"“I strongly supported Obama for
President,” Elon Musk tweeted late last month, part of the spree of ideological
comments accompanying his continuing takeover of Twitter, “but today’s
Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.” Around the same time, he set
the social-media platform ablaze by reposting a cartoon showing a
stick figure comfortably on the center-left in 2008 redefined as a right-wing
bigot by 2021 because the left-wing stick figure had raced way off to
the left. Then this week, he expressed the same kind of thought in the
abbreviated style for which the site is famous: “Twitter obv has a strong left
wing bias.”
And now, at last, we have the news
that he’s likely to allow Donald Trump to tweet freely once again.
All of these comments and promises
align the country’s richest man with the rightward side in our culture war. But
though I don’t know Musk — I’ve never interviewed him or hung out with him in
any secret billionaire lair — I think I know enough about him, and I know
enough Silicon Valley people like him, to suggest that neither his tweeted
self-descriptions nor the criticisms being lobbed his way capture what’s
distinctive about his position and worldview.
A term like “conservative” doesn’t fit the Tesla tycoon;
even “libertarian,” while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of
ideas that I don’t think he particularly cares about. A better label comes from
Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book “The Future and Its Enemies”: Musk is what
she calls a “dynamist,” meaning someone whose primary commitments are to
exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one
that’s always inventing, transforming, doing something new.
If you think this sounds uncontroversial, think again.
First, the dynamist may not care where novelty and invention spring from:
Unlike the purist libertarian, he might be indifferent to questions of public
versus private spending, happy to embrace government help if that’s what it
takes to get the new thing off the ground — and happy to take that help from
regimes like Communist China no less than from our own. And he may be willing
to risk much more than either the typical progressive or the typical
conservative for the sake of innovation. Political principle, social stability
and moral order are all potentially negotiable when discovery alone is your
North Star.
For many people, dynamism is
contingent — on how invested you are in the world as it is, whether you stand
to lose or benefit from innovations, and where your moral intuitions lie. (I am
personally a dynamist about Musk’s Mars colony but not Mark Zuckerberg’s
metaverse; flying cars, yes, sex robots, not so much.) Even in the tech world,
your appetite for dynamism depends on where you stand: If you’re lucky enough
to work for one of Silicon Valley’s near monopolies, the new powers of the age,
you may not be that interested in further churn or change.
Musk himself may yet evolve into
that kind of comfortable monopolist, but for now, pending the I.P.O. for
MarsCorp in 2047, he remains a dynamist in full. And seen in this light, his
recent transformation from Obama Democrat to progressive foil makes perfect
sense in light of the transformations that liberalism itself has undergone of
late.
Liberalism in the Obama era was an
essentially dynamist enterprise not because liberals were absolutely committed
to capital-S Science but because those years encouraged a confidence that the
major technological changes of the 21st century were making the world a more
liberal place. Whether it was social media shaking Middle Eastern autocrats,
the Obama campaign running circles around its Republican opponents with online
organizing or just the general drift leftward on social issues that seemed to
accompany the internet revolution, progressives around 2010 felt a general
confidence that technological and political progress were conjoined.
Ever since Trump bent history’s arc
his way, however, that confidence has diminished or collapsed. Now liberals
increasingly regard the internet as the zone of monsters and misinformation,
awash in illiberalism, easily manipulated by demagogues, a breeding ground for
insurrectionists.
And if digital technology has become particularly suspect,
via the transitive property so has the larger idea of innovating your way out
of social or environmental problems — empowering the part of the environmental
movement that wants to tame capitalism to save the planet, for instance, at the
expense of the part that imagines taming climate change with fleets of Teslas
and sun power plants.
Meanwhile, the values underlying dynamism — above all, the
special pedestal given to free thinking and free speech — are also more suspect
within liberalism today. In their place is a new regulatory spirit around
culture as well as economics, a how-much-is-too-much attitude toward the
circulation of potentially dangerous ideas, a belief in institutions of
scientific and intellectual authority but not necessarily institutions
devoted to wide-open inquiry.
Just as a dynamist might, at the extreme of the orientation,
prefer a monarchy
that protects innovation over a democracy that discourages it, some of today’s
progressives are making the same move in reverse: If democracy is endangered by
technological change and unfettered free speech, then so much the worse for
free speech. The important thing is to save democratic self-government, even if
you have to temporarily take the “liberties” out of the American Civil
Liberties Union or put away your John Stuart Mill.
Whatever else Musk wants with Twitter — and obviously you
should assume that he wants to make a lot of money — this seems like the
ideological trend he hopes to resist or halt: the liberal retreat from
dynamism, the progressive turn toward ideological regulation, the pervasive
left-wing fear that the First Amendment and free speech are being weaponized by
authoritarians and need some kind of check.
So now the question: If this was
your ambition — setting aside whether you think it’s admirable or dangerous —
would buying Twitter make sense?
The affirmative theory holds that
because Twitter is both an essential digital town square and a place
particularly populated by well-educated liberals, if Musk can make it succeed
with a lighter-footprint approach to content moderation, from a dynamist perspective
he might hope to accomplish two goals at once. First, he would be simply
sustaining an important space in which free debate can happen. Second —
assuming that he could come up with a light footprint that left-leaning users
would accept — he would be gently training Twitter’s liberals back into their
Obama-era belief that openness and dynamism are good things, that a marketplace
of ideas can work without constant ideological supervision and constraint.
The more skeptical theory, on the
other hand, suggests that Musk may be making a mistake somewhat characteristic
of the Silicon Valley mentality and overestimating the importance of novel
virtual spaces compared with the legacy institutions — East Coast, brick and
mortar, academic and bureaucratic — that still give contemporary liberalism its
actual shape and direction. That is to say, what you see on Twitter, the fads
and mobs and performativity, may accelerate certain ideological
transformations, but social media isn’t actually the place where these shifts
are taking shape; it’s just the space in which the change becomes visible and
legible to people on the outside.
So, for instance, if important media
institutions are more doubtful about free speech than in the past, or if
important academic fields are more likely to impose ideological loyalty oaths,
or if important foundations and funders are creating a climate of intellectual
conformity, a social media town platform is too far downstream of those changes
to really help reverse them.
A free-speech-oriented Twitter can
certainly surface individuals or even small-scale factions offering diversity
and dissent. But institutions of employment and ambition will always matter
most — there’s no app-based solution or simple blockchain fix if you think the Ivy
League and the mainstream media have gone terribly astray. At some point you
need to make change within those institutions themselves, start new ones — the
Musk Schools! the Musk Herald-Tribune! the Musk Foundation! — or do both.
Since a big part of Musk’s success and wealth comes from
looking for tech’s applications in the real world — meaning cars, rockets and
tunnels, not just apps and tweets — it’s quite possible that he’s already
considered all of this and that he has an ultimate vision for a Twitter as a
virtual network that links reformed or revitalized institutions in the real
world.
Or alternatively, maybe he believes
that very soon the virtual will fully displace the world of bricks and bodies
and that in buying Twitter, he’s literally buying the digital real estate where
his fellow dynamists will build the great institutions of tomorrow.
It’s one of dynamism’s strengths as
a guiding ideology that it can inspire those kinds of leaps. But its weakness
is usually the same one that doomed Icarus. Sometimes you leap and have a
bird’s wings to bear you upward. Sometimes, though, all you have is their
disintegrating feathers — or, still worse, not their plumage but their tweets."
