joebot.substack.com By Joe Allen
If you take this guy seriously, you’re living in a simulation
Elon Musk holds out the promise of restoring “free speech” to Twitter. Yesterday the Tesla CEO offered $43 billion dollars to buy the social media platform outright. Conservatives are intoxicated by the idea. If by some miracle the shareholders take the offer, Musk promises to relax speech-policing and make the algorithms open source.
Presumably, he’ll continue shitposting from his toilet.
If we take Musk at his word, his intention is to open real debate and save our democracy. Then again, he also told us “China rocks,” robot slaves will replace every worker, universal basic income will soon be necessary, all vehicles will be autonomous, AI will achieve a god-like status, brain implants will connect us to that god, and ultimately, there’s a billion-to-one chance our universe is just a computer simulation.
A cynical listener might suspect this cyborg car-dealer is taking the public for a ride.
Even so, in the case of Twitter, the excitement is understandable. Starting with the Great Meme War that led up to Trump’s 2016 election, the platform laid waste to the funniest dudes on Frog Twitter—from Ricky Vaughn to Kantbot2000—and eventually, the cyber-Stasi banned the sitting President of the United States.
