These last few weeks, I have been watching with endless fascination the antics of two wildly rich men: Kanye West (or the artist Ye who was formerly known as Kanye West or whichever iteration of his ever-changing preferred moniker is appropriate) and Elon Musk. Since earlier this year, West has been on social media oversharing the details of his private life and obsessing over his ex-wife. He then upped the ante, conflating free speech with hate speech, and posted a bunch of bizarre anti-Semitic opinions. Various brands who had associated with him walked out, and in a matter of weeks, he had managed to successfully slash his net worth by half, leaving him with about $400 million from a previously estimated $1.5 billion.
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West was knocked off the headlines when Elon Musk’s half-hearted attempt to take over Twitter became a reality. In the last few weeks, Musk paid a massively overvalued $44 billion and took the blue bird home and then had several meltdowns when things didn’t go his way. First, he said he would charge $20 a month for the verification badge, then got involved in a Mumbai street-side level negotiation with author Stephen King to bring that down to $8, then fired half the staff, then said he was a free speech evangelist so will reduce content moderation on the platform, a move that saw an immediate upsurge in hate speech, which led to advertisers fleeing from the platform, further damaging the business. Through all of this, Musk kept tweeting conspiracy theories and posting crude memes, blaming everyone else for all his problems without, seemingly, having spent a minute introspecting his own actions.
Kanye West’s anti-Semitic opinions led various brands to dissociate with him | Photo Credit: AP
Social media endorphins
In both their cases, the deep spiral was spurred on by social media validation. In a world where celebrity is the biggest currency, it is conceivable that being rich and famous means a free pass. There are fans for all situations. When thousands of people are clapping and cheering you on for posting something nasty, it is tempting to then post something nastier. This vicious cycle of pushing the envelope and finding validation in it will, inevitably, lead to that one step too far. No moderate narrative is likely to go viral. In this sense, celebrities are normal people too because to be boring is to be unloved.
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When Musk, seemingly casually, first spouted the idea of taking over Twitter, legions of his fans cheered him. It would be imprudent to think that his eventual actions weren’t spurred by the endorphins derived from this. Like a young boy who rolled up his shirt sleeves in jest and was then propped up on the shoulders of his cheering friends into the boxing ring, West and Musk too found themselves in the middle of a fight they had neither the skills nor the advice to de-escalate from. While West’s antics were self-destructive, Musk’s will have a larger impact on the world. People are already paying for it with lost jobs and stalled careers. In the near future, unmoderated and unverified speech on Twitter will likely harm whistleblowers and activists in all parts of the world.
Musk’s antics will have a larger impact on the world | Photo Credit: Reuters
New rules, new mistakes
More significantly, it is clear that now more than ever, the world is but a rich man’s toy. That Musk could so easily buy and break something that millions of people use would have been shocking at any other time. But now, we merely shrug and move on. We have already begun to forget the antics of the earlier disrupter, Donald Trump, who threw out the rule book and did as he pleased, while occupying what is arguably the most powerful office in the world.
The last couple of decades have seen the glorification of “disruption”. Move fast and break things, they said. Shoot first and aim later, they said. The old rules are irrelevant, they said, they have been holding us back. Well… it is now beginning to seem like the new rules are not much better. It has been a rather short hop from disruption to devastation. For now, the cautionary tales are shrouded in the myth of their still charismatic protagonists, but sometime in the near future, we will have to confront the reality that perhaps breaking things is not the best way to make them better.
Until then though, we have no choice but to get used to these upheavals, in this technology-fuelled world, where things start, take off and end all too quickly — cataclysms are the only constant. But hey, thanks to the fact that all the mud-slinging is now public, we will at least go down thoroughly entertained. Keep the popcorn ready. Always.
Veena Venugopal is the author of Independence Day: A People’s History.
