RICHARD SEYMOUR - Musk & Twitter: the first lab rat to take over the laboratory

By Dilip -

Social media platforms are devised by a Californian tech scene committed to competition and social hierarchy. Twitter’s protocols treat us as wannabe celebrities, striving to produce storms of admiration and rage. It is a complex evolutionary system that selects the vacuous grandstanding and sniggering boorishness of adolescent personalities... So much the better if, like Musk, they have a record of sociopathic behavior... What Twitter has done is (to) automate this tendency... A public sphere dominated by this lurid publicity mechanism is structurally committed to stupidity. And in that world, Musk is king... users are not citizens of a representative democracy, but lab rats governed by incentives and controls: Musk is simply the first such rodent to take over the laboratory.

No plutocrat has ever so drastically de-sublimated his own mystique as has Musk, merely by tweeting his thoughts into the eternal void. His online persona -variously dull, boorish, self-pitying, whimsical and exuberantly vainglorious - has an ambiguous impact on a credulous business and tech culture: on the one hand, his armies of online sycophants defend everything he says; on the other, he just doesn’t cut the figure of a genius.

Not, of course, that he hasn’t been feted by the usual obsequious outlets, from TED to Charlie Rose. Not that his achievements aren’t routinely inflated: even a critical article in The Economist explains that he “invents things that are changing the world, from electric cars”- already in commercial use by the end of the nineteenth century -“to space rockets” - first fired into space in 1957. But his addiction to social media, where he epitomizes so thoroughly the Twitter try-hard who thinks he’s funnier than he is, relentlessly sabotages the myth.

Yet there are reasons, beyond well-funded narcissism, why Musk might want to own his favorite platform...

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/musk-takes-twitter/


Why does Elon Musk want Twitter? The answer may lie with what he could do with your data


Elon Musk is the king of trolls in an age of troll politics / What better owner for Twitter than master of the ill-advised tweet?


"The spectacle is the guardian of sleep"



KATIE KADUE - Twitter as Suspended Hell


Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?


Book review: The Politics of Heroin - CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade


The rotting carcass of English conservatism (+ the certifiable lunacy of the American variety)


‘It is obscene’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony


How the Facebook-Reliance combine and the farm laws pave the way for digital colonisation


‘Moral bankruptcy’: whistleblower offers scathing assessment of Facebook


Book review: The revolution will not be tweeted / Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?


OSCAR SCHWARTZ: What Was the TED Talk?​


Man’s Godgle Search for Meaning


Facebook Papers paint damning picture of company's role in insurrection


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