Money Talks…

Elon Musk is a learning a lesson that most of us learned when we were young: there is no such thing as free speech. In the days following his purchase of Twitter Musk, self-described “free speech absolutist”, set about following through on his plans to make Twitter a free-speech platform and layoff a large proportion of the company’s employees. How he did this seems to have involved, in typical Musk style, not knowing what he was doing, as with the story (possibly apocryphal) about firing engineers simply according to who had written the fewest lines of code, or being dishonest about it, as witness the way he claimed nothing was changing with content moderation while firing members of the content moderation team.

Free speech absolutists like to think that there should be no consequences for any kind of speech. This idea achieves ludicrous dimensions when “speech” is expanded to include things like corporate campaign donations, but even with the narrowly restricted version of speech, it is never the case that speech has no consequences. Indeed, the idea of “no consequences” (really “no social consequences”) derives from that mythical, never-existing “state of nature” in which “natural man” has full agency and which provided the basis first of social contract theory and then of liberalism.

“No consequences for speech” is the watchword of every liberal defence of free speech, typically couched in reasons why “no consequences” must be right: it’s the only way to get at the truth, if there are to be consequences then who will be judge, etc, etc. As with many liberal discourses, these are completely disingenuous: there is no point in talking about how and why to maintain “no consequences” when consequences are unavoidable. And they are unavoidable because there never was a “state of nature” in which individuals had complete agency and which modern society is bound to protect.

We are born into social relationships and culture that predate us by generations. Those social relationships and that culture create who we are as individuals. And while we are learning to be individuals, there are consequences. If, as a child of five, I hear the words “fuck you” spoken and I witness the thrilling reaction it provokes, and I then try out the same word on my mother or father, I will found out that speech has consequences. If I destroy a sibling’s toy, lie about it, and am then forced to recant the lie, I will find out that speech has consequences.

Only the most twisted “state of nature” freak could construe my learning not to swear at my parents or that lying is wrong as a form of “self-censorship” that has no place in a democratic society.

Later, when I move into the workforce, I find out not only that “free speech” is not consequence-free but that speech can and is compelled. My first real job was in an AT&T call centre. Not only could I not swear at customers with impunity, but I had to follow a script for the opening and closing of each call. Not following these rules had consequences. Whether or not we want that to be the case, all I am trying to show here is that “no consequences” for speech is an illusion.

But it’s important to remember that consequences are most often not themselves speech. Someone who doesn’t speak to a government social worker with the proper respect may find themselves not receiving government benefits. Someone who mouths off to an (overworked, underpaid, exhausted) nurse or teacher may find themselves not treated with “liberal universal equality”. And this is all good. This is how social relations work. We try to be careful, we screw up, we take our lumps, we move on. We are never out of society’s stream. Nothing ever pauses for us to figure something out.

Things become more pointed when you think about work. If your speech offends your boss, consequences flow with impunity (this happens even in unionized environments), and those consequences - in the form of paychecks - affect your ability to clothe, feed, and house yourself, as well as your ability to continue getting paychecks. In the worst case scenario, if you get fired with no reference (or a bad reference) and can’t afford the clothes you need for an interview or the stable housing you need to get a good night’s sleep for an interview, the consequences affect your ability to get another job. Again, I’m not talking about what should happen in a civilized world; I’m just trying to be realistic. Working class people, marginalized and oppressed people, ordinary people are under no illusions that there are indeed consequences for speech. There is no such thing as free speech.

Indeed, perhaps the clearest example of speech not being “free” was that it cost Elon Musk $44 billions dollars to buy Twitter after running his mouth.

I don’t know (and frankly don’t care) about Musk’s early days, whether he ever worked a job where he had to watch his mouth for fear of consequences, or whether he had to “self-censor” in early conversations with any of his future wives. But it certainly appears that once he became a self-made individual, the richest man on the planet, he fell for the liberal myth hook, line, and sinker. And to be fair, having that much money does remove many of the consequences of speech: there are very few people out there who can affect your paycheck at that point.

And that is how Musk has behaved ever since he hit the public eye. As Rousseau’s “natural man” made flesh. And leaving aside the machinations behind his takeover of Tesla, he presented himself as a man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, created his wealth and power by his own acts of individual will. And his followers lapped it up. It was all a lie, but it’s a lie we’ve been conditioned to swallow.

But it turns out there are other entities who can affect Elon Musk’s paychecks. Even the world’s richest man, that Prometheus of industry, cannot evade the power of social relations. Even apart from the forced purchase of Twitter, Musk is finding out that there’s no such thing as free speech.

When he took over Twitter (flirting with a QAnon meme as he did so), Musk sent a signal that Twitter was now a free speech/no consequences platform. Many users immediately took advantage of that, pushing the limits of what could be said to see if they would fall foul of Twitter’s moderation team and policies. In the confusion of those days, and with Musk continuing to trumpet freedom of speech, advertisers got scared. They have learned a hard lesson over the past few years, that having their ads appear in conjunction with hate speech affects their bottom line. No speech without consequences… for someone.

(Kanye West, another Rousseauian natural man, is learning the same lesson as Musk. After crowing last year that Adidas couldn’t drop his contract even if he was openly anti-semitic, Ye found out recently that they absolutely would drop him, as he engaged in various anti-semitic diatribes.)

So advertisers are pulling out of Twitter in droves, costing the company $4 million a day, according to Musk himself. He is desperately trying to reassure advertisers that content moderation is still in place. Not only does free speech have consequences, but Musk is finding out that some speech is even compelled.

Liberal defenders of free speech or intellectual freedom won’t usually consider cases like this. Because liberalism is the ideology of capitalism, they cleverly bracket off corporate activity and corporate culture from questions of free expression. The classic liberal antichrist is the state and the mob, and today’s free speech absolutists only worry about them. Corporations can do what they like.

And this is why free speech defenders are so disingenuous and ideologically blinkered. “Freedom” can’t be limited according to its sphere of operation. You can’t claim that a socio-economic system which routinely infringes on your own definition of free speech is a society founded on free speech.

It would be easier if we gave up on the liberal, individualist idea of freedom completely. It has never existed. Freedom, if it exists, means something else. In order to clear the way to figure out what that is, I would love it if we could have a moratorium on the word “freedom” for a decade. But I don’t have the power to silence or compel, so that’s unlikely to happen.