Elon, Twitter and the Feudalization of America
Twitter’s Takeover as a Battle of the Estates
Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk was just a corporate acquisition.
But it is also part of a broader cultural revolution. And this local revolution brings to light an important cultural and political struggle over who should control the culture of companies and how. And perhaps more broadly, who should control America and how.
If you have wondered why so many would get so upset about free speech, it’s because it’s not about speech. It’s about power. And not just power over Twitter.
Jung was right — it’s always about power.
Society’s leadership and power was, long ago, explicitly divided amongst three estates — the nobility, the clergy and commoners. Of late it has been returning to that mode with a nobility (the corporate establishment and the very wealthy, epitomized by Larry Fink), aligning with a clergy (woke academics, experts and media) to lord it over the commons (workers and builders), controlling the information the commons receive, deplatforming ideological wrong-thinkers, implementing many important policies through non-democratic processes such as ESG and DEI, and wielding a dominant hand in shaping the national narrative through near absolute control of the voice of journalism, social media and entertainment.
The coordination within the nobility and clergy are today so tight that when the Biden administration meet with Twitter to coordinate censorship, the communications sound like two offices of one larger organization happily working together, much as one might imagine the tone of discussions between movie studios in China and SARFFT, the government censorship department.
The rationale for this kind of assumption of power, with attendant cultural changes, has its deepest roots going back to Marx and Rousseau, has American roots back to Marcuse and Adorno and 80s academic postmodernism (critical legal studies at Harvard and literary deconstructionism at Yale) but has really been implemented in people’s lives as a day to day force, I would propose, only over the past decade.
The culture of Twitter had become that of a (needless to say) leftist government bureau or academic department.
Expectations of high output were not in evidence. Despite a staff of 7,500, the cadence of new feature releases was, I would say as a long time Amazon product manager, quite slow and not innovative. During eight years of a massive tech bull run, TWTR had predictably created (prior to the acquisition talks) negative stockholder value (in December 2014, it was available for $50.08/share and seven years later for $38.69, -22.7%). Nevertheless, the employee perks kept coming, and the company was notable mainly for being woke.
The woke mode of business, which would include speech restrictions and numerous other policies, is today introduced to and imposed on Twitter and other American corporations via non democratic processes, from without by asset managers like BlackRock with ESG and from within by HR cadres pushing DEI and various other policies. The culture of a company is like its operating system. The clergy seeks to impose a culture layer on top of all corporate cultures that co-opts all corporations to the service of the clergy’s political program.
This is not something America has voted on but it has the same impact of widespread legislation. It is simply the nobility and clergy agreeing that this what everyone has to do by force of their power and umbrage. The clergy simply slips it into the liturgy with the implicit or explicit threat that there will be bad PR — or worse — if it is resisted.
This aligns with the move over the last decade in Washington to politicize all government ministries and to get them on board with the clergy’s political program, which is why for example formerly non-political NASA’s main output these days seems to be climate change reports while private companies build rockets to the moon.
The goal is for all government ministries and corporations (and it goes with saying — the press) to be aligned with and part of the ESGDEI establishment. Do you want to get promoted? Do you want to get good press? Do you want to be able to raise capital? Do you want to be able to use visa, PayPal, mailchimp, AWS, app stores, etc.? Then get on board, serf. Two of the biggest supporters of ESG in the US are Larry Fink and Brian Moynihan, head of Bank of America. But that’s just the beginning — obviously Tim Cook is part of this as well as Apple has withdrawn advertising from Twitter of late. Many identify themselves on Twitter by their outrage. Look at Alexander Vindman’s feed. Why is he so exorcised about a little free speech? It’s not the speech — it’s the power.
It should be particularly emphasized that in the system desired by the woke, personnel decisions are to be controlled by the clergy. Instead of being promoted for delivering incredible results, people should be promoted for adhering to a political orthodoxy, for being nice, or for promoting the right mix of people. It’s not that you grew your division’s cash flow with a 40% CAGR over three years and developed 32 patented technologies, but that your promotion distribution looked like X. A notable example: Jennifer Sey was fired from her Levi’s CMO position (she was the CEO in waiting as well) for speaking out against stay-at-home schooling policies. This way, it’s not just the CEOs who feel pressure but the entire line of execs from top to bottom. Essentially, this replaces what at Amazon are known as Leadership Principles with a united national set of Leadership Principles that, again, has not been subject to any democratic review.
Fundamentally, this is not the American process where we vote on sweeping changes, or our representatives do. But this is of course exactly how it works in China (just ask Jack Ma). Indeed, critics of ESG rightly identify it as a Chinese social credit system imported to the US. As Klaus Schwab, arch woke leader of the World Economic Forum recently said, “the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model.”
If the woke can take control of all government ministries and corporations, it won’t matter much who gets elected any more.
These people claim to be “the resistance.” They are not the resistance, they are leading an elite revolution against the commons.
If you assert that ESG is an extra-democratic power grab and that the World Economic Forum has aspirations to change the world that are inimical to Anglo-American ideas of individual autonomy and freedom, you may be told that you are taking the World Economic Forum and its Davos meeting too seriously, that there is no connection between the WEF and the US power centers pushing ESG, and that you’re paranoid to boot. But if that’s true and the WEF isn’t powerful, why do the most powerful people in the world feel the need to attend Davos as if it is the new Diet of Worms? And if others take him seriously, which they obviously do, should we not take Klaus Schwab at his word, too?
Larry Fink seems to believe he has already won as he is not bashful about his intent to leverage his power.
More on Larry Fink and his sincerity:
These people are putting a lot of effort into extending control over America’s companies and information and, in turn, people, and there is no desire to see any backsliding or resistance.
A lot of thought has gone into business management and culture over time. Indeed, they have entire schools devoted to business, do they not? And America’s canonical management texts, culture artifacts, attitudes and ideas would seem to have been entirely out of place at Twitter. American business is like a football team that has gone 16-0 for 50 years. This is the culture that the clergy propose to leave behind. Why should we? To refresh our memory let’s glance at a small sampling of primary sources — key works, datapoints, characteristic remarks, and cultural moments — taken from the unofficial canon of America’s successful leadership and business culture, both classic and contemporary. You might like some of it and not like some of it but it has been successful and there is a theme.
High Output Management (or any other book) by Andrew Grove (“adapt or die”)
Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (“Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual … insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.”)
Any version of Amazon’s Leadership Principles and policies from 2004-2017 which included “Insist on the Highest Standards,” “Innovate and Simplify,” and which required managers to “topgrade” 7% of their direct reports every year. Leadership Principles also required leaders to “Have Backbone,” which meant you have to speak up for your point of view and be ready at any time to support your positions in argument.
The tradition of frank feedback like “This is the stupidest piece of code ever written” from Bill Gates while CEO of Microsoft.
Promotions in the US military are rigorous and never assumed. Only a very small percentage of elite service members achieve promotion into the General Officer ranks (O-7 and above) and their career path is a combination of clearly defined steps and their ability to maintain their competitive edge.
75% of the elite who are invited to Navy SEAL BUDS do not make it to become US Navy SEALS.
Google is famous for their selective hiring, hiring only 0.25% of people who apply. An unforgiving bar indeed.
Netflix traditionally maintained an 8% “involuntary attrition rate” and in their famous Culture Deck emphasized that they “keep only our highly effective people.” “Our model works best for people who highly value consistent excellence in their colleagues.”
Ray Dalio created the world’s most successful hedge fund with his Principles, which include, famously, radical transparency, where people give very upfront feedback to their co-workers, and “be willing to ‘shoot the people you love” and “do not tolerate badness.”
The theme is that we have had a rigorously high bar for performance. We are hard on ourselves because being hard on ourselves gets results. Competition has organically driven high performance standards to a place of prominence in the ethos. The uniting spirit has been to win and to have a high bar for performance.
This is because we are always in a competition, as a country and as companies. Whether you may be designing a new algorithm for a social media app, improving the performance of a new generation of batteries, or designing a new vehicle for large scale fund raising, every moment you pause and relax and do nothing, you must ask yourself whether your peer in Shenzhen or Berlin is also tarrying over a beignet.
Or as Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) said in Apocalypse Now: “Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. Every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger.”
Anything other than the highest performance, in reality, means that you will lose and you will not in fact build a major company because in most segments there are only one or two major companies. The hard reality is that, in business, there are generally only two outcomes: glorious victory and sad defeat and most of us are eager to avoid a sad defeat.
It is worth noting that many of the most prominent supporters of the ESGDEI either have a strong monopoly/duopoly market position in key markets (Apple, BlackRock, Coca-Cola, Amazon) or they are very large companies in heavily regulated industries and are too big to fail (Delta, Bank of America). They have moved beyond regular issues of day to day competition to a higher plane on the Maslowian hierarchy of needs. Socialists always prefer markets with big businesses and big unions (see: Italy in the early 70s) that are stable and where distribution of the spoils can be managed from above.
But the rest of us still need to compete and build, and the structure of the American economy should be optimized for competitive markets.
Successful business enterprises are essential to our prosperity and every major business in America was built in the old way. There have been no major businesses built from the ground up in the “new” way (no, Goop and Ben & Jerry’s are not “major businesses”). So by adopting these new principles American business success is put at risk. It should not become a national norm.
Elon hasn’t brought anything particularly new to Twitter culture. He has simply imported the normal tech ethos that has been shown to work. But by prioritizing success and high performance internally, permitting (somewhat) free speech for customers, and by denying the writ of the new nobility and clergy, he has created a rift in the nobility and allied himself, as a dissenter, with the commons.
The commons have a few other leaders on their side and … they have crypto. The promise of crypto is to give individuals sovereignty over their money, sovereignty over transactions (which Venmo and PayPal would like to be in a position to approve or deny), and also more autonomy from the State, including free speech and an ability to access unedited information. Crypto excels at two things: censorship-resistant financial transactions and censorship-resistant culture. It is these that are most needful in the present conflict.
As Balaji Srinivasan has pointed out, at a high level, ultimately the present conflict is between the forces of the NYT (the clergy), the power of the CCP, and the liberating opportunity of BTC (the commons).
And it is not just business freedom impliedly at stake in this conflict. It is art and expression freedom, too. It is indeed, every aspect of one’s life. As @punk6529 has argued, there are no other freedoms without the freedom to transact.
By making speech more free on Twitter and by making internal culture high performance and results-oriented, Elon doubly threatens the clergy. He threatens their control over the narrative and their control over corporations. He tells them, essentially, as Glinda the Good Witch said to The Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz: “you have no power here.”
In the case of Twitter, and whether it will succeed under new management, I bet on the new “hardcore” team because this approach has been shown to work. But going against Apple will be a fight. It will be necessary for all people who care to be a part of this fight.
In the case of the larger war between democracy and top down control, between the entire clergy, the nobles, and the commons, we will see. It may be a thirty years war indeed. But in the end I bet on the builders who are creating value, who have web3 on their side, who ultimately have the arguments, and I bet on the American people who, as they learn more about this fight and its protagonists, will no doubt prefer democracy and freedom.
We should stay with the ways that work because we need things to work well. And in principle we should disfavor anti-democratic approaches to aggregating power and forcing change on society.