Why did Elon Musk take over a company to which he has to pay extra? Dangerous ideology in Silicon Valley

Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. For the richest man in the world, this is a rather unprofitable business move, because Musk himself admits that So what drove him when he decided to buy Twitter? The answer is not money, but the idea of ​​longtermism, according to which the future of humanity is the most important.

In August, Musk shared the publication of one of the most important promoters of this thought – William McAskill. He is also, together with Pieter Thiel, a billionaire with whom he collaborated on PayPal, a sponsor of the Future of Life Institute. So there are no major doubts about the views of Elon Musk.

According to Musk and others like him (longtermism is an ideology popular in Silicon Valley, who stole billions of dollars from his cryptocurrency exchange FTX), it is important to take care of future generations. While the idea seems right, there are a lot of red lights when you delve into it.

Watching Musk run Twitter live is an unforgettable spectacle. It’s a pity for the users of the platform, and above all, the laid-off employees. It would be better if they did not meet Musk on their way, but he also falls in this spectacular way, about which the philosopher and publicist Tomasz Markiewka writes a lot,

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For Musk, however, this may be another opportunity to confirm that we little people do not understand anything, while he sacrifices (sacrifices us) for the future. In the end, Musk invests his own money in an unprofitable company. This is longtermism.

However, before we settle accounts with the ideology itself, let’s go back to Elon Musk. Because Twitter is supposed to be a tool for him that will ensure the survival of humanity, i.e. it will allow to implement the assumptions of long-termism.

Musk wants to make Twitter more than just a social medium

Investigative journalist Jack Dorsey, who was now the head of Twitter, claimed in April that he did not believe in principle that anyone should run Twitter. He added that he wanted Twitter to be a public good on a protocol* level, not a company. Dorsey believes he is the one-off solution to this problem.

*Without going into details, it’s about making the code available so that anyone can run it.

Economist dealing with the digital economy, Jan J. Zygmuntowski, in an interview with Gazeta.pl, pointed out that Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have taken over so much public space that they are already competing with the state. “Such platforms, if they are large enough, are simply digital infrastructure. As a natural monopoly – just like water, electricity, railway traction – they cannot be private and free market” –

So you can agree with Dorsey that Twitter shouldn’t be treated like a company. It has become a modern Agora or Hyde Park, where you can freely express your thoughts, so it’s not good when one person can treat it like a toy.

In order to solve this problem, Zygmuntowski postulates the democratization of social media, instead of technocracy. And the latter model is introduced by Musk on Twitter, from which he released, among others, content moderation team.

Musk and Dorsey are good friends in private. Both believe that Twitter should be a mainstay of free speech. where everyone can say what they want. Freedom can be understood, however, as “freedom from something” and “freedom to something”. So we have freedom to express our views, but what about freedom from hate directed at us?

Musk doesn’t seem to care. He took over Twitter to weed out political correctness from geopolitical games that the billionaire and his supporters believe have been hijacked by censorship and woke ideology, writes Dave Troy. So for Musk, Twitter is also more than just a company – it’s a tool with which he can get the world back on track. And again – about the dubious history of managing people.

So why did Dorsey put the company in the hands of one billionaire when he wanted to make it a public good? Dave Troy believes that key to Dorsey was Musk’s desire to free himself from Wall Street investors. The billionaire believes that as a technology open to everyone, Twitter will serve humanity more than if it were managed by one man or stockbrokers who only care about increasing profits for shareholders.

At the assumption level, Musk’s intentions may seem quite pure. The devil, however, is in the details. Because while you can try to justify the basis of Musk’s actions, it is much harder to justify his absurd and impulsive decisions that he has been making since he leads Twitter. And even more doubts are brought by delving into the philosophy of longtermism, which is guided by it.

Longtermism, or the catastrophe of one man, an opportunity for all mankind

The philosophy of longtermism may seem tempting. Because how is it not to care about the fate of humanity, and therefore also future generations? Longtermism grows out of the idea of ​​effective altruism, which comes from the ethicist Peter Singer. Its supporters carry out activities aimed at improving the condition of humanity and try to be less guided by intuition and emotions.

Longtermism takes these assumptions even further, and Singer himself complains in his book “The Most Good You Can Do” that some people have decided to abandon effective altruism in favor of it. This movement is mainly focused on the people who now inhabit the planet. Longtermists, on the other hand, emphasize future generations that in the future the number of people will be much greater than the one that inhabits the Earth today. (Associations with abortion suggest themselves).

Longtermism is an extension and perversion of the idea of ​​effective altruism, its mixture with radical utilitarianism – media researcher. Utilitarianism is an ethic in which we are guided by the calculus of utility when making decisions. Hundreds of billions of lives from the future in such an action are therefore worth more to longtermists than real people living here and now.

And Elon Musk has been focusing not so much on the present as the future for years. Tesla is the future of cars, The Boring Company – urban transport. In SpaceX, in turn, he set a goal to populate Mars. In this company, Twitter appears to be the future of freedom of speech.

. One of the most important publications in this matter is “Superintelligence. Scenarios, strategies, threats” by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. It just so happens that he is one of the key theoreticians of longtermism, who laid the foundations for this idea in his works in and around. The scientist and popularizer of science Sabine Hossenfelder in her material on longtermism points out that in both works Bostrom conducted considerations of dubious moral nature.

“A catastrophe that does not carry an existential threat, but causes a civilizational breakthrough, from the perspective of all humanity, is possible to repair is:

… a huge massacre for one man, but a small mistake for humanity

– wrote Bostrom in 2009. “Yeah, the collapse of global civilization is exactly what I would call a small mistake,” Bostroma concluded Sabine Honssefelder.

In 2013, Bostrom mathematically calculated e.g. the value of human life. “We found that the value of reducing existential risk by just one billionth of one billionth of a percentage point is worth 100 billion times more than a billion human lives.”

Utilitarians may be indignant that there is nothing wrong with that, because generals or politicians (and Musk is such characters), whether they like it or not, must make decisions in which the lives of various groups of people are at stake. However, it is one thing to calculate it in theory, and another to actually make a decision in such an important matter. In the latter case, having to choose can be applied. Then you can ease your conscience a bit, which is more difficult when you equate the value of a human life to one billionth of one billionth of one percent.

The problems of longtermism are therefore at the same time the foundation of this thought, in which not only is the value of human life calculated mathematically, but the numbers that come out of this equation are so absurdly small that it is difficult to even imagine them. Sabine Hossenfelder, to show the absurdity of this situation, invokes a thought experiment… invented by Bostrom to justify his thoughts. “Pascal’s Heist” is based on the principle of maximizing expected utility, which we know from the famous “Pascal’s Wager” (the content of “Pascal’s Heist” can be found here).

When a thief, having forgotten his gun, asks you for your wallet and offers to return twice its contents the next day, you will refuse because you do not trust him. Bostrom argues, however, that if the thief offers you a large enough refund, you will eventually accept the offer, because it is worth spending a few dozen or a few hundred zlotys, if there is even a slight chance that the next day he will return the amount that will keep you happy for the rest of your life. Especially since according to the thief, who claims to be from another dimension, the contents of the wallet will ensure the well-being of his people and make many children happy.

Hossenfelder soberly points out, however, that most people wouldn’t give up their wallets in such a situation, no matter what, so Bostrom’s thought experiment is wrong. The logic of longtermism that follows him was also ridiculed by Jon Schwarz. He cited seven better philosophies that we should follow if there is a slight chance that they are true. There was, for example, Yum, Zebra-ism (if there is one chance in a quadrillion that life expectancy can be extended by even a fraction by eating live zebras, then we should eat them), or … masturbationism. These are, of course, made-up examples to show the absurdities of lontergmism.

And here we come to the crux of the problem of this thought. The assumption that one must sacrifice oneself for an idea when there is even the slightest chance that it is true raises many questions, for example, how much do we value future lives in relation to our successors? Can we sacrifice our health and comfort for unspecified and non-existent people from an unspecified future?

When the most powerful people in the world believe that this is the best way for humanity, longtermism becomes dangerous. They want to steer the fate of humanity, regardless of the voices of those who will be directly affected by these decisions.

In addition, our uncertainty about the fate of the future is too great to be based on minimal odds of any predictions. Especially that a lot of things can spill on the way and the so-called. black swans, i.e. events with a minimum chance of occurrence, but turning the world upside down.

Because although it may seem to us that we have grabbed God by the legs and we are an extremely advanced civilization, the last few years have been full of black swans that have destroyed our ideas about the world. From the pandemic, through the energy crisis, to the war in Ukraine.

Elon Musk, as a long-termist, has the ambition to save us from such events, but the whole of humanity, and he also includes future people in this collection. And Twitter is supposed to be a super-application, the equivalent of Chinese WeChat, which will replace governments, even in terms of finances. “A vision of a future in which the same man controls public discourse and personal finances takes us into the realm of dark dystopias” –

The costs of achieving these goals for Elon, on the other hand, do not play a role. For the sake of the future of humanity, you need several hours a day for a whole week and sleep in the office or