The Oligarchy Reveals Itself

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Freedom to speak. Freedom to vote. Freedom to live. These basic liberties were blatantly violated by irresponsible and self-centered tech billionaires this month.

For almost five years now, Ukrainians have been risking and losing their lives to defend their own basic freedoms as well as the sovereignty of their country. In so doing, they have been preserving our freedoms as well, from a model of politics, oligarchical fascism, which has its world center in Russia. As the Trump regime has executed an open turn towards the Russian aggressor, Elon Musk chose to deprive Ukraine of access to a system that they needed for their own defense. Although Ukraine uses Starlink under contract, and the system is paid for, it was nevertheless cut off at certain speeds for about ten days between October 14th and October 24th. As a result, Ukraine was less able to defend itself from the onslaught of Russian drones and missiles missiles that accompanied Trump’s overtures to Moscow. Among many other unnecessary deaths, six people in Kharkiv were killed on October 19th, including a baby in a stroller in a park in Kharkiv.

For two hundred and fifty years now, elections have been held in the United States of America. Earlier this month, Americans came together in an enormous demonstration of support for this right. On October 17th, Americans gathered at about three thousand sites in all fifty states to encourage early voting and celebrate their right to vote. Millions of people joined together in the largest such action in American history, which was organized by a number of civil society organizations working together as the No Kings Coalition. At about 1:30pm that day, Meta suspended the Instagram account of the No Kings Coalition. The page disappeared, and its administrators were locked out, so that the coalition could not post right in the middle of the day for democracy that they had worked to create. After ninety minutes of public protest, the page became viewable -- but its administrators remained locked out for four hours. The forum that was being used to organize support for the American right to vote was suspended by a private company -- for no reason, or for no plausible reason that Meta was able to provide.

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For two thousand five hundred years now, friends of the freedom of speech have made a very simple and convincing argument: in order for the wealthy and the powerful to be subjected to the critique necessary to preserve a decent and just society, the safety and prosperity of those who express themselves must be protected. That is the origin and the essence of the freedom of expression. Perhaps the most wealthy and powerful person in the world right now is Elon Musk; as such, he is perhaps the single human being most deserving of critique, if the rest of us are to have a chance of living decent lives. A vehicle for such critique is the documentary Musk. As its makers correctly noted, and as the founders of the United States understood, factual critique of the major oligarch is not only protected speech, but essential to democracy. Given that Musk was, at the very same moment, taking actions that killed Ukrainians, one could add that such critique is also essential to life. Given that his actions helped a fellow global oligarch to wage a criminal war, it is hard not to see the outline of a global oligarchy.

And so, predictably, several major internet platforms refused to air content about the Musk documentary before its release. Just before the national release of the Musk film, on October 16th, Tiktok suspended the account which advertised it, and kept it down the whole following weekend, thereby suppressing the movie during what was to be its first big weekend. Tiktok is partly owned by Musk’s friend Larry Ellison, who in the film offers Musk billions to help Musk buy Twitter. A few days later, Musk invested a billion dollars in Ellison’s massive entertainment conglomerate. The film makes a good case, now borne out even more strongly be these events, that the point of these media monopolies is to suppress freedom and control the political sphere. It is worth noticing that these two oligarchs were helping one another at exactly the same time as Musk was helping Putin.

All of this happened at the same time. While the makers of the Musk film could not promote their work, Musk was helping Putin’s projectiles kill Ukrainians; and at that very same moment, American organizers were cut off from access to Meta platform they were using to work for democracy.

The men who have power embrace irresponsibility. In each case the wealthy and powerful relevant denied that they had done anything, that they could have done anything, that anything could have possibly been their fault. Even Putin, who is waging the largest war since 1945 that the Ukrainians made him do it by existing. As Trump ever more openly allies with Putin, he claims that Zelens’kyi made him do it by not surrendering. When Musk enabled Putin to strike Ukraine, thereby taking charge of US foreign policy, Trump and Musk each made mumbly remarks to the effect that perhaps the other had done something. When TikTok suppressed viewership of a movie that would have helped make sense of it all, its spokespeople said that it was just following mysterious standards which it could not explain. Meta went so far as to blame its own AI. Great power with such extravagant irresponsibility is inconsistent with any freedom -- including the rights to live, to speak, to vote.

Private individuals have been allowed to exercise power in such a way as to deny the right of others to speech, to democracy, and even to life. They have been given the insidious extra layer of power granted irresponsibility: they take decisions that affect millions of people, and then wave their hands and say that they are helpless, that it was someone else, that it was just protocol, that it was the automated system. They use their vast, irresponsible power in the service of nothing that is of any public value: because their feelings are hurt; because a friend asked them for a favor; because they like having total control and feel uncomfortable when something happens that they did not themselves want. Musk plainly does not like that Ukrainians defend themselves; they should surrender to the stronger. He also has made clear, precisely during these last days and weeks, that he does not like elections, which do not always turn out in ways that make him happy. And even as he does so he suggests that there is some vast invisible web of power out there which is behind it all, and which is provoking him.

The more powerful these men become, the more the embrace a cult of irresponsibility, making it our fault when they take our rights to speak, to vote, to live. Such are the predictable reflexes of tyrants, which can now be realized with unprecedented rapidity and scope. What to our broligarchs (or cyberbarons, or technofascists) feels like a defense of their tender feelings is, for everyone else, the construction of a form of politics in which no one has the right to speech, no one has the right to democracy, no one has the right to life. If people have those rights, then things happen that hurt their feelings of the wealthy and powerful, or hurt the feelings of their wealthy and powerful friends, or generally make them uncomfortable.

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One of the two most important of the broligarchs, Musk himself, is now the chief financier of the Republican Party. He has donated, thus far, nearly half a billion dollars to Republican candidates in the midterm elections. And as he does so, Putin, the other sensitive centibillionaire, also helps Republicans by targeting Democrats on social media, which Russia has done in every election since 2016.

Something is emerging which can, should, and indeed must be stopped. It is a world in which one oligarch’s drones kill you because another oligarch helps, and in which a third oligarch then suppresses the discussion. This has all been incipient for some time; what is special about this last month, about the coincidence in time of these three assaults on freedom, is that they make our new Matrix or Skynet impossible to miss.

The global tech oligarchs, be they South African, Russian, or American, conspire with one another, while shutting the rest of us out of our freedoms, our democracy, and even our lives. They try to buy an American political party and try to ease its way into power. And they build their own kind of politics, one in which only they matter, one in which the rest of us will have no human rights, and indeed will not be regarded as human.

Such is the threat, and it is real, and elements of it are very new. But the general shape of the problem, the concentration of wealth and power in too few hands, was known to the ancient Greeks those two thousand five hundred years ago, and to the founders of the United States two hundred and fifty years ago. Five years ago, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, we were reminded again what happens when a single individual controls the wealth and the media of his country. The selfishness and the fantasy of one person becomes the grief and the nightmare of millions.

It is no surprise that people allowed to gather such wealth and influence combine whimsy with terror. That is the precise tendency that a certain type of government, indeed the American form of government, was designed to prevent.

Only a government can act to resolve this problem, but it has to be a government animated by people who care about freedom, and who vote out those who take money from the makers of our American Matrix, our American Skynet. Government animated by liberty can break up monopolies, government can tax centibillionaires, government can regulate media and social media platforms. All of this can be solved.

The wealthy few, the builders of our Matrix, or our Skynet, are powerful, but they are also vulnerable. Putin seeks and gets the help of his fellow oligarchs not because he is winning his war but because he is losing it. Musk rages about the results of elections because they are not going the way that he wants. Musk and Putin’s client Trump runs about in traditionally Republican states not because his party is ahead but because it is facing an electoral calamity. The three blatant violations of rights to life, expression, and voting became visible in October not because our global oligarchs wanted to flaunt their power, but because they knew that their power can be broken. They were flushed out by the power of people who want to live, who want to vote, who want to speak.

All of this seems like a bad dream. It will have to be made into a bad dream. Americans still enjoy freedom of speech; but those who oppose it have made themselves known. Americans can still vote in elections; but those who oppose voting have made themselves known. Americans can still imagine a country in which it is their lives and their dreams, that count, rather than the lethal fantasies of the wealthy and irresponsible few. A better future, a far better future, can replace the dystopias for which our oligarchs now so openly long. To get there, we will have to exercise the very rights that they now so openly hate

Timothy Snyder

snyder.substack.com - Our american matrix our american

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