Elon Musk and Tweeting on a Volcano
19th April 2022
Of all the hilarious freakouts over Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, my personal favorite comes from journalism professor and self-styled “NYC insider” Jeff Jarvis (as noticed by The Spectator‘s Bill Zeiser last week). Jarvis tweeted — and I quote — “Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.”
One imagines Mehdi Hasan and Molly Jong-Fast manically jazz-dancing as the Bruenigs belt out a song from a cabaret stage. And surely nothing calls down the specter of fascist totalitarianism quite like Musk’s pledge to end Big Tech censorship. Because that’s what the Nazis did, right? They kicked down the door to the nightclub, stormed through the horrified crowd, and barked, “ATTENTION PLEASE! YOU ARE NOW FREE TO SAY WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT!”
Jarvis’s tweet should have been a regrettable one-off. But of course it wasn’t. This is Twitter, after all. Thus did several users spend the start of a perfectly lovely Easter weekend debating whether the dark night of fascism was about to descend by means of looser content moderation. And while the analogy is obviously insane, there’s a point to be made about style here too. Because the thing about elite Twitter is that it actually makes Weimar look pretty good by comparison.
Jeff Jarvis is a Professor of Journalism at NYU. Now you know why they are the way they are.
Jarvis is also a fan of Habermas, which tells you pretty much all you need to know. (Frankfurt School? Where have I heard that before?)