How It's Going
As Elon Musk cancels UAW's verification in response to a auto workers' strike vote, helps Saudi Arabia persecute and kill its critics, and even seeks to assist the Russian invasion of Ukraine by manipulating communications availability, we might take a moment to think back about why he bought the Twitter platform, and what his supporters said, and maybe some of those could check in and tell us, again, all about Elon Musk and free speech.
Because, really, inquiring minds do want to know how anyone could be so profanely stupid. We could all watch this happen from the outset, even before the purchase. And, honestly, the bit where two journalists sacrificed themselves in order to lie about censorship really should have made the point. But the more we find out Elon Musk is pretty much as dishonest as we might have suspected, and his Twitter takeover as much about assailing and suppressing speech as his own rhetoric made clear throughout, sure, we wonder, except we don't.
It's like, c'mon, we kind of knew already, but the year spent proving the point has, at least, outstripped our imaginations.
Because, sure, there is a version that wonders if you're reasonably ashamed, yet; and then there is the mundane experience, like every day when we were supposed to pretend that supremacism wasn't. The idea that suppression is freedom? It's an interesting performance art concept at forty-four billion dollars, but, really, he
didn't need to spend the money↑ to prove the point. Reminder,
we do it for free↑, on our own time. But Elon spent
forty-four billion dollars to make the point.
The prospect that such a sum represents an investment in auhoritarianism and vainglory is pretty much demonstrable, at this point. Still, inasmuch as anyone ever believed Elon Musk, or pretended the Twitter acquisition was about free speech, sure, it occurs to wonder how those folks think things are going.