After Elon completed his acquisition of Twitter, I mostly checked out of the platform for a while. I was too disgusted by Musk's arrogance and childish behavior. I couldn't see wanting to use my time to sustain any project associated with him, however infinitesimal my contribution might be. I was probably away from the platform, then, for a good year at least. And my mental health probably improved as a result.
But then, like so many commentators and activists before me, I came crawling shamefacedly back. I simply found that there was no replacement for it. The various Twitter clones that had been attempted simply did not have the network effects in place to make them plausible competitors. And so, if I wanted to continue to promote my work to at least some of the relevant audience, at least some of the time, I had to swallow my pride and use Twitter (*cough* "X").
I came back to find a strangely altered world. There were still a few of the same big players in my small Twitter sub-universe (that is, immigration Twitter). And, just like I remembered, I would still occasionally manage to get a post recognized if one of these larger accounts graciously took it up. But apart from these rare dopamine rushes, the rest of my time on the platform was now spent speaking into the void. My most impassioned and thoughtful takes—ones I was certain would get noticed somewhere—sailed into oblivion. They vanished without a ripple in a deep lake of nothingness.
I would, of course, keep checking anyway. I couldn't believe that simply no one was seeing or responding to the things I had to say. I had just pointed out how Biden's latest policy, for instance, had dismantled asylum as we knew it and would almost certainly result in the forced return of countless people to danger. Or, I had just observed how Trump was pledging to do something even more monstrous, if he returned to office. Someone out there had to care. Someone had to be paying attention. There could not be this much feeling concentrated into 280 characters without it catching some responsive vibration out in the ether.
And so, as I say, I'd keep checking. And sometimes, days later, there would be a flicker of hope. A notification would appear. Someone had liked it! I'd scroll over to the reactions page to see what had happened. And lo, invariably, the "like" would have come from what was obviously an AI-generated spam account run by some bot or hive-mind, marketing crypto scams in Belarus, say, or otherwise trying to lure me into divulging my personal financial information. Indeed, I've noticed that the vast majority of the "new followers" I've received, since Musk's takeover, have been bots of this kind.
It occurred to me that this was the perfect symbol of our dystopian time. A cry from the heart—begging anyone to listen and pay attention to the story of asylum-seekers being expelled to their doom—is "liked" by an account with an obvious fake profile photo and a bio line that reads "Sexy lady looking to make sex with man," followed by smooching symbols. This is the most fitting synecdoche for the entire age of Musk that I can imagine—activists howling into the dead internet, railing about "human rights," and "justice," and being met with the equivalent of a poop emoji in reply.
It strikes me that this is the form that authoritarianism would logically take in our time: not so much trying to silence the activists—but simply to make them irrelevant. In the old days, of course, the authoritarians tried to suppress critical speech. The Chinese government still bans words like "human rights" from the internet, as far as their jurisdiction can reach. But doing so—to the dismay of dictators throughout modern history—always only manages to endow these concepts with more power. A banned phrase suddenly becomes more potent. Why are the dictators trying to ban it, after all, if they do not fear it?
Putin, by contrast, has experimented with a more postmodern approach to the problem. Although his regime has also certainly done its share of the old-fashioned type of repression—jailing people and subjected them to horrific penalties for daring to protest his war in Ukraine, for instance—Putin has also at times encouraged a pseudo-opposition to speak its mind. Better to make the opposition look ridiculous than to turn them into martyrs. Better to allow them to speak within regime-defined limits—and in the appropriate regime-defined roles—and thereby cast them as out-of-touch liberal elites than to place them behind bars.
Peter Pomerantsev, in an outstanding book about Putin's methodology, recalls a time he spent working for a lefty magazine called Snob. In retrospect, he notes, he was never sure if the regime hated but merely tolerated this publication—which was openly critical of the government—or whether they secretly welcomed it; maybe even sponsored it. After all, having liberal intellectuals act the part of "snobs" played directly to the government's benefit. It served the narrative that they wanted to advance anyway—namely, that the only people who dislike the regime are smug rootless cosmopolitans in the big cities.
Why make heroes of such intellectuals by caging them, when you can dress them in motley and make them caper for your amusement?
I recall a recent Noah Smith column on his blog in which he suggested—merely as a disturbing hypothesis—that liberalism might be doomed in our time precisely because of this dynamic. It is true, he observed, that liberalism ultimately triumphed over authoritarianism in the twentieth century; but that may have been due to the fact that information was costly in that era to acquire. Under conditions when information is cheap, by contrast, liberalism may be less well-positioned to survive.
The rest of the column was pay-walled, so I was never able to see exactly what the argument might be for why costly information benefits liberalism. But it seems to me that it might well relate to this concept of postmodern dictatorship that I've discussed before. The postmodern authoritarian—of whom Putin and especially his éminence grise, Vladislav Surkov (at least in Pomerantsev's telling) are the prime examples—does not so much try to suppress criticism as to encourage an over-supply of it—thereby driving its value to effectively nil.
After all, as we've seen already, suppressing criticism only increases its value. It then becomes harder to obtain. It has to be circulated in samizdat form, and people will go to great lengths and put themselves at extreme risk just to get their hands on it. But if the criticism is allowed to proliferate, by contrast—it suddenly loses its power. The dictators can simply allow the pamphlets and loose-leaf fliers to blow away in the wind, while they mock their authors as cranks and out-of-touch elites.
They have discovered if they simply laugh at the opposition and continue doing what they were already doing, nothing happens. The criticism falls still-born from the press.
That is why Jean Baudrillard's observation, in his Simulacra and Simulation, still haunts me in this regard. The "strategy" of today's systems of social control, he writes, is not so much to limit speech as to "maximize" it. The system is one "whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction [...] of speech." (Glaser trans.; emphasis added). This must be in part what Noah Smith meant by talking about liberalism's failure in an age when information—critical human rights reporting, e.g.—is cheap and plentiful. There is a glut of it on the market; the authoritarians find it all the easier to brush it off.
This is surely the form that the Musk/Vance/Thiel/Trump/MAGA dictatorship would take, if it ever comes to power. To be sure, I suspect they would also be more than willing to engage in their share of old-fashioned repression. But they have studied the masters of postmodern dictatorship too. They haven't spent the last decade trying to advance Putin's talking points for nothing. Learn from the best, as they say. And so, I suspect they would also encourage the spectacle of "liberal blue-hairs" crying themselves hoarse on the internet, protesting this or that latest policy outrage, while they retort that nothing warms the cockles of their hearts more than to see liberal tears.
"Give us more, not less, of this type of speech!" they would declare to their liberal critics. After all, is not the whole point of right-wing "trolling" precisely to elicit liberal criticism, rather than to suppress it? Is not the consciously-articulated goal to prod liberals into speech—to "make their heads explode" with the latest outrage—rather than to frighten them into silence? The right-wing strategy of our time is plainly not to try to shut liberals up; but rather to taunt them into speech whereby they will make themselves appear ridiculous. It is to coax them into speaking into the echoing void—so that it can serve up a metaphorical poop emoji in reply.
This, it seems to me, is the true meaning of those impassioned Tweets of mine that fall unheard into the abyss. It already seems to me that they somehow lack a power that they might have had a decade or so ago. There was once a time when to say "this policy violates international law! It betrays the UN Refugee Convention!" might have struck people as a potent thought. Government officials might have feared it—they might even have wished to suppress knowledge of it. It might, in short, have been a dangerous thought, and therefore a more powerful one.
But now, it has been rendered cheap. The chronic oversupply that marks the ideal conditions of postmodern dictatorship has lowered its price on the market. Any liberals are "free," under Musk's Twitter regime, to scream all they want into the void—for whatever it gets them; and indeed, the more who scream, the less anyone will hear them. When everyone is screaming, no one is listening. With every mouth on the internet stretched wide in a silent Francis Bacon scream, there will be no one to hear it. In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream.
And surely, as Musk now manages his digital empire, so shall he manage his coming MAGA autocracy. As Bertolt Brecht once wrote—when the crimes of authoritarians mount, eventually a "silence spreads." But this one will not be a silence of ideological submission. It will be the kind of silence that comes from white noise. We may still be permitted to protest and criticize the government all we want; but it will become part of the background Musak of the new regime; so omnipresent that people will simply learn to ignore it.
And it may even serve to enhance the autocrats' value, in the eyes of their followers. "Haha, look at all of these crying elites! All of these snobs," they will say—"The regime must be doing something right, to get them all riled up like this. Hear, hear! A toast to liberal tears!"
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