At the end of last month, just after Elon Musk had bought Twitter, I wrote that having him responsible for an important part of the world’s public sphere could turn out to be “like entrusting a delicate clock to a monkey”. This struck some readers, especially those with tech backgrounds, as intemperate, but everything that has happened since suggests that it was bang on the money.
The world has watched transfixed as the monkey flails around wondering what to do with his shiny new plaything. He can do whatever he likes with it, so we watch breathlessly to see what he tries next and speculate endlessly on whether this stunt or that one will do the trick. We are like spectators watching a chess grandmaster playing some practice games – trying this gambit or that; moving pieces on a board; tearing up the board and refashioning it as a sphere; and so on. The fact that the pieces on this chessboard are human beings – with mortgages, dependents, health insurance, etc – is nowhere mentioned, except by Maria Farrell in her splendid, excoriating essay on the takeover. She too has been through a narcissistic acquisition and knows what it’s like for real people.
