Bribe Back Better
Elon Musk’s deal about Twitter has acted as an epiphany at many levels. The reasons why so much money has been spent on this take over are not all clear. One thing is almost certain though, it is not a, stricto censu, business idea. The point is not to earn money out of it. The fact that by this mean Musk is taking control over his communication channel towards more than his 110 millions of followers makes more sense. But there are surely deeper considerations at play. Let’s put those considerations on the side. What has been revealed loud and clear is how little the formal political institutions are relevant today. This is a theme over which I have written and thought a lot lately. The shift towards a digital society affects the fundamentals of our everyday lives.
The long election night
The atmosphere on Twitter following this Elon Musk tweet:
was very similar to the one following an election. The (Twitter) world was divided in two. One side rejoiced as if the free speech issue was solved, while the other side was acting as if the world was ending. Both sides in their respective overreactions were actually pointing to the elephant in the room. The real power, at this beginning of the XXI century, has moved out of the political sphere.It has also left the mainstream media. People have noticed it even if not consciously yet. We saw it coming. First the GAFAM appeared as being able to make elections by tweaking how information was broadcasted on internet. Then the genie got out of the bottle and even those huge companies became susceptible to swarms of social media users. The question of what the political institutions will be in a digital society is not yet solved. The current framework of nation state is in part an heir of the cultural transition initiated by the printing press. Long story short the printing press led to Protestantism and the thirty years war that finally ended with the Westphalian treaty which is the bedrock of the idea of nation state. We are shifting towards a digital society and this shift is at least of the same magnitude. It means that our institutions are no longer fit. It is very easy to see: from how universities (don’t) work to how the war is fought passing by how finance is evolving, everything is changing. Yet it is not clear how tomorrow’s world institution will look like. There are propositions like the network state who are coming from the libertarian/crypto world. But another proposition is illustrated by this recent episode on Twitter. This the proposition of the World Economic Forum: Governance.
O is a special number
As Bret Weinstein aptly puts it, 0 is a very special number. It is the number aimed at by totalitarian minds: they suffer 0 opposition. This is the number that was revealed by Elon Musk’s Twitter event. The Governance model is, using the words given on the WEF website :
The Forum strives to model world-class corporate governance, […] To reflect the Board's multistakeholder status, its membership is divided equally between representatives of the business community and leaders from international organizations and civil society.
The proclaimed goal is clear: it is a worldwide model that encompasses both the private and public sectors. In some sense it is doubly global: vertically (from the individual to the state) and horizontally (across countries). There is room for exactly 0 alternative approach. The very idea of opposition is not part of the plan.
The private-public partnership takes new turns too: it used to be that big corporations were bribing the political power to get favors. Nowadays it works the other way around: three letters agencies are bribing GAFAM in order to be able to retain relevance. Another three letters acronym GIN, the Gated Institutional Narrative, comes into play. When there is no longer 0 place where a true discussion can be held this governance style doesn’t work as smoothly as it used to be. It begs the question: what next after this epiphany?
Fact checked out of existence
The spell is somewhat broken. How is the establishment going to react? You can expect more of the same: a lot of efforts have been done to fact check uncomfortable discussions out of existence. The MDM weapons of mass distraction have been loaded by the institutions. Since when have you last seen a weapon that remained unused? Me neither, I don’t remember.
Here too the globalist response is hard to not see:
So far the European involvement in new technologies has been restricted to the stupid extra clicks you have to perform before accessing a website. More of the same, I told you. The battle for free speech is just beginning.
Plein de bonnes remarques dans ce billet.
What's fascinating about the WEF is that it does not have to provide its own agenda. It is open to celebrating crypto currency scams and every kind of political or economic grift as long as it is economically and socially successful enough to renting a hair salon in Davos, and it seems to leave it to the business empires to sort themselves out among their peers.