It was a breaking news alert to lift the spirits and make the heart sing. A tech billionaire arrested as he stepped off his private jet and detained by the French authorities. Happy days!
Because while the UK police have been charging individuals who incited violence online during this summer’s riots, the man who helped to fuel its flames – Elon Musk – has simply tweeted his way through it.
It turned out – because you can’t have it all – that the man arrested and subsequently charged in France this week was not Elon. It was his bro-in-arms, Pavel Durov, an Elon-alike who founded the encrypted messaging app Telegram, though for the casual observer it can be hard to tell where Durov ends and Musk begins.
Just as the flattening effect of algorithms means that coffee shops in Brooklyn and Bristol look the same these days, so it is with the bros. From Wim Hof ice baths to a diet of grass-fed beef, social media algorithms have created a tech-masculine ideal and tech-masculine lifestyle fuelled by the kind of basic strongmen they both seem to admire, chief among them Vladimir Putin.
Musk has form for chatting with Putin on the phone and while Durov claims to have been driven into exile by the Russian government, it’s hard to square that with the stream of supportive statements from Russian ministers last week demanding his “rescue”.
Both labour under the apparent eugenicist belief that a man of superior intelligence has a duty to spread his seed as widely as possible – it was revealed earlier this year that Durov has fathered 100 children by sperm donation while Musk uses more traditional methods such as impregnating his employees. Crucially, although Musk was born in South Africa and Durov in St Petersburg, the language they speak is the same: specious, self-serving lies dressed up as ideology.
Last week saw perhaps the first major showdown between the pseudo cryptolibertarianism they both espouse and that old-fashioned, resolutely analogue concept known as the nation state. For anyone who has spent any time pondering the intergalactic levels of entitlement among the tech broligarchy and the – until now – total impunity they’ve faced, the arrest and subsequent charging of Durov was a singular moment.
It’s the first time a tech CEO has found himself in the uncomfortable position of actually being forced to take responsibility for his actions. While this seemed, on the surface, like a moment in which there might finally be some sort of day of reckoning for the tech edgelords, that has yet to be seen.
Durov’s arrest was followed, days later, by another geopolitical first: on Friday, a Brazilian judge ordered the country’s telecoms agency to block access to X across the entire country because Musk had failed to comply with a court order.
It’s the first time a western country has imposed such a ban and the country of 200 million people is X’s fourth biggest market. And although Musk’s efforts to portray this as the work of an “unelected pseudo-judge” seeking to destroy free speech for “political purposes”, it was actually down to another old-fashioned concept Musk is ill-acquainted with: rule of law.
It’ll be months and years before the downstream consequences of Durov’s arrest and Musk’s defiance of the Brazilian authorities are known – whether this is a moment in which the nation state reasserts itself over the lawless wastelands of the internet, the nowhereville beyond the reach of any law influentially described by the poet John Perry Barlow 28 years ago in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
Or whether it’s the opposite. Because just as history is told by the winners, here’s the thing about owning your own global speech platform: you get to control whose speech is heard. And in Musk’s case, that means him. He gets to tell the story. He controls the narrative. And he has already broadcast his version of Durov’s arrest and the court proceedings in Brazil to his 196 million followers. He is the ultimate arbiter of “truth”.
Except it’s not truth, it’s snake oil. Although Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”, a gussied-up term that supposes some deeper philosophical thinking behind his actions, this isn’t ideology, it’s grift.
Musk believes in free speech in the same way that he believes in free Teslas. Free for him, very expensive for everyone else. In between a stream of tweets on how “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy” and “Censorship is a certainty if Dems win” was another one in which he gloated about a ruling in his libel case against Media Matters for America.
Because this is a free speech absolutist who is suing an NGO who dared to criticise him. The case against has been called a classic Slapp, or strategic lawsuit against public participation, issued with the intention of intimidating and silencing, as a judge in California ruled earlier with regard to another suit he brought against another NGO. “This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” he said.
Musk isn’t a truth teller, he’s a truth twister. Like Donald Trump, he does the direct opposite of what he actually says. He’s a free speech absolutist who has complied with 83% of requests from authoritarian governments to remove content from X, often as apparent leverage to advance his business interests.
This isn’t a civilisational battle for the future of “free speech”. And Durov isn’t a hero. The charges against him include the decidedly unfuturistic crime of money laundering and his less than heroic failure to suppress the spread of sexual images of children.
It’s actually a civilisational battle for the truth. What we need to face up to is that this is a battle that Musk is winning. His truth is simply louder, faster, disseminating further. His algorithms are spreading his metaphorical seed, spawning an entire generation of mini-Musks and would-be Musks who dream of electric Cybertrucks.
Increasingly, 2024 is starting to feel like a tear in reality. This is Musk’s world and we’re living in it now.
• Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer
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