re: #50 Targetpractice

Best guess: He asked/demanded Wiki either delete his page or at least lock it, got told politely to fuck off, and figures that they can’t talk to the “RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD” like that because he’s got enough money to buy them out if he wanted to.

This is about a lot more than just his personal Wiki page. Musk is just the face of a movement of klept (in the William Gibson Jackpot sense) billionaire oligarchs operating under the information warfare strategy pioneered under Putin and best articulated by Steve Bannon as “flood the zone with bullshit.” It involves undermining the populace’s very ability to understand and accept objective reality, by giving us not one story to believe, but by inundating everyone with so many contradictory conspiracy theories that nobody knows what to believe, so we all stop believing in anything.

Like yes, he’s an absolutely ridiculous narcissistic dipshit with no self control, and that might actually be all we need to understand his initial reason for deciding to purchase twitter. But as to why he had his play backed by the Saudi royal family and other billionaire oligarchs, we need to comprehend the leverage opportunity it provided over international public discourse. We need to understand the opportunity that making Twitter go private presented, to make certain inconvenient events like the Arab Spring never happen again. If we understand that, then it becomes obvious that the “feud” with Jimmy Wales over Wikipedia is just another gambit in that same campaign. A way to co-opt a crucial, perhaps the only truly effective epistemological online repository left to humanity. If they can wrest control of that, then they can effectively destroy the very idea of objective reality.

And that is the true Frontier of Credibility, the ability to reset entire populations’ concept of what is real and what isn’t. By first get us to believe in nothing, thereby allowing them to do whatever they want, then by having us accede to the reality they first forced upon us and then subsequently retconned.