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September 27, 2024 - 10:00am
In a vintage case of the censoriousness for which Keir Starmer’s government is already unhappily notorious, Labour has opted — after a fashion — to cancel Elon Musk for mean tweets. Unfortunately for the Labour PM, he may have done so just at the moment the titans of Silicon Valley begin tilting away in earnest from the kind of progressive consensus most congenial to Starmerism.
Following his less than complimentary comments on Labour’s handling of Britain’s summer riots, Musk has not been invited to the UK’s International Investment Summit, which takes place next month. He hit back on X, stating that “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts.”
To my knowledge, no paedophiles were actually released to accommodate the dissident boomers of Facebook, though at least one was reportedly not jailed due to prisons being full. Starmer may well take the view that there is no need to attract Silicon Valley finance to the UK, and he may not care what Musk thinks. But if he is banking on Musk being an outlier, and the rest of Big Tech aligning ideologically with Labour’s political instincts, he could be in for a surprise: his blackballing of the outspoken and often provocative X owner comes amid a now-noticeable cooling in relations between progressive consensus and the American tech sector.
Ever since their alliance became entrenched under Barack Obama, Big Tech and Left-liberalism have seemed naturally aligned. This extended even to a revolving-door relation between liberal British politicians and Silicon Valley, as with the seamless transition of former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg from UK Government also-ran to an arguably far more powerful and influential role as President of Global Affairs for Meta. While there, he enforced a broadly progressive and sometimes palpably pro-censorship programme, including deplatforming Donald Trump in 2020 and cooperating with governments to censor “Covid misinformation”.
Arguably, though, Big Tech was never really Left-wing. The ethos of Silicon Valley has always been more libertarian than Leftist; the two only aligned to the extent that Leftism seemed to be about liberating people from constraints. But so long as profits were left to flow unopposed, Big Tech had seemed willing to swallow a measure of libertarian principle on progressive censorship.
But then Joe Biden turned on Big Tech. He set about breaking up monopolies, seeking to protect users’ data security, and constraining AI research; in the wake of this turn, Silicon Valley’s support for progressive ideology more broadly has grown palpably thinner. In a recent episode of their “Little Tech” YouTube show, for example, billionaire investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz explained why they support Trump. In their view, the Biden regime is waging all-out war on tech, via a hostile tax regime and laws constraining the nascent crypto, AI, and biotech industries, whereas Trump had signalled a more positive attitude.
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SubscribeOr you could argue that the Big Tech rightwards shift vibe is part of a much larger but fuzzy ‘populist’ surge. Perhaps the po-faced antilibertarians have overplayed their hand(s) and people are reacting against the ‘one size will fit all’ vibe?
DEI is the only growth enterprise in the U.K. Any push against it from anywhere is welcome. The sooner Nandy, Reeves, Rayner, Wes and the Tool et al are floundering in the Thames the better……please, soon.
Didn’t they just sink Britain’s only tech entrepreneur in his yacht in the Med?
But so long as profits were left to flow unopposed, Big Tech had seemed willing to swallow a measure of libertarian principle on progressive censorship.
These tech geeks are not committed to libertarian principles, but take advantage of liberty when it suits them. The very strong pushback against DEI now rolling across the US has changed the direction of the wind, and the direction these swallows now fly. Don’t count on them to be with us the next time our liberty is at risk.
out and proud Right-libertarians
All we need are a flag and our own month
Isn’t it just the yellow ‘Don’t tread on me’ flag with the snake on it?
Ted Cruz and the WSJ exposed Zuckerberg for what he is.
I do wish that those seeking more freedom of speech, of expression,and less statist interference were not referred to as ” rightist”? As I keep reminding people, remember who the National Socialist were? Eric Blair reminded us post his involvement in the Spanish Civil War…
Outside of Elon, who has always been a bit of an outlier, the others reflect more self-interest than principle. And that’s okay so far as it goes. They have businesses and investments to protect, so what’s a little bowing and scraping to the demands of the state, right? I’m sure Zuck felt the heavy hand of govt on his shoulder, but unless he also felt a gun in his back, there was always the option of saying ‘no.’
That the option was not exercised hints at a few possibilities. 1) Zuck and others like him did not care who was targeted so long as it wasn’t them. 2) The threats to anyone not going along with the censorship program were not vague implications; they were outright statements. 3) The suspicion that govt’s fingerprints are all over multiple tech companies and the appearance of completely independent businesses is a charade.
One could surmise that a lot of eyes finally opened and tech people finally figured out that alienating and attacking half the country on behalf of a particular administration was lousy business. But whatever it is, it’s not libertarian sentiment. There is no bridging libertarianism with even a hint of statism; the two are incompatible at a core level.
Not if you pretend to or insist on ideological purity, or peer through the prism of a single “ism”. But in the muddier and bloodier fields of embodied reality, of course there can be state involvement and state services alongside some form of libertarian beliefs and practices. By assigning a the suffix -ism to something, we tend to make it a pathology to ourselves and those we are trying to address—unless it really appeals to our own sensibilities.
In my case, I’m susceptible to the general import of humanism and traditionalism, for example, but the words “humanity” and “tradition” (with plenty of qualifications and exceptions) still sound better to me. I like much of libertarianism when it is advanced by people who truly aspire to liberate, as I read them, like John Stuart Mill. It’s one thing to oppose liberals—a common and defensible stance—another to be avowedly illiberal, let alone an adherent to illiberalism.
Some legit libertarians still want publicly funded highways, schools, hospitals, and prisons. Or at least some availability of essential services not under private ownership and control. And some laws that are enforced, whether a given individual consents to them or not.
Otherwise you invite a (bigger) flood of rampant capital into matters of life and death, and flirt with a right-of-center anarchism that is damn close to its left-wing counterpart at the other end of the extreme-ism horseshoe.
If you have the time and patience, I’d like to hear your view of the key difference(s) between having any kind of a state government and succumbing to statism.
I’m fine with big tech hating us. I’m sure most of us hate them.
Billionaires who created their vast empires on a foundation of open source software written in the 1980s and 1990s by thousands of idealistic, unpaid, developers.