whatever Matt Taibbi may or may not tell himself, “The Twitter Files” is explicitly intended as right-wing political project. Any potentially significant information it includes doesn’t really matter—not only because the report is singularly meant to bolster one narrative—but also because any meaningfully ameliorative changes to the issues theoretically raised, like publicly and transparently managing Twitter, are not going to happen.
So it is difficult not to see this as particularly pathetic for Taibbi, if the latest in a years-long downward slide. Of course, it’s not just him (though for more, Yasha Levine’s write-up of Taibbi’s cowardice and willingness to jettison his past collaborators, like Mark Ames—presciently written in 2020—reads as one of the best explanations of what led him here).
The attendant conversation around “free speech,” years old now, and amplified by Musk’s recent purchase, has just become insufferable. Nevermind that it’s got a terribly bad-faith origin point—the idea that this reactionary society in any serious way “censors” conservative speech—it’s not even truthful in its basic pretensions. Musk and his pals don’t want free speech: just look at the left-wing accounts he’s canceled from Twitter. Many of his collaborators are openly anti-democratic, and Musk’s own hostility to workers is well documented. Given the opportunity, these people will censor and cancel as much as they are allowed.
No comments:
Post a Comment