The answer to lousy regulation is not better regulation. It is less regulation because more regulation means worse regulation. Until recently, conservatives took this empirical fact as an article of faith. They also agreed with the classical liberal idea that the market was a better and fairer arbiter than partisan politicians or the permanent bureaucracy.
Today, however, statements of the Reaganite obvious are out of fashion. Instead, the Twitter Right is more likely to quote Carl Schmitt, the might-is-right theorist of state power in Nazi Germany, than Adam Smith, the “cuck” whose free market crack dream, it alleges, is the source of our woes of outsourcing and oligarchy. This confirms a second empirical fact: Never trust an intellectual. And it ignores a third: Elon Musk’s purchase of a significant stake in Twitter.
On April 4, Musk dropped $2.64 billion on a 9.2% stake in Twitter and a seat on its board. That makes him Twitter’s largest shareholder, with four times as many shares as its founder, Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s shares rose 29% overnight, but Musk won’t settle for the dividends of a sleeping partnership. Just days earlier, he had telegraphed, as they used to say in the 19th century, his dissatisfaction with Twitter.
“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” Musk tweeted a poll on March 26. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”
Something must be done. Big Tech is the unacknowledged legislator of the public square. Its manipulations, all of which benefit Democrats and liberal activists, range from the sinister, suppressing discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the origins of COVID-19, to the ridiculous, suspending the Babylon Bee’s satirical account because it gave Adm. Rachel Levine, who is neither a real sailor nor a biological woman, its Man of the Year award.
An inability to tolerate mockery is a vanity typical of the rich. In politics, it is a sign of incipient totalitarianism. Success only turned the libertarians of Big Tech into monopolists. Their love of clean, smooth surfaces might have turned Big Tech against the public — human beings do tend to gum up the wheels of technocracy. But it’s Big Tech’s struggle with the federal government that has turned it into a censor.
Musk also asked his followers, “Is a new platform needed?” The stifling of Parler and the fiasco of Gettr have already shown that Big Tech will brook no rivals from the Right, so I doubt Musk was crowdsourcing his decision to buy a stake in Twitter. He is far too smart for that. He knows that Silicon Valley’s alternative to expertise, the “wisdom of the crowd,” does not exist. It is in the nature of crowds to form around the lowest common denominator — hence the Twitter mob.
Rather, I suspect Musk was securing his followers’ support to legitimize what he would do anyway. This is what Mark Antony did over Julius Caesar’s body, and it’s what politicians always do. With this investment, Musk is making the Trump and AOC transition. He’s now a social media politician, at the head of his public.
This suggests a fourth empirical fact — or at least a fact in the making. The merger of Silicon Valley and the swamp is irreversible. The libertarian futurists of Silicon Valley have made a cold peace with the statist Franklin D. Roosevelt fans of the Democratic Party, but the peace will not hold. Silicon Valley sees itself as the successor to Washington, D.C., but Washington cannot rule without Silicon Valley’s tech. As the big welfare state that Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama built gets more and more expensive to run, the more the analog antique of the Washington bureaucracy needs digital economies of scale — and the more Silicon Valley reshapes the state in its digital image.
The populist Right is not wrong about Big Tech’s corruption of constitutional democracy. But its answer, raising the Left’s regulatory hammer in the name of the Right, if not righteousness, will intensify the problem. The populists’ authoritarian impulse replicates social media’s thumbs-up/thumbs-down binaries. Completing the feedback loop with repressive legislation will only worsen the unconstitutional suppression of free speech.
Instead, Musk’s move into the market suggests an alternative solution. For, whatever Obama said, in this world, the arc of the amoral universe bends toward the money. The paradox is that the digital defense of free speech may also mean passing its protection into private hands. Musk, the world’s richest man, is now effectively the first senator for Silicon Valley. He won’t be the last.
