CyberSovereign
He Who Controls the Pipes
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter marks a turning point in our understanding of the role internet platforms play in political orders. Though other media organs, like books, the press, radio, and television, have been understood to be crucial to maintaining power and the prevention of the dissemination of revolutionary ideas, the internet has heretofore only been speculated as the next battleground for such activities. Due to its rootedness in pseudo-libertarian “hacker” culture, initial peer-to-peer openness, and research origins, the popular conception of the free and open internet maintained itself long after it could be reasonably called such. Musk’s takeover, the regime and its media organs’ response, represents irrefutable confirmation that he who controls the pipes controls the future.
Knowledge of the historical context of the early internet ought to dispel idyllic notions of a free and open prairie for the unfettered expression of ideas, given that it owes its development and many of its most fundamental infrastructure staples to DARPA and U.S. Defense Department. Even the crypto revolution, itself made possible by advances in cryptography largely attributable to the funding of various research & development projects, and competitions put on by the NSA, is inextricably tied to U.S. military and strategic interests. To avoid the fallacy of origins, it is important to consider whether these facts have bearing on the current state of the internet, or if indeed the creation has truly escaped from Frankenstein’s Lab. Suffice it to say that military, state security, and intelligence agencies maintain close relationships with all major U.S. tech companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon –participate to varying degrees and with varying levels of complicity, in state-sponsored R&D, national security and executive protection operations, criminal activity monitoring, and information suppression. There’s a reason Amazon built its new headquarters in Crystal City. God only knows how many Big Tech employees are active Federal agents. All of this amounts to a multi-decade success story where the U.S. Defense Department’s initial and ongoing investments in information technology have given the Empire an unmatched advantage in controlling, monitoring, and influencing much of the world’s information superhighways, because they effectively own many of the major arteries.
A private citizen, even an upstanding U.S. citizen with close ties to various U.S. government agencies, such as Musk, being in unilateral control of one of their major traffic hubs is a massive threat. As many have already noted, a democracy such as ours cannot maintain itself without manufacturing consensus of public opinion. One of the ways it does so is through the light touch, exertion of soft power if you will, of social media moderation. Whether this touch is exerted through a “spontaneous” distributed memetic effect of various employees, and activist investors belonging to a certain class all coming to similar conclusions on norms and values, or through more coercive means, the concentration of power in one individual such as Musk, at the helm of a weapon like Twitter, makes such coordination much more difficult. “Is their job not easier given that they can now simply press on a single man?” — you might ask.
The reasons Musk makes this operation of consensus formation more difficult are at least two-fold: 1. Musk is notoriously unpredictable, making his next move, response to countermoves, and willingness to take certain actions hard to estimate; 2. Musk is by all accounts eminently principled. This second point may seem at odds with the first, but they are certainly not mutually exclusive; and knowing the contents of the latter does not automatically give you an understanding of the former, even if it narrows the domain of possibilities somewhat. What his principled nature means is that he does not fold easily to public opinion or even aggressive bureaucratic pressure, tools the regime uses routinely to hem people in in less obvious ways.
Musk’s positioning does certainly give the USG a few pressure points on which to press, such as disrupting operations, financing, and legality of Tesla, and Space X, and Musk’s other ventures. What’s unique about Musk’s standing in a democracy such as ours is that he is held in high esteem by many millions — something other tech tycoons can hardly say for themselves. Indeed, Elon Musk may be the most trusted man in the United States, by a considerable margin. This goodwill and positive public sentiment (despite socialist whinging about “billionaires”) insulates him from certain actions that the regime may wish to take. They can try to harm his companies, put arbitrary obstacles in the way if he does things they dislike, but it would be unconscionable for the regime to take him out of the game completely. This leaves them with a choice: because he must be contended with, he could be the biggest thorn in their side or a helpful ally. By all accounts Musk has no explicit political ambitions (though a Martian colony is certainly some kind of political project), so he is not a direct threat, making a clear attack even more unlikely.
It would be remiss not to mention at the closing of this piece the DHS’s newly anointed Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). I’ll save you all the Orwellian trappings oft repeated, the name speaks for itself. Reminiscent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA and INR, whose mandate was sweeping, had little to no oversight, and included propaganda, subversion, and espionage activities behind enemy lines, this organization has already been criticized by even regime friendly organs as being nondescript, lacking in scope, and poorly articulated. Perhaps these are features, not bugs. Initial experiments in mind control, truth serums, and other advanced interrogation techniques were carried out by the OSS. and its later progeny organizations. Some of the earliest developments in signals intelligence were also made by the organization. The DBG is yet another step taken by the USG to maintain control of narratives, information, and airwaves, because what you see, hear, and know, determines how you think. How you think matters. It matters for the future of the United States, and for the coordination of humanity at large. Elon Musk knows this, and that is why he bought Twitter.
Someone told me recently you can understand Elon’s actions by knowing that he looks at everything through the prism of whether a decision will move us closer or farther away from colonizing Mars. Keep this in mind. A civilization-shaping titan is moving in the belly of the Leviathan. Some think he’s merely trying to catch a fish.