The ‘free speech public square’ promise of Musk’s Twitter was as alluring to many people as the infamous perfume of the 1970s.
They couldn’t get enough of it, or Musk, when he first offered to buy the platform. He was going to be the saviour of the free world. But then the deal went sour, Musk backed out, a court case ensued and then just as suddenly it was all back on again. But the promise this time is not quite so rosy. The perfume wore off and we see Musk’s Twitter buyout for what it really is - a hard-nosed economic opportunity, according to Robert Malone, but not just that, an ideological vision of a digital hellscape where everything you do, say, or purchase (goods and services), becomes integrated into your digital social media profile. Thus Musk’s vision speaks not just of economic enterprise, but of huge, powerful, overarching control of the lives of its users through the provision of basically everything.
Who will ultimately be pulling the levers though? Not Just Musk I’ll wager. The Biden regime, FBI, CIA, IRS and no doubt many other foreign governments and their secretive law enforcement agencies have an unhealthy say in what goes on (and what doesn’t) on Twitter. Musk’s genius is to bring it all under one umbrella, massively expand the ‘services’ offered by the platform and bring back all those suspended accounts (and their valuable data) under that big umbrella - which he quaintly refers to as the ‘public square’.
All that data will be controlled and analysed by AI bots, harvesting and processing every word you say, every service you select, every thing you buy - so in future, Twitter bots won’t be trawling your account for ‘misinformation’ and wrong-speak in order to censor you, they’ll be surreptitiously integrating that data into your Twitter profile and thus if you step out of line, then you might just discover that you can no longer insure your car, get a bank loan, or remortgage your house. Hell, you might not even be able to buy a bottle of smelly stuff simply because you removed your kids from Drag Queen Pervy (sorry, Story) Hours, or questioned the ‘safe and effective’ holy pharma cow, or even pointed out the non-existence of the mythical ‘climate crisis’!
This is what Robert Malone says:
Musk’s vision for Twitter is “one stop shopping.” E-commerce. He intends to bring social media, banking, auto loans, Amazon type buying, insurance, paying loans and utility bills, medical insurance, service estimates, you name it- under the umbrella of Twitter. Everything you do, buy, need - could be bought on the Twitter website. This is about power and money.
Why does he care about bot accounts? Because what he is buying is access to you, to me, to each and everyone of us on Twitter now or on Twitter in the future. He wants to know the exact number of warm bodies to sell to his investors. Remember - with the purchase of Twitter, he will have a client base maybe in the billions - before he even launches a single product! That client base includes some of the most influential, wealthy and educated people on the planet.
What happens if you are rude, share porn, use inappropriate language or only use binary gender descriptors? What happens if you believe that Russia should take over Ukraine? What happens if you are just a contrarian or a “science denier.” What if you don’t believe in gay marriage or do believe in gay marriage? Who knows what the societal drivers in the future will be? Who knows what the next “thing” will be.
He’s not wrong to warn us about this.
Karen Hunt is even more forthright and gloomy:
The demon, as Musk says, is out of the box and we must let it in.
If we return to Twitter, it should now become obvious why Musk desires it. I discuss it in my essay I Dream of Musk, quoting a Forbes article by Oliver Rennick:
“[Twitter] is as close to humanity's stream of consciousness there is. It makes complete sense that the man behind Neuralink, Musk's company exploring brain-machine interfaces, would want unfiltered access to this digital consciousness.”
If controlling data means ruling the world, Twitter is a perfect place to get ahead in the race. Here we find every psychotic despot’s dream come true—an endless supply of raw, unfiltered data extracted from an endless supply of willing victims.
Tweektown observed:
Musk is going to do something with all of that data that is housed in Twitter's servers and algorithms, which could be fed into Neuralink... the perfect data set. Everything the world has typed into 140-character tweets since its inception, with an AI learning it all... and then the BCI (brain-computer interface) being inserted, quite literally, into your head.
So, if you’re invited at some point in the future to resurrect your ‘permanently’ suspended account (or accounts) on Musk’s Twitter, just ask yourself the question: Do I really want to do that?
I must admit to a frisson of optimism myself when this whole takeover was first mooted, if only because Musk said he'd unfreeze accounts. Reality soon came back! It's long past time we stopped concentrating power in the hands of the technocrats but it will be virtually impossible to persuade billions of twits to give up on their gossip mill. Any ideas?