First, a brief history of the greatest show on earth. From buying a massive stake of Twitter to joining the board, to leaving the board, to buying the company, to perhaps not buying the company, to no wait yes I am definitely buying this company… the story of Elon Musk and the internet’s most beloved toxic waste dump social media platform has captured the hearts and minds of America. In direct response to Elon’s threat to not censor political content, the press — which is now a class in favor of robust, authoritarian speech controls — went to scorched-earth total war with the billionaire shitposting god of tech, targeting advertisers in an effort to starve the company of cash, and targeting politicians in an effort to provoke draconian congressional measures. Amidst the chaos, Elon revealed the company was in danger of going bankrupt. Half his employees were laid off. Dramatic product changes were made, including the elimination of bluecheck media status, and the introduction of a new revenue stream in human verification. Mutineers were fired. An ultimatum for the remaining employees was presented. A third of them walked away, and over the course of one, surreal night, “misinformation experts,” aging columnists, and Crunchies-era celebrity venture capitalists lost their minds, thoroughly convinced the platform they both hated and could not live without was in imminent danger of dissolving. Through actual tears, and panicked, lip-quivering sobs, the worst people on the internet said good bye, farewell, I told you this would happen!, please follow me on Substack for $10 a month.

Finally, for a couple of hours, it was quiet.

Then Elon announced Apple, the most powerful company in the world, threatened to remove Twitter from the app store.

Welcome to the Tech Civil War.

The girl who cried stochastic terrorism. Before we dive into the conflict between Apple and Musk, we do need to briefly examine this month’s spectacular media meltdown. In the first place, we need to do this because it’s funny. But it’s also important we fully understand the stakes in this escalating war for language.

Until a month ago, every tech giant with the power to censor speech was politically aligned. This meant the One Party — a tacit, if unofficial marriage of media, government, business, academia, and tech — maintained de facto monopoly control of political speech in America. Elon’s Twitter presents a confusing, enigmatic complication to that equation. For this, the once-celebrated techno futurist responsible for everything from jump-starting the electric vehicle movement to founding the private space industry was overnight recast by our nation’s culture makers as the darkest, most dangerous villain in America.

With the press, the government, and now the most powerful company in tech committed to re-establishing the prior system of speech control, in which a few “trusted experts” were granted exclusive control of the “truth” on every platform — rather than merely all but one — it’s worth exploring the question of who these experts are. And how do they define the truth?

Over the last four weeks, almost every major piece of Twitter disinformation was amplified to national attention by just a small handful of activists and media influencers, all classically verified, all ostensibly focused on fighting disinformation, with all but one of them employed by a major media company (the outlier is employed by Harvard). But there is nobody more influential in the nascent space of professional thought policing than NBC’s chief “misinformation expert” Ben Collins, who for weeks predicted a cataclysmic end to the platform, culminating in a victory lap the night a third of Twitter’s remaining employees took a severance and left.

This is an “expert” cited throughout the press specifically for his understanding of the modern information landscape, which is to say tech. He literally thought the company was shutting down. But Ben’s reporting often transcends the realm of mere aggressive stupidity, and enters the realm of more obvious propaganda.

Ten days ago, a mass shooting took place at a Colorado Springs gay bar. Five people were brutally murdered (the New York Times published an excellent portrait of the heroic response here). Within hours Ben appeared on MSNBC, spreading what appears to be a string of entirely fabricated stories for which there has still been no correction. From Jesse Singal, in a three-part thread that begins here:

Ben’s intention is clear, and even admirable. This man believes, truly, the lives of gay people are at risk because people like Tucker Carlson openly admit they don’t like drag queens dancing for children. But because Ben believes in stakes for speech so deadly, he isn’t committed to accurate reporting. He’s committed to stopping murder, and he believes terrifying America into broad support for censoring anti-gay “hate speech” is the best way to do that.

When parents express anger over the trans-ing of their very young children in public schools, for example, that is not merely a bad opinion, that is “stochastic terrorism,” a form of language that is literally violence, and should therefore be illegal. As an activist, Ben isn’t interested in parsing the “truth.” He’s interested in manipulating people into doing something he believes to be the right thing. Which, great. Love that for him. But we’ve placed him in charge of the “truth,” a concept to which he is openly hostile.

After Ben’s home at NBC, which is owned by Comcast, which is directly competitive with Elon’s Starlink, the next major fount of Twitter disinformation is the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is directly competitive with Elon’s SpaceX. Among purportedly serious press outlets, the Post has been uniquely unobjective (a trend I first began to parse six months ago). But no Post staffer has made so grand an art of propaganda as Taylor Lorenz.

Just before Thanksgiving, in an appearance on the BBC, a visibly anxious and erratic Taylor attacked Elon with what can only be properly characterized as a string of outright lies, notably including a reference to an aggressive censorship campaign that does not exist. The campaign allegedly targeted all “negative content” on the platform, a stray comment of Elon’s spun into invented law, which Taylor nonetheless correctly noted posed a problem: who is defining “negative content”? Bizarrely, it was a weak echo of the last ten years of libertarian concern — a concern I share. Great point, Taylor! Anyway, the woman’s brief flirtation with integrity did not last long. Two days later, she reported Elon’s intention to allow banned users who had not broken the law back on the platform was — in the words of one “expert” — akin to “opening the gates of hell.”

The “expert” cited in Taylor’s piece was a pro-censorship activist named Alejandra Caraballo. Weeks ago, in the early hours following Elon’s takeover, it was Alejandra who first propagated the false story that a wave of hate speech gripped the platform. This was not true. But the point was cited throughout the press, specifically by Ben and Taylor, and later used by Taylor as evidence the Twitter terms of service had been changed to greenlight “hate speech” (to date, no such change has taken place (Taylor’s piece remains uncorrected)). Here, we discover an interesting pattern.

When Alejandra said advertisers would be worried about the organic spike in platform hate speech (a lie), what she signaled — through her allies in the press — was “bombard advertisers over hate speech.” Activists listened, and advertisers acquiesced. But the advertiser game is a long con, and Twitter can defend against the attack for at least a year. Not only is the company sitting on as much as $6 billion in cash, Elon just — you may have heard — dramatically reduced his cost of operation. At this point, we understand the advertising blitz is not enough to kill the company. Activists have also received the memo.

In Taylor’s latest piece of propaganda, Alejandra has a new suggestion, and she makes this one more explicit:

“Apple and Google need to seriously start exploring booting Twitter off the app store” said Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s cyberlaw clinic [PW EDITOR’S NOTE: LOL]. “What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities.”

To her credit, Taylor is an effective activist. Her call for Apple to nuke the company appears to have immediately been answered.

Pour one out for Jobs. It’s not yet certain why Apple threatened Twitter. We haven’t seen the notice Elon mentioned, and in any case he reported the threat was ambiguous. Most people following the story, across ideological lines, assume it has something to do with the question of content moderation, as this has come up before for Apple, both with Twitter and elsewhere (most notably Parler, when nearly every major tech company conspired to silence a sitting president, and all of his supporters). What we do know is Elon has, characteristically, reacted. Strongly.

There is the question of Apple’s motivation. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to make much sense for Apple to threaten Twitter before the platform has meaningfully changed, and certainly not in terms of content moderation. Why risk blowback for nothing? Nonetheless, we know that Omnicon, Apple’s ad agency, recommended all clients pause spending on Twitter, and Apple went ahead and took its own advice. Then, after Elon reinstated Trump’s account, Phil Schiller, the man who oversees Apple’s app store left the platform. Could this really just be a thing of values? After all, Apple has been home to some of the most incredible activist excesses over the last several years. Or is there maybe a more tactical motive?

Congress, under the Democrats, already proposed antitrust legislation targeting the company. Nothing new here, dismantling important American companies is something of a bread-and-butter position for the far left, which constitutes a critical component of the Democratic Party’s base. But at the moment, there is one thing more popular on the far left than self-immolation. That would be aggressive political censorship. Is Tim Cook offering the Democrats in government and media a carrot? A veiled promise to maintain the censorship status quo in exchange for leaving his monopoly alone? Time will tell. But what we know for sure is if Apple does choose the nuclear option, declaring war on Twitter, Elon will one hundred percent happily burn his entire world down to win. He will also have many allies.

In one deleted tweet on Monday, Elon shared a meme touching on another piece of the puzzle: Apple takes a 30% cut of every in-app purchase on the iPhone, recently including a tax on ads that has most especially brutalized Facebook and Instagram. This policy has naturally made Apple a greatly-loathed company throughout the industry, including notable critics Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), Spotify, and Fortnite. Mark Zuckerberg has long-since proven his ease with petitioning the government for legislative action, whether the government listens or not. If Cook strikes Twitter, we could see industry wide support for antitrust legislation.

As dearest new Twitter intern (and legendary hacker) George Hotz noted:

Politically, the situation will be a little more complex, but just as weird. Ron DeSantis, the newest star of the Republican Party, has already threatened Apple over just the hint of targeting Twitter.

For anyone politically right of center, a system of total censorship administered by an “expert” class of Harvard-based Marxist activists is an existential threat, and Elon — despite whatever flaws — is the only light in that dark tunnel. The GOP will defend him. It will use the power of government to do so. And it presently controls the House.

But what about the left? That is a great question, in answer to which I’ll ask another: have you ever met a socialist who didn’t want to dismantle a giant company? No? Neither have I. While I expect most Democrats to recognize the power in play, and to hypocritically resist — at least for now — any calls for antitrust legislation targeting Apple, there could very well be enough bi-partisan support to pose a legitimate threat to the company. But the likeliest thing to earn buy-in from the left will be some kind of broader hit against the entire technology industry. In this way, every giant company could be dragged into Washington’s crosshairs.

As in any civil war, the destruction of value in such a scenario would be both considerable and completely localized, which is to say the only thing the industry would hurt would be the industry. And it would hurt a lot.

Then, in the end, who would be left standing?

The thing about war is there aren’t always winners, which is why I’m hoping calmer heads prevail, and Apple relaxes its dictator shit. But if the company does escalate, my perhaps controversial opinion is I’m betting on the guy currently building his own world, powered by his own grid, circled and connected by his own satellite network, linked to earth by his own rocket system, which he lovingly talks about on his own social media platform.

Elon is creating the closest thing the world has to a second, self-contained tech stack. An Apple first strike would be bad news for the man. But Tim better hope he doesn’t miss, because that counterstrike will be hell. For everyone.

-SOLANA