It’s time to acknowledge that Twitter is not improving in any significant way under Elon Musk. Despite the CEO’s alleged commitment to freedom of speech and his flirtation with center-right circles online, the platform’s algorithm routinely clamps down on politically and culturally conservative individuals, preventing users from reaching their existing audience or gaining potential new followers.
Perhaps Musk ought to temporarily take the platform offline while devs rework the algorithm into something more, for lack of a better term, equitable that doesn’t include visibility filters and niceness factors or boosts corresponding to the number of exclamation points used. But what are the odds this could even be achieved? Despite being the owner and CEO of Twitter, Musk does not run the company.
Immediately following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, I noted, in these pages, that the individuals composing the managerial elite — the over-credentialed, entrenched midwits who run every major institution in the country, the Yoel Roths and Ella Irwins — are still a dominant force in American civic life and Musk’s acquisition of Twitter wouldn’t change that. Rather, it couldn’t change that.
In the early 1940s, James Burnham published The Managerial Revolution, in which he observed Western society was moving away from a traditional capitalist system, in the interwar period, to one more reliant upon engineers, scientists, technocrats, and other credentialed intermediaries who act as regulatory agents to direct production. Burnham characterized this demographic as having subject matter expertise due to attaining merit-based credentials through graduating high school and participating
