Citizen Musk
Rather than the BBC feeding the public's appetite, it is the public that feeds its one.
I haven’t actually listened to the recent BBC interview with Elon Musk at Twitter HQ. But that’s because I haven’t watched the BBC for the last few weeks, as I was repelled by the increase in leftist, woke, crypto-communist content on its platforms.
I would give you a specific example of such content, but as a journalist that’s not my job. Obviously. As we all know, facts and empirical evidence are a white, male, European construct. I would provide a reference to back up this assertion, but that would undermine the very point I am making.
I can however, reveal that I learnt this from the BBC before I switched off, and without naming names, it was when they referred to a bloke in a wig, who was famous for having sex with women without their consent and said he was a woman to ensure that his punishment would be to be made to live in a building full of women who can’t escape him, as “she”.
It is the job of the BBC to inform, educate, and entertain the world about the lived realities of people, even if those realities were largely unlived. What matters is if it felt like they were. The only definite facts that the BBC concerns themselves with is whether or not you paid your license fee. On that they have the exact precise empiricism of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider trying to find subatomic particles to a 99.99999999999999999999% certainty.
Help me pay my state mandated license fee by subscribing above.
As with the ascertainment of quantum states, my license fee is both paid and unpaid depending on whether the hired BBC goons are able to look into my home to observe the state of my TV. Likewise, Twitter is both better and worse after Elon took hold of the bird, depending on how you observe the world.
This goes some way to explaining why, when the BBC journalist James Clayton interviewed Musk about twitter recently, he didn’t feel the need to empirically verify his assertion that Twitter had become more hateful since Musk had taken over. All he had to do was put forward his felt world view that it was.
As Musk deftly riposted, “who decides” what is hateful? For example, saying that a biological male with a penis who says he’s felt like a woman for the last week, is actually a man, is hate speech to some and feminism to others.
Except of course, we all know who decides. The cabal of journalists like Mr Clayton. He may well be correct in his assessment that Twitter content is more vituperative in the post-Musk era. However, the arrogance of a journalist not feeling the need to back up such assertions with evidence reveals the rot at the heart of much established media.
Any utterance given by the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, or the phantasmagoria of left-wing Blairite NGOs, is pre-vetted simply because it came from within the system. Anything from outside the system, may well get a hearing, but it is often an adversarial one, in the defence booth at the mercy of a zealous prosecutor asking when it first started beating its wife.
The interview between Musk and Clayton was in many ways a clash of epistemologies. By purchasing the world’s pre-eminent publishing platform, Musk has become the new William Randolph Hearst. However, he is not a literary man by nature, but an engineer first and businessman second. That is to say, his world view is necessarily tethered to the empirical reality of whether or not the Space X rocket ships explodes shortly after lift-off, or Tesla batteries set on fire, or dogecoin hits one million dollars.
If one grants that Musk is not an alien, it stands to reason that he is also vulnerable to the biases and logical inconsistencies that afflict us all. Though one always suspects that his epic trolling and displays of megalomaniacal mirth are some form of ultra-dry Vulcanian satire of the mammalian irrationality he witnesses when observing us humans.
As CEO of Twitter, Musk’s current day-to-day slings and arrows are no longer the unassailable laws of physics and finance, but the very much assailable laws of human social interaction and meaning. However, whereas a more qualitative person would be compelled to run Twitter based on whether or not those social interactions fit within his or her own world view of what is good or bad, one suspects Musk’s empiricism and respect for the quantifiable, necessarily draws his attention to more material matters, such as the fact that Twitter has never made a profit, and was losing 44 million dogecoins a day. Is Musk’s top priority whether or not the astronauts on the spaceship are playing Kum Ba Ya or Horst-Wessel-Lied, if it is running out of fuel and heading for a blackhole?
Can Musk turn the ship around? Who knows. Can an internet payment platform creator make electric cars mainstream and build rocket ships better than NASA? It seems unlikely.
Although the likes of Clayton castigate Musk for the (alleged) increase in “hatey” words on Twitter, a more balanced appraisal would also mention the astonishing fact that 75% of the workforce were let go, and yet the damned thing still works. Maybe not quite as well, but it’s hard to fix a spaceship when it’s already in flight and full of singing Nazi’s. Of course, the reason why Twitter critics such as the BBC, Amnesty International, the New York Times et al, are remiss to highlight this fact is the awkward pang that deep down they also know that a large proportion of their workforce could be axed without a significant deterioration in their core services provided, and perhaps even with some improvement.
It is no wonder that a corporation as bloated as the BBC nowadays makes programmes championing body positivity over the public health crisis of an obese populace. It could stand to lose a little weight itself. However, unlike the body beautiful in this world, the BBC doesn’t sustain its bloat by gorging on its own spoils, but rather those of the public who fund it. Musk was wrong to label the BBC as “government funded media”, because like the government it is really funded by the public, a fact that is important to remember to understand its disdain for them.
Rather than the BBC feeding the public's appetite, it is the public that feeds its one.