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Elon Musk has suspended a slew of liberal journalists and pundits from Twitter. It is, as Benjamin Braddoc puts it, a red wedding for the liberal establishment. I initially believed that he was just the "controlled" opposition of the deep state, obviously he's stepped on way too many toes for that. This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue. Social media, our Frankenstein, has made it insanely easier for mob rule to influence culture (not that it wasn't already).
I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.
EDIT: It looks like he's lifting the suspension.
It's not, though, and the people crowing about it don't understand how the game is played. And I'm not saying that because I'm butthurt that some journo I've never heard of that's supposedly 'on my side' is the unlucky ox du jour.
When the left deplatforms someone, they genuinely believe (rightly or wrongly) that they're righteously fighting racism/inequality/injustice. They're saving lives from COVID. They're supporting the downtrodden in society and giving them a chance to improve their lives. Contrary to the conflict theorists, it's neither arbitrary nor intended to make 'disfavored groups' suffer.
When Elon (or some figure on the right) deplatforms someone, 1) best case, he's having to grapple with the realities that many people said he would (thus the smugness) or 2) worst case, he's being driven by petty personal or 'own the libs' revanchism. The small fraction of principled libertarians are slinking off, having lost again, while the conservatives pretending to be principled libertarians are cheering the fact that the libs are getting owned.
They miss the fact that really winning, and not just eking out a transitory term in the white house, requires articulating a vision for the future that wins the hearts and minds of the people. And it needs to be more inspiring than 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' People need to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. It needs to be more than 'I'm really angry after the last 5 years and after forfeiting all my morals I just want to hurt my outgroup,' which, I don't mean to pick on that commenter personally, but that's the vibe I get from most of the conservatives here.
And you know what? There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade. Something has to change; I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.
I've read this thread yesterday. It asserts that Musk stands for a compelling and coherent vision:
Not defending the Temple Mount frame or California-centric analysis, I have to admit that the Civic Religion angle is apt. As @2rafa observed, my support of most tenets of Muskianism is essentially irrational and quasi-religious, following from my basic Cosmism (that Musk, as a deathist, unfortunately disagrees with) and qualified belief in technological solutions to problems that, while social in nature, partially follow from scarcity and technological limits.
Compared to SVU or SJC, what do libertarians offer in the marketplace of ideas? If they know what's good for them, I think they should position themselves as a minor sect allied with the former church.
Likewise for many others. The vision of SJC is totalizing and unforgiving to competitors, being rooted in absolute zero-sum philosophy.
working in a tech hub and knowing a lot of this type of person their response would largely be that those problems are trivial. First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.
The second assumption is that tech runs the world and everything else is a sideshow. Going from primitive agricuture to the nuclear age is a much larger step than deciding who does the dishes or writes meeting notes. The idea is that tech leads and the rest is mainly commentary to it. The big issue is having a trillion people living in rotating space habitats with a GDP per capita 20 times that of a current western nation, not figuring out how many members the local school boards will have on each rotating habitat.
These types of technoutopians tend to favour descentralization and not really want a specific system for the whole solarsystem. The idea is 3D printing and AI can allow for relatively small groups of people to achieve autonomy and with tens of billions or more people spread out in the solarsystem many different systems will exist in parallel.
Salience is a subjective metric. Plebs are more placated than ever. Folks here have been losing their minds about excesses of BLM, but compare it either to the '92 race riot or the terror wave in the 70's.
There's a great deal of simulacra running wild; most are ephemeral. With actual virtual reality we may wage entire world wars that'll amount to moving bytes around.
I suppose techno-utopians wouldn't count the current condition as a win. But it is largely a product of tech, and economy built on top of technological improvements.
In any case, not caring a lot about the culture war is a legitimate position to hold, and one expected of people who are more interested in objects than in other people – as in, most STEM nerds.
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