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Maye Musk tweet about how POTUS is trying to stop her son
Growing into adulthood has been an education around a lot of things, not least of which is the things that moneyed can do that the rest of us can't. On Mastodon I saw a screenshot of a Maye Musk tweet:
I am the mother of @elonmusk His goal is to make this world a better place. @POTUS wants to stop him. Have you any idea how furious I am? ...
I'm not particularly clever, but even I recognize this for what it is: a deniable call to action, to violence, a more subtle form of what Henry II gave when he gave his famous "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?" speech. King Henry had knights, legal authority, and a state monopoly on violence (inasmuch as the peasants didn't realize that this, like every other legal concept was just an implicitly agreed-upon convention, that their so-called betters were flesh and blood and squishy) but Musk has something potentially even more powerful: a large audience, an army of maladjusted simps loyal to her son, many of whom have knives, or guns, and many of which have, perhaps best to say, a questionable grip on reality.
Not that they'd even get the chance, given how well the Secret Service does their job. But still.
What's been wild about the social media age has been seeing stratification between classes laid bare. If I tweeted "someone oughtta do something about..." I'd get a file opened by the FBI and RCMP, at the very least. All these moneyed and money-adjacent tweeps? Well, so long as they're not targetting the new owner of the site, they're not going to have their account suspended.
And what's all this over, anyway? The FCC ruling to deny $900M in subsidies for rural Starlink broadband. That's it! Just a denial for free government money, the kind that rich call subsidies when applied to themselves, and handouts should we poors get the same.
It's always been the case that the haves and the have-nots had different rules, different laws. It's just that, for a brief minute, the online felt like a refuge from all that. It has been exhausting seeing the bright future reflected by the internet (and specifically the web) become just another vehicle of capital, to see what we once called a digital frontier turned into nothing more than a feedstall. And yet, here we are, watching digitally motivated feuds and incitements. The sort of thing that's replaced local news. Implicitly, we're told it's more worthwhile.
It's exhausting, though I'm not naive enough to think there was ever an era where the internet was perfect. Awful things have existed in its dark corners forever. But somewhere around the confluence of the smartphone and the platform, things got decidedly worse. The places we made for ourselves got depopulated, then delisted. We all got funnelled into apps and had metrics applied against our eyes. The hands-off attitude that made the early net so full of possibility has since warped it. We exist in a place of fewer and fewer possibilities. On one of the remaining sites of mass possibility (though, now with less), the mother of its owner rails against the most powerful man in the world. Oh, but there's subtext. Easily deniable, but to millions of his fans worldwide, who certainly follow the mother who birthed their hero, it's crystal clear what she'd like someone to do.
Elon Musk's Mom Rushes to His Defense: She's 'Furious' With Biden
The FCC, for their part, was clear: Musk was denied the funds because,
The FCC followed a careful legal, technical and policy review to determine that this applicant had failed to meet its burden.
It sounds like if Musk wants public funds, his company needs to actually do the necessary work. Instead of buying a social media company and running it into the ground, tweeting erratically, he could focus on the work of doing work instead. But he can never, will never log off. He's cursed with a desire to post while at the same time lacking any ability to do it well. We're all worse off for it. We unlock our phone. A tweet comes across our feed. We grimace. _Christ, what did those assholes say this time._
