Breda O’Brien: The online world was broken long before Elon Musk

Having had a very profitable pandemic, the Big Tech companies are not having a very good 2022. In the last quarter, the Financial Times reported that nearly $800 billion (€819 billion) had been wiped off share valuations. Amazon shares fell 10 per cent. Shares in Meta, the company once known as Facebook, dropped by 25 per cent.

Only Apple bucked the trend. Its operating profit for the quarter was $24.9 billion versus $23.78 billion a year earlier. Profits are still in Monopoly money territory. For example, Google’s net profit was $13.91 billion compared with $18.93 billion a year earlier. The tech giants are so big they are almost impervious to regulation.

The human mind is not equipped to visualise figures that immense, never mind the widely reported $100 billion that Mark Zuckerberg has allegedly lost from his personal wealth since last October. He is betting the Facebook farm (now called Meta) on becoming the dominant element of the metaverse.

According to Zuckerberg, the future of computing lies in a parallel existence involving avatars, where a mixture of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence will allow people to live an almost wholly online life.

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Currently, Meta’s version of the metaverse is only accessible through almost comically clunky headsets but Zuckerberg keeps assuring us that the technology will improve.

Zuckerberg has slipped to being merely in the top 30 wealthiest people on the planet, rather than nestling comfortably in the top 10. It doesn’t mean that he might have to put off buying any extensions to his 647-hectare (1,600-acre) estate in Hawaii, or huge properties in Palo Alto, or Lake Tahoe, however. Last Wednesday, Bloomberg reckoned that Zuckerberg had $36 billion left.

[ Una Mullally: Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter makes a bad situation worse ]

This insane wealth is somehow seen as a just reward for having given the world Facebook, and buying Instagram and WhatsApp at a financially savvy time.

The kind of influence that amount of wealth buys should terrify us. We should be scared stiff that Zuckerberg’s passion project of a metaverse, where he controls every aspect of everything we do, will succeed.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been forced into honouring his overpriced purchase of Twitter. One employee tweeted a picture of another sleeping at the office to meet deadlines imposed by Musk. Presumably, the featured employee, Esther Crawford, director of product management, was desperate to carry out his will in case she is culled like the top executives he fired almost as his first act.

Even though Musk is currently the world’s richest man, he tried really hard to get out of the contract to buy Twitter. Now, he is trying to get out of paying Twitter executives their so-called “golden parachutes”, that is, millions that will cushion them from the impact of being fired. He says he has fired them for “cause”, in other words, behaviour damaging to Twitter that allows him to ignore their settlements. No doubt the court cases will drag on for years.

Lots of people are salivating at the prospect that Musk cannot possibly succeed in making Twitter profitable, or square the circle of moderating content while maintaining his much-touted absolute free speech zone, which he has already backed away from, telling advertisers that it cannot be a “hellscape”. (Too late, Elon. It already is.)

People who are broadly left wing worry about the far-right influence and disinformation campaigns, while people who are broadly conservative worry about the deadening effect of woke culture and the vicious cancellation of anyone who steps out of line ideologically.

People worry that Musk will let Donald Trump back on Twitter but cannot seem to see that even if Musk were a perfectly well-balanced individual with impeccable views, when it comes to discussion and commentary, the online world is a fundamentally broken place. Having an oddball like Musk owning an influential chunk of it is not the biggest problem.

It has become increasingly difficult for truth to compete or even dialogue coherently with the threadbare ideologies of the powerful, including state actors and the obscenely wealthy

Perhaps we need to go back and read Marshall McLuhan. In 1964, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan wrote: “The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”

McLuhan was a bit too fond of his own guru status and too enchanted by playing cameos as himself in Woody Allen films, but he did have penetrating insights. It is not just about the content. It is the way the medium changes the way we live in the world.

[ Why free speech is more complicated than Elon Musk makes out ]

It’s about the culturally destabilising impact of a profit-driven space that thrives on heightened emotions and polarisation.

Trump did not turn Twitter into a hellscape. He was just the most adroit at using it to set the news agenda for years on end. Musk may kill Twitter off but is TikTok a wonderful, cerebral alternative?

Zuckerberg may have formally repudiated Facebook’s original motto of “move fast and break things”, but something vital has been broken.

Complexity, nuance and the ability to disagree vehemently without demonisation have been relegated in favour of rapidly disseminated agendas and opinions encapsulated in memes, tweets, clips and ever-shorter soundbites. It has become increasingly difficult for truth to compete or even dialogue coherently with the threadbare ideologies of the powerful, including state actors and the obscenely wealthy.