The Warlord Internet

It’s kind of funny how the trajectory of the internet wound up following the plot of the Mad Max movies in an analogy that’s only a little bit silly.

 Those movies are often used as a reference for a lawless post-apocalyptic anarchy, but the story only started off that way. The roving marauders who inhabited the wasteland eventually congregated into gangs and townships and societies where everyone could live closer to each other and nearer the essentials that made life possible. Those townships were, more often than not, ruled by some kind of warlord who dressed in a way he thought looked intimidating but actually came off as ridiculous.

 Each township was subject to the specific laws and whims of its overlords, some of them brutal and some of them senseless but thanks to the increasingly siloed nature of civilisation it was difficult to escape whichever walled city you wound up in. If you did leave, you were on your own.

 As time moved on further, and Mel Gibson started aging strangely into Tom Hardy instead of a twitchy old hairy racist who smells like nicotine, those warlords started forming alliances and their own visions for the world started to converge. It wasn’t a vision in which the common people they ruled over had much of a role except as pale anonymous bloodbags for the ruling class.

Eventually it didn’t even matter whether you lived in Gastown, the Bullet Farm, or the Citadel. The warlords were more or less on the same page about their designs for their world and how you are going to help them achieve it. 

Saturday Night Live genuinely could not have outparodied real life when Mark Zuckerberg, wearing the lamest, most awkward gold chain and ‘fro combo, sat down in Joe Rogan’s studio the other week and started waxing redpilled about bringing masculine energy back to the workforce. 

Zuck’s new image as the Pokemon who evolves into Macklemore is a bizarre and sudden turn away from the image he’s cultivated his entire life: the antisocial robotic hate-nerd who only owns one T-shirt and cuts his own fringe using a Wahl clipper and a ruler.

 It’s packaged with a full rebrand of Meta’s entire slate of social media companies: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Effective almost immediately, all of these products are following Elon Musk’s lead and abandoning most content moderation, eliminating its Trust and Safety division, and switching off any and all safeguards against foreign propaganda and domestic disinformation.

 Zuckerberg, you see, has suddenly decided that he’s a “free speech absolutist” in the same mould of his former adversary Ser Musk, and that the mandate established by Donald Trump’s landslide presidential victory has finally broken his Nutty Professor Jordan Peterson persona free of the plain grey tee prison that Barack Obama locked him in. (Strangely, his reputation as the most strict and censorial of the social media czars survived four entire years of Trump between 2017-2020, but we don’t discuss that).

 Until last week the hate speech filters on Facebook were so strict that you could lose your account if you called a redhead a ranga, but the new rules of Meta officially classify both homosexuality and transgenderism as controvertible “mental illnesses” and permit, arguably encourage, referring to them as such. Racial vilification is also now fully permitted. Strangely, religious vilification is still against the rules. Really makes you wonder (not really) who Zuck is pre-emptively trying to appease with that particular carve-out in his new free-for-all abuse rules. (Hint: It’s not Zoroastrians).

 Zuck’s sudden 180 on social media moderation isn’t based on any market metric. Flooding Facebook, Instagram and Threads with bigots and worse ideologies who can only aspire to mere bigotry is a Three Mile Island advertising partnership disaster to match Elon Musk’s Twitter Chernobyl. Nor is it based on any kind of sudden reawakening of ideological integrity.

 No, this is a pledge of fealty. Elon Musk was the first to prove that the Russian model of oligarchy is possible in the United States, and both legal immunity and immense financial rewards await those who kiss the ring of an authoritarian president.

Performatively, Zuckerberg has terminated all diversity programs at Meta as a show of good faith. And in case you thought Zuck was a unique species of worm, Jeff Bezos, the third of the oligarch trinity, has also taken emergency measures to drastically de-progressify his companies. Bezos has swiftly instructed Amazon to remove all commitments to the rights of, specifically, Black and LGBTQ people from its company policies. (Interestingly, the report I read on this was published in The Washington Post, which is wholly owned by… Jeff Bezos. The article briefly mentions this about halfway in.)

 These guys aren’t trying to hide this stuff. This is a public job application for the new oligarchy. It’s working. The three richest human beings on the planet are, thanks to the New American Feudalism, the Three Chief Warlords of the Internet—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. All three will join Donald Trump on stage during his inauguration. They have followed the rules and they have cleaned the boot, now the age of their reward begins.

The Illusion of Competition

 There is no swifter way, I think, to demonstrate that the engine of capitalism is almost entirely divorced from the concept of providing a quality product or service. Take Tesla, for example—at the beginning of January, the Tesla company was embroiled in numerous scandals involving its vehicles exploding. A Tesla Cybertruck was used as the delivery vehicle in a car-bombing attack in Vegas, and it seems likely that the choice was intentionally symbolic as the company, via Musk, is now deeply culturally associated with right wing politics. A couple of days later, another Tesla, in full self-driving mode, drove its terrified owner onto railroad tracks, unable to tell the difference between that and a regular road.

 The company had just released its quarterly report indicating that it missed its delivery targets again. It was overtaken by BYD as the world’s largest electric car company. Its CEO was livestreaming with the head of Germany’s alt-right and started frequently calling his critics “retarded.”

 This was all literally in the first week of January. Here’s how the stock market reacted:

Zero of Tesla’s market cap growth following the election had anything to do with Tesla’s own merits. One hundred percent of it is due to the market’s certainty that either the Republican party will intervene to give Tesla special advantages over its competitors, or that they will refuse to intervene when Musk breaks the law to obtain these advantages. This is the market reacting positively in anticipation of massive corruption.

 Likewise, Musk’s close alliance with the incoming President has very likely saved Twitter from its death spiral into bankruptcy. The transformation under his tenure as a marginally classier version of Gab was granted a slower-than-you’d-expect collapse only due to a decade of cultural momentum, but advertisers did start pulling out of the platform en masse when they lost patience with having their product positioned directly next to a dozen tweets with Pepe avatars throwing out bizarre Gen Z fusion epithets like “Shoah 2 Electric Boogaloo.”

 Musk threatened those companies with “thermonuclear lawsuits” for pulling their ads because his bizarre interpretation of the constitution suggested to him that refusing to fund his website violated the first amendment. Again, that threat seemed toothless when Musk was an albeit extraordinarily wealthy private citizen, but since the Trump administration’s announcement that Musk will be given a position in government, those advertisers have been returning. They hedged their bets that Elon Musk couldn’t punish them worse than a customer boycott could, but now that Musk is an official oligarch that’s no longer necessarily true. For companies like Disney and Apple, themselves lesser feudal lords, Twitter’s ad spend is now a tax. It was joked at the time that Musk thought it was illegal not to advertise on Twitter, but that is effectively true now.

 Smart warlords like Zuckerberg and Bezos are hastily following Musk’s lead.

 During his most recent presidential campaign Donald Trump, feeling that Facebook’s moderation worked against him in 2020, directly threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life if he was re-elected. Zuck’s immediate grovelling heel-turn ten seconds after he was indeed re-elected is a direct response to this. Trump, no stranger to Mafia tactics, easily baited Zuckerberg into a protection racket.

 But again, it’s not a racket he went into unwillingly. The threats against any public figure who fails to pledge loyalty to Trump may be dire, but as Tesla’s stock growth shows, the rewards for bending the knee are immeasurable. Never has a president so boldly and openly promised to slap away the invisible hand of the market and install the golden elevator of government corruption for those who promise to carry out his orders.

 Capitalism, again, is not beholden to the market and doesn’t follow the orders of the market. It is beholden only to power. The market is an inefficient way of achieving it. Competition is an illusion that exists only so long as it’s being enforced, and the moment that threat is rescinded the corporate leaders will always form monopolies of mutual benefit. Ironically, theirs is the real class solidarity.

 Here's something kind of hilarious now: My first viral hit with this newsletter was in July 2023 and it was called The Year of Five Twitters. It was about the exodus from what was then still officially known as Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s conversion of the platform into a Republican campaign headquarters, and I measured the four brand new primary competitors: Bluesky, Mastodon, Substack, and Threads.

 My incorrect prediction at the time was that Threads was going to “win” as the replacement for Twitter. My folly was I was still buying into the illusion of competition. Musk was still, at the time, loudly berating Zuckerberg, flinging lawsuits at him for copying Twitter, and threatening to actually physically fight him.

 Now, Zuckerberg and Musk will sit together on the stage at Trump’s inauguration as Zuck works to make Threads indistinguishable from Twitter rather than the alternative it once pretended to be.

 The funny thing is that, with Threads, Zuck actually managed something spectacular: He made himself look like a hero. The public image rehabilitation of Mark Zuckerberg in the face of Elon Musk is a miracle rivalled only by the rehabilitation of George W. Bush in the face of Donald Trump. This is why so many people flocked to Threads over any of the alternatives. Think of the opportunity he chose to completely throw away in less than two years. He did it for something more enticing than market share: Political power.

 How about Substack, another of the big alternatives that launched a Twitter clone just as the lifeboats started hitting the water? Well, here’s Substack CEO Chris Best praising Mark Zuckerberg for his spineless capitulation— Sorry, I mean his principled stance.

Substack is, of course, financially beholden to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a very close ally of Elon Musk, and one of the most open supporters of techno-feudalist oligarchy. The platform has recently declared a partnership with its star client, Bari Weiss, another close ally of Musk and Trump. Once again, its Notes feature launched under the illusion that it was a competitor and an alternative to Twitter, and once again, when you scratch the surface you find the most incestuous situation since the McPoyles. If Substack doesn’t collapse under the weight of its unstable business model then it doesn’t feel unlikely that some sort of merger with Zuck or Musk or both might occur over the next couple of years.

 As for Bluesky and Mastodon, I’ll mention them later (it’s good news).

Total Assimilation

 There’s another major current story involving social media that may at first seem irrelevant to the larger story here, and mentioning it is going to make this piece age like a raw fish fillet left on a kitchen bench, but it is important so, who knows, I might need to edit or maybe even remove this whole tangent tomorrow or the next day depending on what happens, so I’ll try to keep it concise: TikTok.

Early next week TikTok, the only major social network that isn’t allied, controlled, or owned by Donald Trump, will be banned by law in the United States. The reason this feels irrelevant is because, first of all, it was Joe Biden’s administration, not Trump, who pulled the trigger, and secondly, it is ostensibly to do with a national security threat owing to its opaque ties to the Chinese government.

 Biden seems to recognise the threat posed by the convergence of every social network on the internet under the control of one ideologically aligned oligarchy, but the more important thing is that it’s an American oligarchy.

 But the Trump administration and the warlord confederacy see TikTok as just another opportunity, because the ban only applies for as long as it retains subsidiary to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. If it were to be wholly sold to an American owner, then its millions of human NPCs and Rizzlers can continue to dab and skibidi toilet to their heart’s content. And why not? Ironically, TikTok is already banned in China anyway.

 Trump, seeing value in being the knight in shining armour who rescued TikTok, has vowed to rescue it by finding an American to take control of the company. And of course any such candidate will be, by necessity, a close ally of Donald Trump. Who is on the top of the list? Well… 

Here’s a funny thing—despite his incessant ranting about communists under the bed and infiltrating America’s virtuous capitalist values, Elon Musk, by virtue of economic necessity, is financially beholden to, and forbidden from speaking against… (drum roll)… The Chinese government.

 A Musk-owned TikTok will obviously just be folded into Twitter and become another peninsula of the ever expanding techbro digital ethnostate. But then, Musk’s acquisition of TikTok is little more than a rumour, and at this point it seems like a much simpler solution might be in the pipeline. The exact same solution that worked for Zuckerberg and Bezos: Simply kiss the royal ring.

 And, oh, look who has decided to attend Trump’s inauguration for mysterious and unknown reasons: TikTok CEO Shou Chew. A foreign warlord arrives to pay his respects and talk some business.

A New Hope

 During the Biden administration the biggest social media scandal was Twitter and Facebook’s alleged capitulation to government censorship demands, a scandal that was successfully manufactured by Elon Musk by proxy of a bunch of integrity-bankrupt hacks. Their supposed expose, collectively titled The Twitter Files, didn’t earn them the Pulitzer they thought they deserved for it, but a fuck ton of their Substack subscribers upgraded to paid, which is just as good.

 The reality is that the scraps of government collusion the Files purported to expose were largely exaggerated, distorted, and inaccurate, and even a Supreme Court with a Republican supermajority, the same court that scrapped Roe v Wade, outlawed homelessness, and officially declared Donald Trump above the law, couldn’t bring themselves in what small particle of good conscience remains to rule on that horseshit.

 Now, given that Trump has installed Elon Musk in an official government role, and Musk has no intention whatsoever in divesting from his ownership of Twitter, we have a situation where one social network is literally part of the government and the rest have pledged their loyalty under direct threat of government retribution. The response to this from the Twitter Files authors is mostly crickets, because intellectual cowardice (and lots of dollar signs) prevents them from speaking. Since anything they could say would be an admission of hypocrisy, silence is the only option.

 I mentioned earlier that I would bring up Bluesky and Mastodon again—I’ve talked about this before and I won’t rehash it all again here, but I believe decentralised social media is our best chance of digging ourselves out of the looming tech-feudal-fascist nightmare being imposed on us. You can read what I’ve already said about it in my previous piece: The Silicon Valley Insurrection: Take Back the Internet.

 Bluesky is now my primary social platform, but it’s still a company run by venture capital and susceptible to all the associated pitfalls including unforeseen Muskification. However, the important thing is that they are aware of this and are actively trying to build a protocol that is immune from any individual or alliance of individuals or even governments from taking over.

 A new support initiative toward this end started up just last week called Free Our Feeds, and you can read all about it here. It’s cosigned by some immensely trustworthy allies in this fight including Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt (whose research I rely on a lot for this column) Cory Doctorrow, the man who coined the term “enshittification” (Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year) and Mark Ruffalo (The Hulk).

If nothing else, you want to be on the same side of history as the Hulk, right?