No. of Recommendations: 6
Consider this: there are in fact alien entities that threaten the essence of our civilization. They are undermining education. They do consume our time. They do ruin our relationships. They do separate wives from husbands, children from parents. They polarize our politics. They enter into our very minds, reformatting them, cutting us off from what we once believed, what we once might have remembered. They prepare us for a generic life that is hardly life, separated from the history of what made each culture special and each individual different. They are truly inhuman!
Those entities, of course, are the algorithms of social media. They are the aliens who are penetrating us and changing us. And Musk has done as much (via his ownership and transformation of Twitter) as anyone to ensure that social media enters our lives in the worst possible form. It is he, as much as anyone, who has torn down the walls, opened the borders, and allowed the aliens in.
This, I think, is the source of the actual projection and displacement. At some level, Musk understands all of this; he is, after all, a very gifted man. But the responsibility is overwhelming. It cannot be he who has summoned all the chaos and destruction. It must be the human migrants. Blame them. Blame them every day. Blame them for everything. Never stop. Keep the truth at bay. The unbearable truth. About yourself.
We all do this sort of thing. But it is more consequential when the centibillionaires do it. Their giant self-deceptions affect not just the people around them, but the whole world.
—Professor Timothy Snyder
