Elon Musk has outed Twitter - and himself!
Conservatives should say no to the hive-mind paradigm.
MAGA movement conservatives can hardly contain their glee as they anxiously await Episode 2 of the Twitter Files. They are right to celebrate. After being treated like deranged conspiracy theorists for two years, their allegations about Twitter collusion with the Biden campaign have been backed up with hard evidence. It truly is a great moment — perhaps the beginning of a social media justice movement — in American history.
But celebratory moments like these are always a good time for a word of caution.
Amid all the fanfare of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, there has been little time to catch our collective breaths and evaluate the big picture. What are Musk’s true motives? Is this a positive development for individual freedom in the long run? Musk’s own words and actions offer clues.
Let’s cut to the chase and talk about the disturbing tweet Musk just posted this morning. He wrote: “The intelligence of this hive-mind will improve significantly as signal/noise effective cross-linking of tweets and speed of tweets all improve.”
Hive-mind???!!! WTF.
Keep in mind that Musk is an engineer and a spectacularly successful one at that. He is a visionary who sees pathways to achieve the impossible where others see only mountainous obstacles. When he tells you he is building a hive-mind, a human neural network into which all Twitter users brains are plugged, it is wise to take him seriously. And, while you’re at it, rewatch The Matrix. But why would Musk want to go the mad scientist route and build the perfect hive-mind?
Musk is the world’s richest man. He has built, or had a hand in building, multiple wildly successful companies, with PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX being the most prominent. He has a gift for seeing opportunities and making profits. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Musk saw purchasing Twitter as a necessary step a) to defend the profitable companies he had worked so hard to build from the woke anti-capitalist mob, and b) to penetrate the MAGA market of working class folks with disposable income who were not among the elite early adopters of Tesla. The Deplorables who are cheering Musk today form a necessary component of future growth as Musk’s flagship company ramps up production and introduces cars with lower price points to bring working class purchasers into the fold.
Take a moment to consider a few of the benefits of purchasing Twitter for Musk:
Become a hero and champion to millions of fans of free speech and transparency
Get free advertising for Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Twitter itself
Laugh as competitors like Volkswagen stop advertising on the world’s largest speech platform
Make legacy journalists irrelevant as you pick and choose journalism’s new stars
Subtly message how the Neuralink brain chip poses no danger because a three-letter government agency must approve it
We can applaud Musk’s transparency regarding actions taken by Twitter before he owned it, but at the same time we must see how Musk is using Twitter to his own advantage — and using us. Recall, we are part of his hive-mind, working for free as part of his fancy schmancy neural network. This conception is inconsistent with human nature and human dignity. And the idea of harnessing the power of human thought into a collective hive-mind is downright scary. Eventually something will have to give.
Conservatives must stick to core principles of conservatism. We must resist excessive concentration of power in the hands of any government, corporation or individual. We must always endeavor to defend the freedom of the individual. There is no room for hive-minds in the conservative movement.