Speaking a few hours ago about Twitter purchaser Elon Musk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey declared: “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” Bless. This feels like the first flashback scene we see in a dystopian drama after the words “SIX MONTHS EARLIER …” Quite where we’ll be in six months’ time as far as Twitter is concerned remains tantalisingly unclear, but it seems difficult to imagine it will be either a more or less pleasant space. It’s a social media platform. I’m not sure what further evidence humanity needs before we cotton on to the idea that such a thing might be an intrinsically toxic concept. Of course, there will always be some people who think it just hasn’t been done right yet. Like communism, or a British version of The Daily Show.
Anyway, if Musk’s takeover goes through, he’ll assume control of a platform where the people on the right are incredibly angry about free speech, and those on the left are incredibly angry about hate speech. Which is to say: they have so much in common. As the tech visionary Jaron Lanier has long been excellent at pointing out, the best way to keep people on platforms is to make them angry. So the platforms are designed to make them angry. You might consider the anger worth it for your version of advertising (I myself will post this column on Twitter), but even then it is a weirdly grim cost of doing business that just conceivably ought to be weighed far more carefully than it is.
