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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-04-27/elon-musk-threat-billionaires/

Elon Musk isn’t a threat to society’s health. All billionaires are

The mega-rich buy up media outlets precisely because a lie is more likely to fly than the truth – including the lie that they are invaluable

The most dangerous thing about Elon Musk buying Twitter outright for $44 billion is the rapidly spreading notion that his controlling an influential social media platform is dangerous. It is, but not for any of the reasons his critics assert.

The current furor is dangerously misguided for two reasons. First, it assumes that one billionaire owning Twitter is significantly more harmful than a bunch of them owning it. And second, it worries that Musk is committed to an anarchic version of free speech that will undermine the health of our societies.

This is the equivalent of staring resolutely at a single tree to avoid noticing the forest all around it. The fact that so many of us now do this routinely suggests how far we already are from a healthy society.

Money is power. The fact that our societies have allowed a small number of individuals to accumulate untold riches means we have also allowed them to gain untold power over us. Debates, like the current one about the future of Twitter, are now rarely about what is in the interests of wider society. Instead, they are about what is in the interests of billionaires, as well as the corporations and institutions that enrich and protect this tiny, pampered elite.

Musk, as the richest person alive, may have a marginally stronger hand than other billionaires to push things in his direction. But more significantly, all billionaires ultimately subscribe to the same ideological assumption that society benefits from having a class of the super-rich. They are all on Team Billionaire.

Some are more “philanthropic” than others, using the wealth they have plundered from the common good to buy themselves today’s equivalent of an indulgence – a ticket to heaven once sold by the Catholic Church for a princely sum. These “philanthropists” very publicly recycle their riches, while quietly claiming tax exemptions, to make it look as if they deserve their fortunes or as if the planet would be worse off without them.

And some billionaires are more committed to free speech than others, if only – as with the rest of us – by temperament. Certainly, it would be beneficial to have Twitter run using a transparent, open-source algorithm, as Musk says he wants, rather than the secretive algorithms increasingly preferred by the billionaires behind Google, Youtube, and Facebook.

Meritocracy race

But one thing the super-rich are not open to is the idea that billionaires should be a thing of the past, like slavery or the divine right of kings. Instead, they are all equally committed to their own ongoing power – and whatever planet-destroying economic model is required to sustain it.

And they are committed, too, to the idea that they should have much more power than the general population because they are supposedly the winners in a global meritocracy race. They believe they are better than the rest of us – that natural selection has selected them.

Musk appears more open than some billionaires to allowing the expression of a wide range of views on social media. After all, someone who believes he should face no consequences for vilifying a rescue worker as a “pedo guy” for having a better idea than himself about how to save children trapped in a cave probably prefers to see free speech defined as broadly as possible.

“Controversy” is Musk’s shtick, and being a “free speech absolutist” serves his aim of winning popular consent for his billionairedom in exactly the same way profiteering from vaccines does for Bill Gates. While they are busy raking in billions more at our expense, we are busy dividing into Team Musk or Team Gates. We cheer from the sidelines at our own irrelevance.

But one thing that Musk and Gates most assuredly agree on is that they and their ilk must never be swept into the dustbin of history. If we could ever harness Twitter to that end, we would quickly find out just how much of a “free speech absolutist” Musk really is.

‘King of trolls’

This brings us to the second misguided “row” about Musk buying Twitter and its 217 million users: that his supposed commitment to free speech will further tear apart the health of our democracies. Put bluntly, the fear is that allowing Donald Trump and his followers back into the Twitterverse will unleash the forces of darkness we have been struggling to keep at bay.

Environmentalist George Monbiot, a columnist at the liberal establishment newspaper The Guardian, calls Musk’s influence “lethal.”

His colleague Aditya Chakrabortty visibly quivers with anxiety at the prospect of a Twitter molded in Musk’s image, calling him the “king of trolls.” Democracy, Chakrabortty avers, must defend itself not only from the Trumps but from those who enable them through their “free speech absolutism.”

As is expected in such articles, Chakrabortty bolsters his argument with a statistic or two. For example, a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) finds that false stories on Twitter are 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. Putting Musk in charge of this lie factory will bring civilization crashing down, we are warned.

Let us set aside for a moment how MIT defines truth and falsehood, and assume it is capable of divining such things correctly. Again the study’s logic is compelling only so long as we stare at a single tree and ignore the forest all around.

The reason billionaires and corporations – as well as states – want to control the media is precisely that a lie is more likely to fly than the truth. Our societies have been engineered on this principle since we divided into leaders and followers.

If truth reigned supreme, and media platforms could do little to sway us from seeing reality clearly, the richest people on the planet would not be investing their money in buying their own bit of real estate in the media landscape.

But then again, if we could all see reality clearly – unclouded by corporate media interference – there wouldn’t be any billionaires. We would have understood that their extreme wealth was too much of a threat to be allowed, that their fortunes could too easily be turned against us, buying our politicians and turning our democracies into increasingly hollow shells, stripped of the good things we intended.

If billionaires weren’t making fortunes from weapons sales, we surely wouldn’t be endlessly cheering on wars.

If billionaires didn’t demand the right to buy politicians, we might be more ready to address our dysfunctional political and media systems.

If billionaires weren’t profiting from the destruction of the natural world, we might be having a more realistic conversation about the impending extinction of our species.

Censorship as panacea

But, unable to maintain their attention on the structural deformations caused by the rule of the billionaires, left-liberals like Monbiot and Chakrabortty keep deflecting to the cause of censorship. They speak of unspecified “curbs” and approve of blocking “Russian news sources” as though this is the panacea for society’s ills.

The point they have obscured is that misinformation spread by Twitter users pales in comparison to the disinformation that constantly batters us from corporate news outlets, like The Guardian newspaper they work for. (Disinformation is misinformation with deception or manipulation as its intent.)

Disinformation such as making us believe that the West’s many illegal wars of aggression, like the one against Iraq, were defensive, or mistakes, or to promote democracy. Or that such illegal wars cannot be compared to the wars of aggression committed by “enemy” states.

Disinformation such as persuading us that we have Trump-voting “deplorables” because of social media “fake news” rather than growing disenchantment with liberal political systems in thrall to billionaires – systems that serve the super-rich while imposing austerity on the rest of us.

Disinformation that for decades has allowed climate denial lobbies – secretly but handsomely funded by billionaires – to conceal from us the findings of the billionaires’ own scientists, which show we are hurtling towards a climate breakdown tipping point.

And the continuing disinformation that makes us believe the Green New Deals we have been offered are designed to save us, rather than the billionaires’ profits, from extinction.

Latest Darth Vader

But significantly, the reason Twitter users spread more trivial forms of misinformation is that, after a lifetime spent in the billionaires’ bubbles of disinformation, we struggle to anchor ourselves to reality.

Awash in corporate disinformation, we are credulous in the face of simple, easily digestible stories: ones that require us to cheer either for Team Musk or for Team Gates, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, the Rebel Alliance, or the latest Darth Vader. We cannot make sense of a world so corrupt, so divided, so harsh. Instead, we are drawn to simplistic narratives of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong.

And the most simplistic of all these narratives are the ones that undergird the sense of collective virtue of our society and our tribe.

If our wars are different from their wars, then the difference must be that Putin is a madman or a megalomaniac. And before we know it, we are starting to imagine that there is something inherently backward or bloodthirsty about the Russian psyche. The arms dealers – and behind them the billionaires – can once again lick their lips in delight.

Or if people are too stupid to see through a Trump, it must mean we need more censorship, more of those undefined “curbs.”

The unstated logic is that, if we can blank out some types of information, the “deplorables” who are susceptible to the wrong kind will gradually be won back to the status quo. Like victims of a cult, they can be deprogrammed through an absence of exposure. Deprived of a Trump, they will become standard-bearers for a Biden.

And if that fails … well, these same liberals will be cheering on whatever other forms of authoritarianism are needed to “curb” the threat.

But Monbiot and Chakrabortty’s veiled advocacy for censorship will not save our thread-bare democracies. It is exactly where the most powerful forces in our society want things heading: not towards a more pluralistic, open, and transparent media, but towards a more tightly controlled and policed one.

We know where this leads because we are already firmly on this path. Anyone not backing the flow of arms to Ukraine must have been influenced by Russian disinformation. Anyone critical of Big Pharma’s profiteering is colluding in vaccine hesitancy. Anyone supporting socialism and criticizing the wealthy elite must harbor antisemitic tendencies.

Footsoldiers for the rich

The debate has been polarized yet again into one in which we must pick one of two unappealing sides. Either a Twitter ruled by a shadowy cabal of billionaires limiting our exposure to information by manipulating the algorithms in secret, or one ruled by a single, outsize, fickle ego who promises a bigger information marketplace and a little more transparency – until he doesn’t.

Liberals, because they distrust the deplorables, want to stamp out the chaos of populism and ensure that nice, philanthropic billionaires like Gates decide what is best for us.

And conservatives, because they distrust liberals, want to let a maverick, more brashly self-aggrandizing billionaire like Musk decide what should be allowed.

Team Musk vs. Team Gates.

We are now deep in the trenches of an information war. Who should be allowed to speak? Whatever we might imagine, the victors will once again be the billionaires – until we stop recruiting ourselves to be their footsoldiers.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr22/doom-porn4-22.html

Doom Porn and Empty Optimism

 I'm often accused of calling 783 of the last two bubble pops (or was it 789? Forgive the imprecision). Like many others who have publicly explored the notion that the status quo isn't actually sustainable despite its remarkable tenaciousness, I am pilloried as a doom-and-gloomer (among other things, ahem).

Fair enough, and I'm fine with the doom-and-gloom label (we have more fun!) as a generality. But many take any skepticism of the sustainability of the status quo as extending into some perverse delight in the prospect of collapse leading to a Zombie Apocalypse featuring black gunships and firefights over the planet's last case of refried beans.

That is a mis-characterization of my premise that whatever is unsustainable eventually unravels. We are not god-like (other than the Federal Reserve, of course), and so our heartfelt desire to render the unsustainable sustainable via the power of empty optimism will fail, as magical thinking can change our internal emotional state (happy happy, it will all work out without any inconvenient sacrifice or change), but it can't change the real world (alas).

This leaves us a choice: either 1) manage the unraveling with an eye on minimizing general adversity by investing our capital, resources and labor in transitioning to a sustainable economic model, or 2) squander our capital, resources and labor on propping up the final terminal phase of a waste-is-growth, hyper-financialized, hyper-globalized, perversely corrupt and unequal status quo in which the few exploit the many via their control of power and capital.

One analogy of this choice is pruning a fruit tree. If we let nature take its course, the most extended branch weighed down with the most fruit will break off under its own weight, an ugly splintering that puts the tree at risk. The alternative approach is to prune the most extended branches and thin the fruit to what the tree can productively bear.

That is my preferred approach to unsustainable systems.

The managed unraveling won't be "bad," it will simply be different. Those of us who look at our way of life as a system don't see much point in value judgments that characterize the unraveling of unsustainable systems as doom-and-gloom, any more than the overloaded branch breaking is anything other than gravity acting on an over-extended branch.

Those who reckon that the unraveling of the waste is growth Landfill Economy is a catastrophe are clinging to a brittle branch. A living branch is flexible and bends in the breeze; a dead branch is brittle and breaks.

The unraveling will be different but it doesn't have to be "bad." Black gunships won't have to blast the zombie hoards. The more likely path will be things simply fray and stop working reliably. Things that were always abundant may become sporadically scarce, or perhaps permanently scarce. Overly complex and wasteful systems will decomplexify, either via a controlled process or an uncontrolled collapse. Frugality will be incentivized, waste will be disincentivized. Phantom "wealth" will dissipate. Real wealth will be reassessed.

Capital, resources and labor will all be revalued. When stuff breaks down, there may not be enough capital, resources and silled labor to restore it to the good old days of endless abundance. What's valued now may well be revealed as worthless. What's mocked and ridiculed may turn out to be more valuable than what's currently praised and admired.

We've been trained to view optimism as the most important trait, and therefore one that must be displayed in public. If life gives you lemon, make lemonade, etc. Anything less than more of everything for everyone, forever is frowned upon as lacking the desired optimistic confidence in human ingenuity and the magical power of self-interest to solve all problems.

America has lost the ability to discern the difference between the empty optimism of magical thinking and grounded-in-reality optimism which focuses on assessing the resources at hand and making tough choices about how best to maximize the value of those resources. As a general rule, this means to invest more, we must consume less.

This confusion between empty optimism and grounded optimism based on realistic assessments, tradeoffs, experimentation and adaptability manifests in one absurd fantasy after another: the U.S. has built a grand total of two nuclear reactors since 1995, but we're going to magically build hundreds in the next few years to replace hydrocarbons.

We're going to seamlessly transition without any sacrifice of comfort, convenience or cost from jet-fuel powered aircraft flying at 590 miles per hour to all-electric aircraft recharged by solar panels and wind turbines. (Never mind the panels and turbines have to be replaced every 20 years; the future is unlimited.)

And we'll all be sitting around with our virtual-reality headsets getting rich buying and selling digital "value" in the Metaverse, while robots will do all the work and money will be printed and distributed to everyone. If we need to invest in whatever systems produce the robots, fine, we'll just print another couple trillion so we can have it all: invest and consume at whatever scale we desire.

Missing in all the pipe dreams is any grasp that the real world has constraints that are becoming consequential. Systems that have reached extremes of unsustainability--hyper-globalization, hyper-financialization and hyper-self- exploitation--will unravel first and unravel fastest. This isn't doom porn, it's simply the way systems work. All systems have constraints, and the constraints of unsustainable systems become consequential in non-linear dynamics.

I like my comforts and conveniences as much as anyone: we're all entitled to pursue our own interests. But to believe that the pursuit of self-interest will overcome all real-world constraints is magical thinking because there is no causal link between overcoming real-world constraints and self-interest.

We tend to solve systemic problems as a group, so cooperation is one of humanity's core selective advantages. On occasion the lone genius invents a new technology that solves scarcities and adds new comforts and conveniences, but relying on this one model of change is folly. Social innovations are just as important as technological innovations.

Just as common sense suggests pruning the deadwood and thinning the fruit is a better use of our time than waiting for the overloaded branch to break, we would be better served by eliminating the waste and friction in the current systems that don't add to our lives while consuming immense amounts of capital, resources and labor that would be much more productively invested elsewhere.

We would be better served by reducing our dependence on unsustainable systems such as hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization and invest in shortening long dependency chains, i.e. invest in self-reliance.

If we can't discern the difference between doom-porn and investing in self-reliance, then solutions will continue to be out of reach.