Hi, everyone. Welcome to Positively Dreadful. I'm your host, Brian Boiler. This is going

to be an episode about Big Tech, but not about Silicon Valley per se, or the infinite scroll,

algorithms that drive phone addiction or utopian fantasies or any of that stuff. What I want to

try to understand better this week is what happens when the people responsible for all of that stuff,

so people who have always fancy themselves the smartest men in the world, people who have been

rewarded with Caesar-sized fortunes and are the surrounded with sycophants. What happens when

the shine comes off and the public starts to question their ingenuity, their power, their social

value? I'm specifically interested in what happens if and when they decide that despite all that

pushback their right and everyone else is wrong and then start deploying their immense resources

toward making sure nothing stands in their way. This is obviously a fairly small universe of

people and they're not all like that. They sometimes even back by each other about how they and

their competitors conduct themselves in public life. But some of them are like that and I think Elon

Musk's on again, off again, on again, hostile takeover of Twitter is a kind of live fire experiment.

In the risk of letting a handful of citizens and a democracy get so powerful that they can almost

compete with America's national sovereignty. It's not just that Twitter will be in the hands of

an ultra-billionaire. It has been in the past, after all, it's that it will pass in the hands of

the richest men in the world at a time when he's very publicly radicalizing against democracy,

making business alliances of convenience with foreign autocrats and seems to be joining forces with

nascent global network of right-wing billionaires and politicians who idolize Victor Orban and think

the world would be better off without liberalism so long as they were the ones pulling all the strings.

That is a relatively new thing. In some ways, I guess it's not all that new in that the American

right-wing and American industrialists have had alliances with foreign dictators in the past. But

...