Counter-Currents
What Good is a Town Square if You Live on Different Planets?
Jim Goad
Since-deleted tweet sent by Elon Musk on February 17.
1,073 words
When renegade weed-smoking transhumanist wannabe Martian Elon Musk announced his $46.5-billion takeover of Twitter on Monday, he said, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Musk had also compared the site to a “town square” a month ago on Twitter, when he asked his 85 million+ followers: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”
Democracy seems like a nice concept. We’re told that it depends on a fully informed public. But it also depends on a public that’s able to be informed. It rests on the shaky assumption that most of the public isn’t superstitious and overemotional. Most importantly, democracy demands that you have only one public square and, by implication, only one “public,” one tribe, one nation, one demos. If you have more than one, you don’t have a democracy, you have a looming civil war.
Free speech also seems like a nice concept. To make it work, though, everyone needs to be speaking the same language.
Just like democracy and free speech, debating also seems like a nice concept. But I heard someone opine a few years ago that debates should only be arranged between people who share the same goals, and the debate should only involve choosing the best strategy for achieving those goals. This is why most online “debates” devolve into a poo-flinging contest rather than an honest exchange of ideas — because the two combatants can’t even agree on what’s best for the world. They might as well be different species.
When I first heard of Musk’s swaggering takeover of Twitter, I will confess to a brief squirt of springtime optimism. For all of the site’s flaws, it is still the only website on the planet that I know of where you can follow any breaking news story as it happens up to the second from multiple sources. As is inevitable, some of the breaking news is false and some of it is true, but as more and more information flows in, a clearer picture of truth starts to emerge — that is, if the site isn’t actively burying some sources and promoting others.
But that’s what Twitter has been doing for years, and many suspect it’s because Donald Trump’s presence on the site was a yuge factor, if not the yugest, in his 2016 election to the presidency. Before Trump was elected, the site had already begun banning “dissident” voices it found objectionable such as Chuck Johnson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jared Taylor, and Andrew Anglin, who had all garnered media attention but were hardly considered anywhere near the mainstream.
But only four years after his election, Twitter banned Trump himself for allegedly promoting terrorism on January 6. Only last month, it banned Tucker Carlson — the most-watched personality on cable news — for accurately referring to Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine as a man.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
Twitter went from banning “extremists” to banning a sitting President and the country’s most popular cable news host. That’s because sometime after Trump’s election, there ceased to be an American mainstream. The center collapsed. There were only two sides, both of them extreme, and both of them convinced that the other side represented the extremists.
But almost immediately after Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, Carlson’s account was back up, as were many other accounts that had been banned under the previous regime.
In late 2020, Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for correctly reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which many see as a blatant attempt to steer the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor. The same year it suspended the account of Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist who alleged that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Wuhan biolab. Twitter had ceased even pretending that it was an open forum for debate and instead took on the role of a debater who decided he’d already won and had paid off the security guards to forbid his opponent from even entering the debating hall.
Elon Musk has promised to change all that. Just like democracy and free speech and robust debating, it sounds like a nice idea. I’m wondering if it’s too late, though.
In an April 11 article for The Atlantic titled “WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID,” Jonathan Haidt writes:
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
Haidt cites the 2014 book The Revolt of the Public by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, who’d noted that before the Internet, the American public perceived itself as a single “mass audience” who were all looking at the same society through a single mirror. In an interview with Vox, Gurri said:
The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.
Ironically, the Internet — which was supposed to bring the whole world together on one stage — is precisely what made such a thing impossible. No, Rodney King, we can’t all get along. Things such as Twitter proved exactly how much we can’t get along. We can’t get along at all.
I understand the enthusiasm for Musk’s ballsy buyout of Twitter. But when I hear people insist that once everyone is allowed again to tweet whatever they want so long as it’s not a violent threat, we will finally have an honest, robust exchange of ideas, the libs will be owned, they will admit it, we will all hug, everyone will come to their senses, order will be restored, democracy will thrive again, people will be judged on their ability and character rather than their ideology, everything that went wrong in America the past half-century will be reversed, peace will reign once more throughout the valley, and clog dancers will once more perform at the town square this Oktoberfest, I appreciate their optimism but pity their naïveté.
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31 comments
Free speech on Twitter won’t bring us all together. It will do something even better. It will accelerate the parting of ways between sane people and the Left.
Yes, Twitter will contribute to the coming apart of the US. However, the Atlantic piece wrongly claims America is dividing mainly because of social media/the Internet.
Of course social media is only an accelerant fanning the flames. The fire itself is caused by diversity/Third World invaders.
The author hinted at the truth when he wrote:
“historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?”
Twitter is a dumpster fire and Elon Musk is a clown. However, you have to admit that all the liberals rending their garments and weeping openly in public, writing melodramatic ‘goodbye cruel free-speech-accepting world!!!’ tweets…is pretty damned hilarious altogether.
As something interesting and useful to the human race, Twitter is utterly worthless beyond redemption, except for up-to-the-minute news, as noted in the article above. But as a way of freaking out the deeply mentally and emotionally retarded adolescents (of whatever age, as very few people seem to grow up these days) who inhabit it like flies on shit, this whole comedic takeover can’t be beat.
These lunatics have gotten away with masturbating in their own often-slung feces for so long, being able to silence anybody they feel like by reporting them or piling onto them to drive them away, that this is like electroshock therapy to them. Good. They need it. And their angst and bad-teeth-gnashing will be a pleasure to behold for a while, as will their attention junkie creeping back to the platform when everything has died down, even if only to whine piteously to others about how terrible the place is now.
Bring it all on. More, please!
Pox Populi made an excellent point about the Savior Du Jour, that Musk has never once spoken up about the plight of White South Africans.
Another Trump. Mostly wind and, where the rubber needs to meet the road, nothing.
Oh I dunno. $44bn is a lot of scratch for a guy who’s rubber doesn’t reach the road.
Well, he’s a fan of Obama and thinks the “real” Democratic Party has been hijacked and he is also a declared non-fan of “the far right.” He might be willing to tolerate dissent on the trans issue but as we know the real hot button is race. Has never said boo about his fellow White South Africans’ plight. We’ll see, but I have learned over time to keep my expectations low. I’d be happy to find I underestimated him.
OTOH, David Duke said that if Musk had ever shown any loyalty to SA whites he wouldn’t be the richest man in the world.
I remember Jack Donovan making the same point about arguments: they’re for people already in your circle, already holding the same priors and on the same page. This is what people of a certain tribal affiliation do, and they’ve also set the spectrum of acceptable choices and positions for the rest of us in doing so.
To paraphrase the great Samuel Huntington, you can debate with allies or with rivals (like sports teams in the same league playing by the same rules and having an interest in conserving the structure) and sometimes with antagonists but never with enemies (who want you dead).
Enemies you don’t debate, you defeat.
Excellent point. The left is our enemy, not a mere opponen
This is the real difference between rightists and leftists. People on the right believe those who oppose them are mistaken, while people on the left believe those who oppose them are EVIL.
Someone who you believe is mistaken in his beliefs can be reached with facts and logical arguments, but you cannot expect to reason with someone who is pure evil. It’s like expecting an evangelical Christian to be friends with a Satan worshipper. The only correct response to such vile creatures is to destroy them utterly.
When rightists of any stripe recognize that their friendly neighbors who have those cloying “In this house we believe…” signs in rainbow colors on their front lawns would happily throw them into camps if they ever got the power, we can recognize those people as our enemies who need the get the same treatment first.
Those enemies think the same way. They don’t debate in good faith, they only want your destruction. Those are their “Rules for Radicals”.
But it’s often hard to see a white leftist as an enemy rather than as a lost soul who could yet be saved. That’s why we keep thinking we need to debate them.
What’s funniest to me is the insistence that Elon Musk is a racist and he wants to open up Twitter so right wing nationalists can freely say “The N Word.” Like we’re all just waiting to start our own “Nigs Of TikTok” account or something. Being white and saying even “nigga” while quoting a rap song will get you deplatformed, fired, chased out of polite society and more than likely assaulted or even murdered these days.
I love this Elon Musk; causing leftist brains to implode. A white man from the toilet-shaped continent that is inhabited by 1.? billion various forms of shovelnose and maybe 6 million whites. Biggest losers with him taking over twitter and promising the odd notion of freedom of speech for all: the hebes.
Toilet shaped? I always thought Africa looked pretty good, like a side profile of the head and shoulders of a lioness. I thought this before I knew what maps were, because at 4 or 5 I would watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Marlon Perkins would intro the show sitting in front of a black outline map of Africa. Since the show featured lions in every episode, I just assumed that that map was the silhouette profile of a lioness.
I always considered it a big apostrophe.
Great Britain comes out on top as usual: said by some to resemble ‘a Witch Riding a Pig’.
It looks like a skull.
Musk, like Trump, will accomplish much less than some people hope or fear. But as with Trump, a primary plus is the effect he has on the Wokesters. Whatever upsets them makes me happy.
Yes, Democracy: where the bipolar girl who just got out of rehab is a statesman.
Free speech is imperative within the limited context of conveying information and forming useful theories for decision makers. The world is largely random and error ubiquitous, so the function of updating one’s models with new information is critical.
While the CEO should always maintain awareness of what the man on the floor thinks, he must not waste his time hearing out endless petty complaints or ideas that are based on falsehoods, incomplete information or fallacious reasoning. The widest latitude of free speech is only needed for debate or dialectic. And true dialectic requires that, at a minimum, the parties are all capable of reasonably stating coherent hypotheses, weighing evidence and drawing sound conclusions.
Those who prove through repeated acts that they are prone to incoherence, hyperbole, histrionics, undue partisan bias or any systematic fallacies must be excluded from the debate should those faults reach the point of regular disruption or impasse. Those without the gift of high discourse may have the privilege of free speech, but they have no right to it; if their behavior were adopted by everyone, intelligent decision making would become impossible. And the entity proclaiming that “right” would thereby cease to exist.
I agree with Heckler that the sad open weeping and tearful hand-wringing we’ve seen so far is already worth every penny of the $46.5-billion dollars.
Whether or not we’re in for anything besides more my-side-right-or-wrong zealots lobbing pre-fab dogma and platitudes back and forth, we shall… well, you shall see.
Let me know how it goes. I’m here Mondays and Thursdays.
The simple fact that that Hitler thing that Musk tweeted would be taken down is so abhorrent. It’s so nothing. Hitler wouldn’t have deleted that.
It probably made Twitter workers cry. They put the “twit” in Twitter.
‘Bubble’ is just short-hand for ‘fragile community’.
Another sobering look at things from Mr. Goad. It’s easy to get caught up in the “owning the libs” vibe what with Musk taking over Twitter but it sort of begs the question if this will actually do any good. I do think it will mitigate the censorship of the right that the left has enjoyed on Twitter. I read somewhere that quite a few Biden voters didn’t know about Hunter’s laptop and if they had known they would have voted differently. But looking at the forest from the trees
I too as of late have been comparing America to the Tower of Babel, more a mix of the Tower of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah. So I was interested in Haidt’s take. While I think social media is fragmentating I think the event that occurred in the last years was the legalization of gay marriage. That single event is the stone landing on a windshield fragmenting it into a mosaic, that is the Tower of Babel moment for America.
“I appreciate their optimism but pity their naïveté.”
I can’t even say I appreciate their optimism now. It’s just too detached from reality. And I was once one of the naive optimists.
Actually, it wasn’t really naivete on my part. It was wilfull ignorance…and wishful thinking.
But reality wins.
So far, so good. Apparently Musk told that, that “AOC” today to “stop hitting on me.”
The slightest hint of humor should have the joyless, irony-bereft tight-assed douchebags jumping off bridges in droves.
You may say I’m a dreamer.
You’re not the only one
Ha!
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