Elon Musk, Twitter and the "Great Men" of Social Media
A conversation with John Naughton and Josh Simons
The Anti-Dystopians are back and this time we’re talking about Elon Musk—and what’s *really* important about his bid for Twitter.
I chatted with John Naughton, a technology columnist at the Observer and co-founder of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and Josh Simons, a postdoc in technology and democracy at Harvard University. We tried to tackle the thorny issue of how to see through the noise of Musk’s tweets, what the Twitter discussions revealed about platform ownership and control, and how to think about the challenges of reining in Big Tech.
As always, you can listen to it here or subscribe here (Spotify) or here (Apple Podcasts). If you like us, please rate, review and share the Anti-Dystopians to help us get new listeners. If you want to support the production of the show, you can visit here.
Further reading from the episode:
John Naughton in the Observer: When Elon Musk buys into Twitter, I don’t need a little bird to tell me something’s afoot
PayPal’s Peter Thiel may be a ‘genius’, but I’m still not champing at the bitcoin
Virtual Event
In case of interest, the Minderoo Centre at Cambridge is hosting James Muldoon for a virtual talk on his recent book, Platform Socialism, tomorrow. Should be interesting!
What I’ve been reading
Bernie Sanders agreeing with me about the private space race in the Guardian: “Jeff Bezos is worth $160bn – yet Congress might bail out his space company”
By the way, How Many Billionaires Are There, Anyway?
Moira Weigel with an excellent guest essay “What You Don’t Know About Amazon” in The NY Times
Review of “Private Virtues, Public Vices”: Does philanthropy threaten democracy?
Muting your mic reportedly doesn’t stop big tech from recording your audio (Did anyone else sort of suspect this already?)
More on Bad Things(TM) McKinsey does: McKinsey Opened a Door in Its Firewall Between Pharma Clients and Regulators
Tweet of the week
In case you were wondering, Despicable Me did feature in last week’s conference presentation about space colonization
Addendum - Research Questions
Researching some things on identity verification and digital platforms, please do let me know if you have any recommended reading!
Great podcast thank you. I am so glad I have found this Substack this is right up my street as a digital campaigner and writer on subjects similar to this.
Thank you I will now be going through other episodes.