The Enemy Within Twitter
26th May 2023
In the post mortems on Ron DeSantis’s less that wholly satisfactory campaign debut, I’ve seen plenty of derision – Donald Trump is firmly aligned with the Left here – and some pro-DeSantis apologetics, mostly along the lines of, “Everybody will forget this in a week or two.” What I haven’t seen is so much as a breath of suspicion that the Twitter Spaces meltdown might not have been simply the result of the deployment of not-adequately-tested technology. Yet the grounds for suspicion sit in plain sight.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, many, many employees did not welcome their new overlord, to put it mildly. They were overwhelmingly Musk-hostile for a variety of reasons, some stemming from his imperious management style, others from dislike of his perceived political opinions, which jibe poorly with the tech world’s longstanding woke orthodoxy and increasingly woke orthopraxis. Many malcontents were fired in the wake of the takeover, but Musk couldn’t, even if he seriously tried, get rid of them all and conjure a loyal work force into being.