Over the past decade, I must have moderated over a hundred panel discussions on EU politics. Most have been offline (many of them in the European Parliament’s VoxBox), but I’ve also run plenty of online panels, particularly since the pandemic pushed us all deeper into cyberspace.
I’ve even moderated several hybrid panels, with a mix of both offline and online panelists. A couple of weeks ago, however, was my first ever metaverse panel.
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This is the second of two posts on the idea of Twitter as a “cybernetic super-intelligence”. You can read part one here.
In my last post, I argued Elon Musk’s erratic behaviour at Twitter makes more sense when seen as being ideologically-driven. However, I also argued that the transhumanist gubbins Musk sometimes comes out with in interviews is a distraction.
This is because Musk’s “ideology” is actually nothing particularly new. As Matthew Claudel and Matthew Shafer argue, Musk’s transhumanism “must be understood as a contemporary development of the ideology of neoliberalism.”
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Like most of you, I’m fascinated by Musk’s recent doings at Twitter. His behaviour seems weird. Is he playing four-dimensional chess? Is he high?
Tweeting a picture of his bedside table with a toy revolver on it, for example, seems odd. Or disseminating far-right disinfo about Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Or Tweeting Pepe memes.
I guess it’s part of Musk’s whacky public persona. Nevertheless, it all seems rather strange behaviour for the CEO of an extremely debt-laden social media platform that relies overwhelmingly on advertising revenue, no? There are surely more satisfying ways to burn through 44 billion dollars?
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