Morning Comrades!
At this point I am certain that everyone on this list has heard the news that 4Chan Edgelord, Elon Musk is looking to buy twitter. Most headlines you’ll have read at this point will claim that he has and to be sure, I am certain this will happen, but at the point of writing this ( Tuesday ) a formal offer has been made which still has to be approved. I know, a technicality, truly, but important enough to point out as this might still not happen. Not that it would change anything, but yeah.
The furore over on twitter and practically all traditional mainstream media is wild, from all sides and truthfully, I can’t even figure out what is satire or not anymore. The radical capitalists cosplaying as the US Taliban, you know, everyone essentially “left” ( sorry I do have to chuckle ) of AOC are frothing at the mouth with their braindead US “freedom of speech” trope whilst everything else is just wild speculation.
Truthfully, just like electing Biden, Macron or any other capitalist puppet, my prediction is that nothing will fundamentally change at twitter, no matter what that lunatic says.
Musk has been adamant about several changes he would make after taking the company private, including: Reducing content moderation: Musk tweeted that a social media platform’s policies should leave both the left and right equally unhappy, and said Twitter has the “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.” ( chuckle once again in antifascist violent intent ) Musk pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying” and “authenticate all real humans.” Additionally, in since-deleted tweets, Musk made the case for Twitter embracing a subscription model, and getting rid of ads for premium subscribers.
Truly, none of the above will happen, it’s just bullshit PR written by some poor scriptwriter, especially if one looks into this frauds actions in comparison to his words. Truly, he’ll probably find out just impossible content moderation, especially, automated which is necessary with something the size of twitter, is, get bored and move on, hoping to catch a glimpse of Grime’s DMs to Manning. Jeez. What an entirely boring dystopia brought on by people with no redeeming characteristic and too much money.
There are obviously more serious topics to be brought to attention in regards to this reality other than my boredom with capitalists doing capitalist shit. I am not a psychologist but I from the very basic, amateur understanding thereof, no one becomes a billionaire without being a "psychopath", a word that is used to describe someone who is callous, unemotional, and morally depraved. That’s not to mean that these actions and people should be disregarded, of course not, but if anything the likes of Musk and Bezos are results of a system that is psychopathic in itself. Our entire, enforced playground of existence is based on individualism, competition and exploitation of the many by the few through violence.
Like the majority, if not all dynastic families around the world, the decade long fraud that is Musk’s “career” is based on the fact that his family got their power and and wealth through violence and theft. From politics to industry, all powerful families built their wealth and influence at the end of a gun, metaphorically but mostly literally. Enough has been said about his families reason for wealth, but the same applies to every billionaire out there as that is precisely what the basis of capitalism is. Violence and exploitation. Hence my choice of word “psychopath”, every one their actions is immoral, and I’ll go even further and say that the accumulation of wealth is precisely that, even if that is the only reward we can attain in our current relationship with the material world. Enough religions, including the very warped western christian versions have said this often enough.
One possible positive aspect of this development is that we can shine a light on the vast concentration of wealth among the very few and the utterly undemocratic world they have for centuries enforced upon us here, at the heart of the free and so called democratic world. For centuries the narrative has been determined by very few people whose sole interest in said control has always been to divert attention away from their ways and means and by utilizing fear, drove masses into conflicts that never, not in a heartbeat threatened their wealth. Nothing about our existence, especially post WW2 in the west is free or democratic and we are coming to the only logical conclusion of the system the rich and powerful have enforced: total monopoly on all life. In an odd way, their post-capitalistic utopia is a step into the past with relations in our societies resembling feudalism more than anything else. Feudalism, as a reminder was the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection. Except that said protection was as much of a lie then that it is today.
The result of capitalism isn’t due to it being unregulated or unbridled, corruption or the result of a few mad men letting it rip to the score of billions, it is the logical consequence of the system itself, the entire structure is built on achieving monopolies and that is the point that we are now not only approaching but essentially are at, with companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Apple and now Twitter in the hands of what, 10-12 people, control over the narrative and thus discourse that shapes our reality and future is now being controlled by men that I wouldn’t allow to sit at my dinner table. Make no mistake, there is not a single redeeming feature of capitalism that is beneficial to us modern day peasants going forward, but luckily we have some ideas of what needs to be done and how we could arrange our social contract and economic relationships with one another. Once again, lunatics like the above have never been the answer and certainly not now.
I know, it seems a little wild to have spent an entire newsletter on the insanity of a system that allows lunatics to acquire billions upon billions on the back of extremely undemocratic and fascist tactics, only to highlight Musk’s pending acquisition of a social media platform but it is necessary. If anything, only to highlight the inhumane fact that one such person can potentially acquire so much wealth on the backs of others without being a contributor to the society hugely benefitted from - unfairness is still worth pointing out and fighting against as far as I am concerned that is essentially what this person and his acquisition boils down it: the game is rigged, we are at the suffering end of it and our planet, our only home is being killed by it. In the immortal words of Utah Phillips:
The Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.
P.S.: If you are wondering what to do if you are using twitter, my only suggestion is, do whatever you want. Your participation or non-participation on any and all of these platforms has no impact whatsoever. Similar to believing that separating your rubbish is helping in the fight against global warming, you leaving or not has no impact on the course of these realities. The issue is systemic and if you are eager for change, I would suggest finding organizations in your neighbourhood that have experience in civil disobedience to become the clog in the machine that brings the monster called capitalism down to smouldering ashes.
Yours, without compromise,
V.