Elon Musk Should Not Own the Public Square

Nobody should.

Twitter has often been called the “town square” of much of the world. It makes some degree of sense — anyone can join, anyone can have a voice, and anyone can have their voice heard by going viral. It’s not necessarily civil all the time, but what public forum is?

So, when Elon Musk created a bunch of buzz by trying to buy Twitter, then backing down, then eventually going through with it when forced, there were many skeptics, myself included. And, I must say, Elon has done far, far worse a job than even I expected, and I haven’t liked him in a while.

Elon’s whole schtick is that he’s some sort of genius billionaire businessman who is the only one who can save the world (now where have I heard that before?), and he certainly does a good job of selling it. He’s certainly got a large enough sense of narcissistic self-worth to sell himself, anyway, even if he is abjectly failing to run Twitter with any kind of decency. Or is he successfully running it into the ground? The jury’s out so far.

While I will gladly dunk on Elon Musk for another thousand words or so, that’s not the point of this (although there will be more dunking, don’t worry). The point is that he bought Twitter not just as a vanity project, but ostensibly to make the platform more “free” or some such nonsense. Presumably, he planned to do this by letting a bunch of alt-right whackos have their accounts back so they can advocate more violence and discord, but who am I to understand supergenius Elon Musk’s plan?

However, approaching Twitter as a public square that should be “more free” by encouraging the likes of Trump, Kanye West (sorry, he’s apparently going by “Ye” now), and other right-wing trolls is not a great plan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that voices on the political right are not worthwhile. What I am saying is that the current political right in America is fairly toxic in general and seems pretty dead-set on spewing hate speech, advocating violence, and ignoring any kind of decorum in favor of owning the libs.

I generally support free speech, but when that speech is bigotry and hate speech, I have an issue. You’re entitled to your opinion and you’re entitled to speak it, but you are also not immune to the repercussions of that opinion, and that often means getting your account banned. At least until recently, since supergenius Musk decided that reinstating a bunch of those banned right-wing accounts is the way to go.

So now, Twitter — which has always been a bit of a cesspool, let’s be honest — is falling apart at the seams. This is not just because of the reinstated accounts that I mentioned above, but also because supergenius Musk fired a bunch of people who keep the site running. He also fired a bunch of the people responsible for maintaining the consent decrees that Twitter is required by law to keep up with. So now, not only is Twitter falling apart because a bunch of alt-right idiots have their accounts back, but also because the company is in legal peril. Oh, and since nobody is maintaining the code, it’s falling apart that way too.

That is undeniably bad in general. Twitter may be a cesspool, but it is a necessary piece of many people’s lives. Ignoring how many people make their independent businesses work with the help of Twitter, I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how tweets often move faster than the local news, meaning that people can hear about local events — whether natural disasters or traffic jams — via Twitter before anything else.

The potential loss of Black Twitter by itself is already being mourned, too. As an integral part of a lot of social movements, including and especially Black Lives Matter, Twitter has an outsized influence on the ability of protest organizers to, well, organize. Plus, as a global social media platform, several social justice movements, including #MeToo and #BLM, got their start predominantly on Twitter.

Twitter, for all of its faults, is an invaluable piece of modern discourse in so many ways, and Musk is actively, if not intentionally, destroying it. For all his talk of making Twitter into a public town square, he sure is doing everything to drive it into the ground.

That, however, gets right to the point of things — Elon Musk, one shitty billionaire, owns Twitter, and that by itself disqualifies it from being a public town square. The point of a public town square is that it is, you know, public. By that definition, Twitter has never really been a public town square. It has always had a lot of competing interests from advertisers, bad actors both foreign and domestic, and, just, so many bots.

The whole point of a public town square is that it cannot, by definition, be owned. That gets to the root of what Jack Dorsey said to Musk when the latter was first interested in buying Twitter — it can’t have an advertising model or really be for-profit at all. Really, it needs to be run by a nonprofit foundation whose sole interest is in maintaining the ad-free model.

The notion that Musk should single-handedly control the town square, using it to serve his own whims and the whims of his allies, is absolutely bonkers and defeats the purpose of what a town square should be. It is absolutely ludicrous to believe that a billionaire who bought a social media company on a whim (or for the lulz, as the case may be) has anyone’s best interest in mind except his own. It is doubly ludicrous when that billionaire is supergenius Elon Musk.

The fact that his fanboys are continuing to insist that he’s a supergenius after driving the company into the ground is laughable. Musk has made so many bad decisions in his tenure as the owner of Twitter that it has taken little more than a month for nearly everyone except his merry band of sycophants to conclude that he’s basically incompetent. Nobody could make so many sequential bad decisions in a row, right?

I mean, there are plenty who accuse Musk of being another bad actor who is intentionally destroying Twitter for his own reasons, whether for political gain, to prove some sort of point, or, again, for the lulz. They make him out to be some sort of nefarious evil supergenius who had these diabolical plans to unleash hell upon the world in the form of destroying the closest thing to a public square that exists on the internet today.

In case you hadn’t figured it out by this point in the article, I think it’s moronic to call Elon Musk a supergenius, a regular genius, or any word that correlates with any level of intelligence. In all honesty, he’s probably got an average level of intelligence, a very high level of narcissism, a fair amount of luck, and enough family money to make himself rich by exploiting those things.

As far as I’m concerned, if his original plan was to break Twitter for some dumb reason or another, I highly doubt that he’d go about doing it in such a way that makes him look this incompetent. So many people are starting to recognize that he’s just a dumbass narcissist who, again, had enough family money to exploit a streak of greed and luck to make himself the richest person in the world. He certainly didn’t need some master plan to break Twitter — his existing incredibly high level of incompetence was always enough.

That said, the article I linked a few paragraphs up (here, I’ll link it again) has some really good ideas about how to actually make an internet-based public town square. It talks about the various things that go into public forums, how to make them high quality without turning them into echo chambers, and a variety of realistic ways to go about making it happen.

There are many hurdles, including idiot man-child billionaires, but if we can get enough force behind it, it could be interesting. These days, my level of optimism for enough people getting behind any one idea is incredibly low, but stranger things have happened. Either way, the article is worth your time to read it — it’s not even that long, honestly.

The whole point, though, is that an internet-based public town square needs to be nonprofit, not beholden to advertisers or corporate interests, and not owned by anyone. That includes any tech billionaire who thinks that they can do a better job than the previous guys, or really any billionaire of any kind. Elon Musk is wholly unqualified to run Twitter, or any company really, and the assorted Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world have shown themselves to be malignant sociopaths, so I honestly don’t trust any of them at this point.

We live in a world where we have elevated a handful of narcissistic mediocre white dudes with family money as the titans of our time and decided that they should control everything. Now that we’ve started discovering that this might have been a bad idea, people are starting to question why we gave these dudes the keys to the world.

In the wake of that realization, I am hoping that we can make an actual public town square that is owned by everybody and nobody, something that is truly public. Maybe we can forge it out of the neutron star that forms when all of these mediocre white billionaires’ egos collapse in on each other when we compost them.

Before I sign off, I’m not done dunking on Elon Musk yet, so check out this article where I do that and only that for a while.

Be well out there.

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