It looks like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg won’t be having their martial arts duel in a Roman colosseum after all. This is disappointing, not just because the people have a right to see their masters throttling each other as they roll in the dirt. It would have been the most significant American duel since 1859, when the retired California Justice David S. Terry shot and killed Sen. David C. Broderick.
Musk vs. Zuckerberg would not be a matter of life and death, but, as Terry vs. Broderick crystallized around slavery and personal insult, the rivalry of the tech titans is about more than the egos of two midlife billionaires. It symbolizes the digital transition of recent decades, an alteration over which Musk of X (formerly known as Twitter) and Tesla and Zuckerberg of Meta (ex-Facebook) and Instagram reign like Roman emperors. It also symbolizes the political combat between competing visions of the internet and democracy.
NIKKI HALEY CLAIMED DEBATE SPOTLIGHT AMONG CROWD OF 'SCREAMING MEN'
Dueling was an aristocratic European ritual. Though the upper echelons of early American society aspired to Old World dignity, or at least vanity (see: Burr, Aaron), Americans developed their honor codes for personal combat. In the comedy of wrestling, the ideals of the old Athens hit the mat in the new Rome. The scripts and characters of WWE and co. have displaced baseball in the world’s image of American sport and leached into politics. Donald Trump, who guested as a WWE ringmaster, plays “the heel,” the villain we love to hate. Joe Biden, campaigning in a 2020 tag team with Kamala Harris, suggested that he and Trump should settle their differences “behind the gym.”
The Musk-Zuckerberg rivalry is a gossip column come to life — the proceeds of their fight were to go to charity. The proceedings and our fascination with them reflect the power of the quasi-aristocracy in Silicon Valley. The internet, like the railroads, the oil and automobile booms, and Hollywood before it, has raised a new upper class to power in America.
The internet has also changed our “information regime.” As previously, this change is altering the nature of politics. The Reformation, which created the nation-state as we know it, had the printing press. The 18th century, which gave us democracy as we know it, had the coffeehouse broadsheet. The 19th and 20th centuries mass-produced voters and daily papers. The 21st century has Wi-Fi, broadband, and a paradoxical relationship to information and the regime, which, by controlling it, can shape social perceptions and political information.
Digital information resembles a mighty river, but a handful of private companies control how the flow of knowledge is dammed, distributed, stored, priced, and cleaned for public consumption. Between them, X and Meta have absorbed much of what used to be called political debate. No one watches Senate debates because there is little debating in the Senate. Hardly anyone watches committee deliberations on C-SPAN, but millions watch the highlights on social media.
Since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, all electoral politics has been digital first. It is bad that tech monopolies distort the digital market. It is worse that they have collaborated with the Democratic Party and its media publicists. Worst of all, as Musk let us know by opening the “Twitter Files,” social media worked with federal agencies to manipulate and suppress information about the origins of COVID-19, the business activities of Hunter Biden, and the opinions of obscure users who dared to mock Democratic candidates. In the name of stopping “disinformation,” social media companies systematically misinformed the voters.
Silicon Valley loves a “disrupter” and boasts of moving fast and breaking stuff. It has disrupted and broken politics as we knew it, and all the tech giants’ persons are struggling to piece it together again. The Musk-Zuckerberg rivalry reflects the bifurcating of America’s information regime and suggests how this split outcome will affect its political regime.
Musk, like most immigrants, actually believes in free speech. His X is the First Amendment on a phone. The racist and reprehensible may range unfiltered, but so can the irreverent and the original. Like Musk’s electric vehicles and rocket shots, this high-risk venture seems to come from an earlier age when America’s best dueled with the elements themselves.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Musk is a digital Prometheus. Zuckerberg collects busts of Augustus, who managed Rome’s metamorphosis from republic to empire. Musk aspires to unleash the American id, electrify our cars, and live on another planet. The opaque procedures of Zuckerberg’s Meta empire are the surveilling superego of technocratic management.
Out in the desert, Jeff Bezos’s megaservers hum efficiently as they back up the data of the federal agencies. In the chambers of the republic, the elected officials hum and haw inefficiently about tech monopolies and disinformation and its discontents but never regulate anything. The faceoff between Silicon Valley’s founding libertarian principles (now in the red corner) and (in the blue corner) the quasi-governmental referee it has become will determine whether free democratic discourse is possible in the America of the future. It might also show whether the public can handle their freedom. For that to happen, all media, social or antisocial, must hold the ring for a free public sphere.