Freedom is slavery: Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Sovereign Individual

Welcome to Content-ed. Each week I write here about what's happening as we scale our content business, tips and tricks for building a digital audience, and things that are interesting and important in digital communications.

Hi team,

By now you may have read a thousand Elon Musk versus Twitter takes too many. Or you might not be the kind of person who obsessively follows such things.?Either way you probably don’t need another hot take from me. Tough luck. Here it is. Strap in tight.

I just finished a super fun and interesting podcast series from the BBC, The Coming Storm:

In it, BBC reporter Gabriel Gatehouse goes down the QAnon conspiracy rabbit hole. As a quick reminder, QAnon adherents believe that an insider with high level (Q-level) security clearance within the US government posts clues to an unmoderated internet chat board, and that these posts reveal that the world is run by an evil cabal of paedophilic satan worshippers led by Hillary Clinton, from the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant. Which doesn't have a basement. Or something.

Episode by episode he explores how this bizarrest of conspiracy theories became such a social force that its followers stormed the US Capitol in order to overturn the government. Just last year.

It is proof, if any more were needed, that in the end, how we behave, what we decide, the meaning we ascribe to our lives depends on what we believe to be true, and people can be convinced and can convince themselves of anything. Look at Germany 1939, Russia 2022.

It is, indeed, our ability to tell stories that compels us to collaborate in particular ways, that separates Homo Sapiens from the Neanderthal. It is the stories that we tell each other that underlie the institutions of human existence, from the church to the limited liability company. And, as Aristotle said:

When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence

He who directs the narrative owns the mind. George Orwell described this most eloquently in that most prescient of novels, 1984:

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

The Sovereign Individual

Woven into The Coming Storm's explorations of the darker corners of the internet are encounters with a book called The Sovereign Individual, published way back in the late '90s at the dawn of the internet age. A book of prognostications by a former editor of The Times of London and an investment advisor co-author, it describes "the new revolution of power which is liberating individuals at the expense of the nation state." The sovereign individual, argues the book, will make their fortune in the meritocratic confines of cyberspace, be beyond reach of the violence of the nation state, and will dominate the economic landscape of the world.

A lot that is in the book has not come to pass as predicted. But it is influential in the podcast series because it characterises clearly that the world is at the dawn of a new period of history:

Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industial societies. Now, looking over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

In the information age, argues the book, the individual will gain the upper hand over the nation state in the perennial battle between the two.

And if anyone is a sovereign individual, it is Elon Musk. His net wealth comes somewhere between Slovenia and Slovakia and above two thirds of countries on this list:

List of countries by total wealth

From Wikipedia

The number column is in US$billion and is the total sum of the value of a country's?assets?minus its?liabilities.

If you follow Elon Musk on Twitter, as I do, he is mostly a mischievous troll. He admits as much in this fascinating interview at TED a couple of weeks ago.

Twitter is a platform awash with every kind of cyber garbage from misinformation, racism and misogyny to verbal violence, cybercrime bots and child porn. It hasn't evolved its business model for a decade. When asked why anyone, especially someone who already has a pretty busy schedule, would want to own it, Musk talks about free speech and being obsessive about the truth. Weird.

The New Yorker puts it thus: His acquisition quest appears to be ... preserving Twitter’s capacity for chaos as a tool for himself and others to continue influencing their vast audiences without interference.

Very sovereign.

Enter... Peter Thiel

Coincidentally, the author of the Preface to the 2020 edition of The Sovereign Individual is Peter Thiel, co-founder with Musk of Paypal, another unquestionably sovereign individual, who recently said:

"If it's a choice between misinformation and the Ministry of Truth, I think we would be somewhat more of a healthy society if we had somewhat more scepticism, somewhat more misinformation, somewhat more crazy conspiracy theories, all thatstuff would be such a healthy corrective to all the centralised, totalitarian one world state. I'll take all the QAnon and pizzagate conspiracy theories everyday over the Ministry of Truth."

Just sayin'.

Enough from me for now. If you like my irregular rants, muses and. insights, please do share me with your networks, it really helps.

Until next time

Mike