’ and those, no matter their product nor legality, always attract attention from the lawmakers and governments. It thus should come to no ones surprise that the US government, and thus all minor players within the NATO / EU umbrella, are working very closely with platforms such as google, twitter, meta to not only regulate but manage what we see, read, listen to and when. Without wanting to exaggerate, we are a few weeks away from having it confirmed that out entire online experience is managed by the government to keep their economy afloat. It’s as brutally simplistic as that. As Lee Fang puts it extremely clearly 4
“Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions.”
Obviously, all this managed content we are seeing is being labelled as disinformation, but unfortunately, it is our governments that decides what said “disinfo” is and anyone still believing in any holistic nature of these capitalist puppets is beyond naivety and help. There is no need to spill out the rest for anyone here.
What remains to be talked about it, is what to do about it all and this, my dear comrades, is up to you. Feel free to ask what I may want to do should I find the time to do so and if I may, feel free to read the article below for some more poetic ways to agitate against all this, but for the time being it is worthwhile to re-examine our relationship with any and all social media and tech firms and decide what is what.
See you at the pub.
Yours,
V
Personally, I think very little of that little dickhead, he’s just another psychopathic rich brat buying friends with a mind frame devoid of all empathy and enough racist, fascist ideas that would he ever exist in the real world, would leave him beaten to pulp in a gutter.