Tweeterdum

The defenestration of Trump from Twitter was long overdue and has resulted in a sense of relative piece and quiet throughout the world. Having deprived the epochal bloviator for the ages of his megamegaphone lowered the overall tone and volume of discourse throughout society, depriving wingnuts of institutional imprimatur from the very highest level.

But a vacuum has also been left, and we all know what nature thinks of vacuums. Who has been the heir apparent, Tweeterdum to Trump's Tweeterdie? Why Elon Musk of course, who rolls elements of Steve Jobs and Donald Trump together, fulfilling society's need for a big-mouthed white male oracle. Like Trump, Musk is willing to do things off the cuff and thumb his nose at traditional authorities, whether by smoking pot on the air with Joe Rogan, drawing the SEC's fire by tweeting about taking his company private without following through, tweeting about buying a jokey cryptocurrency or using Signal a secure messaging service to undercut Facebook's model and thereby driving a frenzy of buying stock in Signal Alliance, an altogether different company that does biotech stuff.

Part of Musk's attraction, as with Trump's, is his regular guyness. He doesn't pretend to be perfect or above it all, so people can identify with him. The problem is that the volume of attention paid to him gives him huge power, so the predominance of ego and id over recessive superego creates a heady brew in the wrong conditions. He's like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, whose piping is indistinguishable from most everyone else's but in nonetheless regarded as the greatest.

Musk is the new Trump and also the new Steve Jobs. At least, on balance, he is doing good things. Driving forward the adoption of electric vehicles and also battery technology in general. But he misuses his megaphone at times and gets people to do things that have the tendency to hurt them in the short run, so I am in many ways not a fan. But he for sure doesn't have time to care. I hope at least that he matures a little and learns to be a little more careful with his mouth.