“The real battle is between the extinctionists and the humanists,” wrote the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, on Tuesday afternoon. “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, the owner of X and Tesla made his point more strongly. “If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists,” he said, “its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”
Like many a thinking man thriving on X — and I’m told, by friends who know him well, he is a deep thinker — Musk has mastered the art of the intellectual leapfrog, coining -isms to advance outlandish conclusions under the veil of academic breakthroughs. “If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is humans should die out,” he said. I imagine his fans nodding obediently, incensed by the idea of an AI extinctionist having the nerve to think most people are awful and plotting the end of the world.
Musk does not want humans to die out; he wants them to dominate. Which makes sense when his own life reads like a parable on human potential. With that potential comes idealism: Musk’s hope for an “everything app” won’t be dashed by the sorry state of X’s commercial decline, thank you very much. Though X’s advertising revenues have halved, his followers are more loyal than ever. For Musk, that is most important. His goal was utopian from the start: taking one of the world’s biggest social media platforms private, in the name of free expression. What could possibly go wrong? Answer: lots. And yet I think the criticism directed towards him is unfair.
For a certain commentator, Musk is a convenient punchbag: a white South African who sleeps with two guns next to his bed. For many more, he’s a societal menace: a free speech absolutist who peddles conspiracy theories, who welcomed Tucker Carlson with open arms and reinstated Donald Trump and Andrew Tate’s accounts. It’s too easy to point the finger at Musk — not least because he can carry the weight. In a fight against Zuckerberg, I’m backing him big time. The trouble with holding him accountable for X’s extremities is that Twitter was a vile cesspit long before it came under his rule. For my sanity, I put out tweets and never look back.
In 2014, PR executive Justine Sacco was boarding an 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” she tweeted. While she was in the air, oblivious to the online pile-on, she became a soundbite, a BuzzFeed headline and a trending hashtag (#HasJustineLandedYet). Then she was fired.
Had Ricky Gervais made such a joke, he would likely have been applauded for lampooning the racial inequalities that persist in South Africa today. “Cancel culture is worse for women,” Hadley Freeman told this paper recently. “It’s a disgrace.”
Twitter was the first platform to galvanise cancel culture: take Maya Forstater, who tweeted that being a woman was “about biology” more than “identity or womanly feelings” and was promptly cancelled by colleagues and fired from her job. JK Rowling came to her defence and faced death threats for doing so. Of all the social media giants, Twitter was always the one to ignite the conversation: somewhere journalists thought they were rock stars, and rock stars thought they were journalists. X’s revenue may be down, and its stature may be diminutive (183 million daily active users), compared with YouTube (2 billion) and Facebook (1.4 billion). But it continues to dictate our cultural norms — I ask you: who is using Threads? — and those norms are sharply shifting.
Musk’s presiding over a culture war that was stoked by Twitter long before it became his playground
Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter —but not because of it — we’ve witnessed a growing backlash against the culture of censoriousness that gripped the Anglosphere for close to a decade. The tide may be turning, but Musk is no captain. He is a symptom, an agent, of change — not the cause. His crusade against “the woke mind virus” does not exist in a vacuum.
In 2022, Forstater received over £100,000 in damages for workplace discrimination. This year, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill passed in the Lords. Just weeks before, Kathleen Stock defended freedom of speech at the Oxford Union — cheered on while protesters glued themselves to the floor.
In July, Coutts came under fire for debanking Nigel Farage for his political views; a news story so major “debanking” became one of the words of the year. Two months ago, Acas employee Sean Corby set a legal first when a court ruled his opposition to critical race theory as a protected belief. And Róisín Murphy’s Hit Parade became her most successful release, after fans rallied to defend her from cancellation (she had, it turns out, unfashionable views on puberty blockers).
Some may squirm at the idea of one man controlling vast swathes of the news/culture/narrative; but as a die-hard libertarian and free speech champion, Musk is, for many, the ideal candidate. His challenge to cancel culture — a twisted, distorted version of liberalism that poses as progress — is not just refreshing, it is a sign of the times. Or, as Musk might have it, a humanist response to a trend that has atomised our ability to think and speak freely. The media likes to suggest that he is an architect of online hatred, but what he truly is is a technocratic overlord presiding over a culture war that was stoked by Twitter long before it became his playground.
So what to make of the AI summit, and Musk’s upcoming interview with the Prime Minister? (who, unlike Joe Rogan, won’t let the tech billionaire smoke a joint live on air.)
Amid a cultural riptide that’s seen online freedoms curtailed while reappraising the word jihad as protected speech, and a man who likes to play God set against one who channels a Napoleonic complex into a smoking ban, all I can say is this: pass the popcorn.
