From a technocracy to a plutocracy
Internet platforms governance moves at breakneck speed. I started writing this post when Elon Musk's offer to buy Twitter became known; when I was finished, it was a done deal. Twitter will then cease to be a public company. What should we expect? Like every time a business changes hands, the new owners arrive full of ideas, expectations, dreams, and goals. I do not plan on becoming Elon's interpreter. (Although I do foresee a lucrative niche there at least for a while.) But I would like to present just one hypothesis here: the changes we are about to see in the coming months will probably be driven by different forms of corporate governance. Some of us wanted the Internet to go back to the way it was in the 1990s (the beautiful early days of chaos and distributed craftsmanship), but we will likely see it regress a hundred years further: from the technocratic realm of corporations with executives trying to capture shareholder value, we are about to see what a one-man rule with something resembling sovereignty can do (if he is not too concerned about money, by the way, a big if).
Let me give just one example. Recently, the Argentine journalist Gustavo Noriega wondered if Twitter's latest corporate trend of reacting to misinformation is about to end now that Elon is in charge. It is an interesting thought worth exploring. Supposedly, Twitter is fighting climate misinformation because it does not believe in it and sees it as harmful to the planet, our lives, the future, etc. But it does not work like that. Twitter does not believe in anything. Corporations make decisions based on different goals and agendas. They start tracking us efficiently to show off their supposedly effective advertising practices. They change the flavor of their drink because they think we will like it better and therefore buy more. They put big signs in front of their windows to entice us with attractive offers. Capitalist corporate governance theory suggests that corporations do things for one primary purpose: to make money. It makes sense, then, to look at the decisions of recent years regarding disinformation as being driven by money.
It is like this: corporations see disinformation as a form of expression that (a) is potentially bad or (b) is perceived as potentially bad (for elections, public health, climate, etc.). A lot of people think that. A lot of powerful people think that. Therefore, companies are under a lot of pressure to do something. So they begin to develop artificial intelligence tools to identify problematic content, strive to indirectly identify harmful speech through users' actions, begin to suspend offenders' accounts, decrease the volume and potential reach of content, etc. They do it because they are pressured to do so by people who have some degree of power to pressure them effectively. Regulators, of course, are part of the picture —- with their actual regulation and with the threat of probably more effective regulation. But collective outrage at a company can also be seen as a threat, with the potential to cause damage where it hurts most: in the stock market. Public company officers love money, but they also have a fiduciary duty to protect the money of their shareholders. So they start to do something hoping, vainly, in my opinion, that the anger they face will fade and their stock value will stop falling, remain stable, or continue to rise higher and higher.
Enter the plutocrat. Unlike the executives of a corporation, who are very, very rich but ultimately accountable to their shareholders (to some extent…), the sole proprietor of a company has no duty to think about money and can afford to consider other factors. They may have an interest in a topic they want to work on (for example—-like in a Hollywood movie—-they may really want to find a cure for a horrible disease...), so a few losing semesters do not significantly affect their decision-making if their pockets are deep enough. Or they may have a public interest view that is not based on projected earnings. That is the claim made by Elon's fans and the man himself in his recent TED talk.
I am skeptical, but what we are about to see is bound to be interesting. It is, in a way, a strange experiment that can either fail miserably or not make a significant difference in terms of how we talk to each other. (I cannot imagine what <strong>success</strong> would be like in this media). Hoping seems absurd: why trust this particular kind of plutocrat to improve the way we talk to each other when the fact is that we talk to each other horribly for a whole different set of reasons that have nothing to do with who owns what on the Internet? Following our knowledge and constitutional intuitions, I would bet on a different outcome: democratic governance and a horizontal conversation between equals seem much more promising to solve the challenge of talking to each other. But, granted: that is a whole different story.
