It turns out, as far as anybody can tell in this bizarro-world Age of Attention, that the new CEO of Twitter is just like any other richest-man-in-the-world: fully human, and unable to find satisfaction.
Opening the internal files of the previous owners to a journalist, and then banning that journalist after he declined a fundamentally compromising request that would have made the journalist part of the story he is reporting, is like Captain Ahab inviting Melville for a cruise on the Pequod.
Maybe that's a little grandiose. Ahab represented, if nothing else, total clarity of intent. But to put things in perspective: a person accumulates wealth enough to feed and shelter every hungry and destitute person in the world. And doesn't. And nobody ever so much as hints at the suggestion of a possibility. Which says more about culture than about oligarchs.
Taibbi has been a journalist, and let the chips fall wherever, which also means, never become part of the story you're reporting. That's high praise (well-deserved I think), and a near-impossibility in this case, even without an embarrassed media establishment hellbent on making him the villain of the story, in hopes of a spectacle that could displace the real story. Which also says something about culture. And by that I mean our real and present evolution, not some polarized ideology. Anyway Taibbi didn't pull their pants down, the state-sponsored media orgy started long before the "Twitter Files." It may not be over.
Musk is not the worst or the first to try to leave a mark on the landscape, although in this case the landscape includes the vast digital wilderness of technological potential. Only a generation ago such egos dotted the skylines of the major cities with tall towers reminiscent of a Biblical lesson they disdained, sometimes as a kind of make-over after a life of naked parasitism. Now it's high-tech electrics and swarms of future space-junk. But we're not getting on any Space-Arc and starting over somewhere else. We're gonna have to clean this place up ourselves.
And obsolescence hasn't gone away. It's more than kept pace, accelerating now to the point where your computer is "updated" almost every day, and most of it doesn't even belong to you until it won't run the new stuff. Once you could purchase a PC. Now you subscribe to it, and it's a public space, you might be mugged on your desktop. Your digital life is somebody else's private property. It's in the terms-of-service (TOS). If you don't believe me, wait until your "healthcare provider" prescribes a medical device, like a CPAP machine, and you try to set up the phone app that lets you turn it on. But you probably have a smart lightbulb or something that has already staked a claim. Good luck!
Maybe none of this is about Musk anyway. Any of us (each of us, if history is any guide) would behave the same way, in the same scenario. Were it not so, given that there are now about a million times as many of "us" as of "them," why are the oligarchs allowed to continue their geocidal rampage? Here's a sad thought: it's because our word for exponentially accumulating wealth and power is "Freedom."
Put simply, most of us hope to become obscenely wealthy somehow. So we don't want to mess with our chances. Meanwhile we'll settle for a vicarious, curated "experience." The crucial difference lies in consequences: above a certain "net worth," there are none. No, that isn't quite it. There are always consequences. Here's the thing: glom a big enough pile, and all consequences are (in this delusion) redirected away from you. Hence the term, "drop-dead money."
That's not enough, though: being the richest apparently doesn't get you loved and admired. Envied, despised, maybe. So the antics of trillionaires (and we'll see one soon, maybe next week) will continue to reflect the howling emptiness of their souls, as they try and try to connect, get related, to fit in, to belong, to become Earthlings again. Even as they build their towers higher and higher, until we must look to them like so many ants down here.
I get a lot of emails with a disclaimer at the bottom naming groups of indigenous people, in their own language, acknowledging a tragic encounter between children of the Earth and people who want to acquire it all, and build a wall around it. While I believe it is a generous sentiment, since we're not likely to see anybody returned to lands from which they were (and continue to be) violently displaced, I want to suggest an update. My suggested update in no way changes the cultural rules by which we all participate in the destruction of the world, but it might be a start at orienting ourselves more precisely with regard to a larger reality. If you are reading this on a computer, it is probably appropriate for you, too:
"I acknowledge that the daily destruction of thousands of families and plunder of their homelands provides the energy and resources that now sustain my life."
