Don’t leave Twitter bc you think you’re creating value for Musk. Stay at Twitter bc you’re here for free while he loses billions. Maybe his actions will end it for all of us. But it would be great if us people who do what makes Twitter great outlast him & have the final word
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 14, 2022
Aaron Rupar, and at least some of his fellow banned journalists, are back on Twitter. The news organizations they work for tweeted right through yesterday’s controversy… because, at this particular moment, Twitter is not replaceable for them. And, apparently, Twitter can’t do without them!
Freedom of speech according to Elon… pic.twitter.com/WhzlU2PxTe
— $8 buck Chuck♻️💙❤️🩹☮️🥏 (@TheRealCarlozV) December 17, 2022
Dave Roth, at Defector, always excellent:
… Online reactionary politics is a fan community before it is anything else; as with Donald Trump, the way to tell that Musk is an active participant is how obviously starstruck he is by the corny dingbats that make up its firmament. Where Trump lived for the approval of Fox News’s glitching poreless on-air goblins, Musk has been queasily quick with an “exactly” in the mentions of various reactionary influencers: the anti-trans activist that solicits bomb threats to children’s hospitals, or the one fellow from the Koch-backed Turning Point USA organization whose face seems to be shrinking, or Cat Turd 2. If it is embarrassing to know who these people are—and it is extremely embarrassing to know who those people are—it is more embarrassing still to have mistaken these relentlessly self-serving grifters for friends.
What all of that decidedly is not, however, is mysterious. Musk’s politics, however heterodox he himself might secretly be, appear very much to be those of an extremely wealthy 51-year-old man with an entirely commonplace conservative media diet. There are only so many interesting ways and even fewer interesting reasons to adopt these politics; the most common one, which again is the one that Musk seems to have chosen, is to simply let the combined inertia of your circumstances and incuriosity back you into them. That he is now someplace so strange—winking at QAnon shit, already—seems mostly to reflect how conservative politics have moved in that direction; Musk, typically, seems not to have given any of it much thought. The extremities of his wealth and strange upbringing, and his personal peculiarities and the limits of his capacities for empathy or insight all probably played some role, but this is true of every other butthead that ever aged into reactionary politics. In time, these people realize what they actually believed all along and embrace what has always mattered most to them. In this sense, too, Musk’s little blurts of umbrage and upset are just like those of all the other reactionary pilgrims on their own lonely journeys. Separately but in unison, they slough off everything and everyone that is not them, either out of principle or pique or just because they find themselves losing interest; instead of talking to the people they used to talk to, they just shout at everyone. Twitter has always been a good place for that.
C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: ‘The Eternal Mystery of A Rich Man’s Politics’Post + Comments (179)