After spending hundreds of millions to return Donald Trump to the White House, un-elected rich person Elon Musk has taken over the U.S. government. Many people are saying it’s a coup.
Musk's seizure of the treasury, overnight shuttering of federal agencies and firing of tens of thousands of employees by diktat dwarfs the scale of any mere "coup" in my lifetime.
The budding plutocrat has Canada directly in his sights. And yet, we're still using his app.
Knowing what we know about Musk and his intentions for us, every politician claiming to represent our interests should have voted with their feet — weeks ago.
In fact, this might have been a good time to go. (Angela Weiss/Getty Images)
I say this as someone who liked the place. I relied on it to build an audience for my writing and my rolodex of sources. But it's less relevant by the day, and if you think you need to be there — for work or whatever — no, you don't.
There are by now countless examples of Canadian politicians issuing ardent anti-Trump, anti-Musk statements, which I’m very on board with.
These messages, though, are sorely undermined when posted under a blue check. So, you're anti-Trump, but you won’t leave the platform that his Oligarch-in-Chief could use to spy on you if he felt like it. I see.
The internet, once limitless, is now consolidated into a handful of corporate websites. We spend most of our online time on five.
Incentives were misaligned from the beginning. Platforms operate with a dual-imperative to grow the user-base and increase the time users spend “on-app.”
At first, social platforms found ways to monetize that were conventional enough; some ads here, a bit of data-collection at an unprecedented scale there — you know, just to inform advertisers.
Eventually all of the not-terrible monetization streams were exhausted. But as profit growth must always continue, platforms must find new ways to make money.
Over 10 years ago, things took a dark turn when Facebook algorithmically amplified hateful content to users in Myanmar. Time-on-site went up, and a positive feedback loop was created that helped turn simmering ethnic tensions into a genocide. It wouldn’t be the last time this happened.
As we became reliant on these platforms for our news, they in turn became subject to more top-down manipulation. I didn't grasp the extent of this, or how long I'd been living in a throttled information environment.
When that realization came, it was jarring.
I was scrolling on Bluesky, and saw a ProPublica exposé. Bookmarked.
Then, a YouTube video from someone I'd never heard of. I clicked it. It was actually good.
Finally, a piece from The Local popped up, which I read right away. It was worth the time.
Time, spent “off-app.”
I’d just clicked a link and landed on a news website, staying there until I’d finished reading. These moments of news discovery are anathema to today’s platforms.
Even in places where the Online News Act hasn’t led to the blocking of news links, such as X, the financial incentive is still to suppress anything that moves users off-platform. Better that users read tweets about the news than the actual news.
After years of this, we as a populace are much less informed. First from the slow boiling news-suppression resulting from the financial incentives of for-profit social media companies. And now, from an additional layer of censorship stemming from narcissistic authoritarians and those that would bow to them.
Our journalistic institutions are now crumbling, predictably, and our democracies along with them — predictably.
How many people in your life do you wish were more aware of what’s happening around them?
How many people didn’t turn out to vote in the Ontario election?
Blame the platforms.
In walking away, we should start with X, which is the only thing I’ll call it, to suppress any sneaky nostalgia for the glory days of Twitter, which was great, but is gone.