LEGIONS of, er, well-wishers will be dismayed by news billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will not be beating each other up in a cage despite promising to two months ago.
Zuckerberg says his challenger is not serious and has avoided confirming a time and place, so it’s “time to move on.”
If there was always something dystopian about the idea of two of the world’s richest men, both of whose fortunes rest on control of high-tech digital empires, deciding to slug it out with their fists, there was something appropriate about it too.
It seemed to encapsulate the continued, basic barbarity of capitalism, where competition is ultimately resolved by violence.
There seemed a moral lesson too. Immense wealth, even among supposedly “self-made” tycoons, is no barrier to being a complete moron; perhaps a world order in which these clowns call the shots has something wrong with it.
A whiff of the mid-life crisis, if their abortive space missions did not already suggest it. Even this was not original. Life imitates art, or at least mass-produced corporate entertainment. Billionaire makes a fool of himself trying to become the ultimate fighting champion was a plot device in Friends back in 1997.
But maybe it’s just as well the fight seems unlikely to come off. The trumpeted rivalry between the most powerful social media moguls on Earth can be seen as a distraction tactic.
Their online personas seem pitched to the two sides of the US culture wars. Zuckerberg the centrist liberal “adult in the room,” removing inappropriate content like Covid conspiracy theories from Facebook and banning former president Donald Trump for praising violence; Musk the “insurgent” right-winger, supposedly championing free speech, railing at authority despite his extreme privilege.
We should not get entangled in these fake divisions. For all the furore over Musk’s Twitter takeover, the company (now renamed by Musk as X) was a villain long before he bought it.
Liberal rage at his reinstatement of banned accounts, especially Trump’s, was far louder than it had ever been at Twitter’s long record of censorship in the interests of US imperialism, such as its blocking of thousands of pro-government Venezuelan accounts in 2019 to give online readers the impression the country was united behind the right-wing uprising, or conversely its connivance at the creation of thousands of fake, pro-coup accounts during the overthrow of Bolivian president Evo Morales.
Lest we think Musk is less beholden to US imperialism, he is simply, like Trump, more open about championing it: “we will coup whoever we want,” he famously declared as the Bolivian army-installed regime was massacring democracy protesters.
Facebook is no different. Its main censorship record does not apply to the radical right: indeed, it was found to have suspended its own anti-hate speech provisions in India to suck up to the Hindu chauvinist BJP. Like Twitter, it has targeted the left, banning accounts like that of former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa despite his more than a million followers.
No individual should own platforms that have become so significant in human communication, with billions using them to access and share news.
A publicly accountable alternative was mooted by the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of Labour. No such prospect is any longer on the immediate horizon.
So what can we do? Boycotting such platforms doesn’t help the left while they continue to be a means of reaching mass audiences.
But we must remain on guard to the techniques used to muffle our voices, and speak up when corporate power is used to silence people.
And we must keep the focus of organising activity on the real world: for all the sound and fury of social media, its limitations have been exposed repeatedly on the left in recent years. It is no substitute for agitation in the workplace, at the protest or on the streets.
