What does Elon Musk want? Is Twitter the way to get it?
“I strongly supported Obama for President,”
Elon Musk tweeted late last month, part of the spree of ideological comments accompanying his continuing takeover of Twitter, “but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.” Around the same time, he set the social-media platform ablaze by reposting a cartoon showing a stick figure comfortably on the center-left in 2008 redefined as a right-wing bigot by 2021 because the left-wing stick figure had raced way off to the left. Then this week, he said: “Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias.”
And now we have the news that he’s likely to allow Donald Trump to tweet freely once again.
All of these comments and promises align the country’s richest man with the rightward side in our culture war. But though I don’t know Musk, I think I know enough about him, and I know enough Silicon Valley people like him, to suggest that neither his tweeted self-descriptions nor the criticisms being lobbed his way capture what’s distinctive about him.
A term like “conservative” doesn’t fit the Tesla tycoon. Even “libertarian,” while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of ideas that I don’t think he particularly cares about. A better label comes from Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book “The Future and Its Enemies”: Musk is what she calls a “dynamist,” meaning someone whose primary commitments are to exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one that’s always inventing, transforming, doing something new.
If you think this sounds uncontroversial, think again. First, the dynamist may not care where novelty and invention spring from. Unlike the purist libertarian, he might be indifferent to questions of public versus private spending, happy to embrace government help if that’s what it takes to get the new thing off the ground — and happy to take that help from regimes like Communist China no less than from our own. And he may be willing to risk much more than either the typical progressive or the typical conservative for the sake of innovation. Political principle, social stability and moral order are all potentially negotiable when discovery alone is your North Star.
So his recent transformation from Obama Democrat
to progressive foil makes perfect sense in light of the transformations that liberalism itself has undergone of late.
Liberalism in the Obama era was an essentially dynamist enterprise not because liberals were absolutely committed to capital-S Science but because those years encouraged a confidence that the major technological changes of the 21st century were making the world a more liberal place.
Ever since Trump bent history’s arc his way, however, that confidence has diminished or collapsed. Now liberals increasingly regard the internet as the zone of monsters and misinformation, awash in illiberalism, easily manipulated by demagogues, a breeding ground for insurrectionists.
Meanwhile, the values underlying dynamism — above all, the special pedestal given to free thinking and free speech — are also more suspect within liberalism today.
Since a big part of Musk’s success and wealth comes from looking for tech’s applications in the real world, it’s quite possible that he has an ultimate vision for a Twitter as a virtual network that links reformed or revitalized institutions in the real world. Or maybe he believes that in buying Twitter he’s literally buying the digital real estate where his fellow dynamists will build the great institutions of tomorrow.