Elon vs. the Therapeutic State
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has had some interesting effects, but we can class all these interesting effects under one heading—that he has vindicated all the most important right-wing thinkers in the past 100 years. In this article I’ll focus on just one of these thinkers: Paul Gottfried and his notion of the Therapeutic State.
When Elon announced his bid, it was met with the standard commentary across the political spectrum that he is the billionaire equivalent of a pop starlet trying to stay relevant and this is his latest troll. As this analysis goes, the persona he has cultivated for himself requires that he do something kooky and “random” just to keep himself in the news cycle lest he fall out and go back to just having billions of dollars. There’s some truth to this, but when Twitter actually accepted his bid, this analysis exploded into a million fragments littered across the political spectrum. For the Elizabeth Warrens it was just another example of billionaires doing corporationy things and they have money and stuff, which is intolerable. For the Rand Pauls it was a welcome example of the market imposing itself on left-wing censorship. For the Nazbols it was a clear signal that all was forgiven and it was time to get back on to enemy territory and flood Jeff Bezos’s timeline with N-stacks.
But of course, the most revealing reactions were on the left. In a frenzy that went beyond hysterical and verged on the allergic, liberal reactions ranged from disagreeing with their last week selves over whether private companies should write their own TOS, to lofty and virtuous calls to move to Facebook where no billionaire has any influence, to explaining the grave dangers of social media companies influencing elections. At times, “liberal hypocrisy” porn verges on the masochistic, but it really was delicious to watch the NPC visibly distressed by cognitive dissonance.
One reaction, however, was far more serious.
Looking on with dismay, the state security apparatus watched as Twitter’s algorithmic bias evaporated overnight, the current mod team anticipating its replacement that would see just how the electoral fraud sausage was being made, and bring it to light. The result? Shadowbans were lifted, right-wing personalities gained hundreds of thousands of followers overnight, and certain dissident publishing companies were able to re-establish a presence on Twitter. In response to all this, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” that would be used to police speech if so-called “private” companies would or could not do so on the security state’s behalf.
This is just the latest in a long series of expansions of government remit in the wake of COVID. Constitutional roadblocks proved useless against this because the constitution is a piece of paper, but still, legal formalities had to be overcome, and they were overcome by expanding the definition of “harm”.