Elon Musk shared an image on Twitter showing the titles of 3 books and the words, “YOU ARE HERE” in the middle. Let’s take a look at these 3 books and discuss how the Twitter files relate.
We’ll also look at Elon’s Twitter poll asking “Elon Musk should” a. Stay out of politics or b. Keep shooting his feet. 57.2% were in favor of “Keep shooting his feet.”
1. Brave New World, 1932
In a society where the “World Controllers” mastered genetic science to “perfect” the human race, humans are nothing more than ‘Alpha-plus mandarins and epsilon-minus semi-morons’ designed to perform menial tasks and educated to be blissfully content with pre-destined roles. Intellectual curiosity, a sense of history and scientific innovation are frowned upon because they threaten the ruling class’s power over the masses.
The purpose of all these distractions is to keep people contented so they don’t question the world around them. Society is designed to reject the consumption of old things—like Shakespeare, which is banned. This is another way to promote continuous consumption, because if people value old, outdated things (like old books and higher-quality, longer-lasting items) they won’t have any reason to buy new things.
Things from past eras when society functioned differently often contain deeper meaning and would inspire people to think critically, whereas new forms of entertainment encourage people to focus on the present only. Huxley himself gave advice for resisting this brave new world,
“Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.”
The Twitter Files are Elon Musk’s way of clearing the decks. Elon explained it this way,
“I think it’s important to, like if you know if we’re going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear the decks for stuff that’s happened in the past so to be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.(laughter from all) Haha, so … is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true? So far, they all turned out to be true. And if not more true than people thought.” –Elon Musk, All-In Podcast
Matt Taibbi wrote “Twitter Files: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In” about how once Twitter began rolling over for Congress in 2017, the ending was inevitable: formal surrender to the intelligence community on content moderation. Matt Taibbi shared,
2. 1984
When George Orwell published this book in 1949 it was around the same time as Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, House Un-American Activities Committee accused Alger Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union sealed off land routes to Berlin. 1984 immerses the reader in a world where a totalitarian government monitors people even in their private lives. Writing is illegal but main character Winston Smith keeps a diary and desires to beat the system. Everything about Winston’s life is miserable and that includes his job, the food he eats, and the dreary London cityscape he lives in. In his and all people’s daily lives there are hidden cameras and microphones everywhere, even at home TV screens spewing propaganda must never be turned off.
The signs “Big Brother is watching you” in the book have become synonymous in our culture for the dangers of a government that works to police our thoughts.
The Twitter Files show just how far our own United States government organizations were willing to go to control the public narrative on elections in the USA and SARS-CoV-2. Three examples are,
- By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
- By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
- By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
You can read about these in this thread shared by David Zweig, author of Invisibles.
Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an M.D., an economist, and a professor of health policy at Stanford warned about the dangerous impact of lockdowns, especially on children, the working class, and the poor.
In 2020, he and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then a professor of medicine at Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford wrote an open letter arguing for “focused protection” for the most medically vulnerable and a return to normal life for the rest of society. Twitter put Bhattacharya’s account on the Trends Blacklist, which meant that no matter how many likes or views one of his tweets racked up, it could never “trend”; its visibility to users on the platform would be sharply curtailed. You can read more about that in the article, “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists.”
3. Fahrenheit 451
The sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451’s title refers to the temperature at which paper burns. The book explores the dangers of a government that tries to control its people through censorship. Reading is illegal and books are burned any time they are discovered.
The main character, Ray, collects books but is betrayed by his own wife. Written in 1953 when people were just starting to buy cathode-ray TV sets. The book features Ray’s wife Mildred, who watches TV on three screens the size of an entire wall. The programs displayed on the walls are shallow, absurd and pointless. Mildred refers to the characters in her favorite program as her “family” and the actors talk over each other the entire time. Eventually Mildred gets tired of Ray and turns him in to the authorities and he is forced to burn his books and his house. 451 ends on a hopeful note when Ray escapes the city before a nuclear war begins and joins a group of intellectuals and academics who live in secrecy and memorize books to preserve them.
Lee Fang released Twitter Files Part 8 and wrote about how Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign in an article in the Intercept. Disturbing revelations are surfacing, as Fang wrote, “This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”
The Twitter Files reveal how the government paid millions of dollars to censor information from the public. Michael Shellenberger shares, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — “Bu alumni” — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” and adds a screenshot of an email.
Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files
CONCLUSION
Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are all science fiction novels that serve to warn people of what can happen if we give up our freedoms and allow others to control what we read or see. Our perception of reality will be skewed and humanity as a whole will be at risk.
For this reason, even if Elon Musk has to “shoot himself in the feet,” it is good that he will keep releasing Twitter Files. The Twitter files are very political because they are important in exposing what the government has been doing behind the scenes at Twitter for years.
Read the Twitter Files (free) on the Twitter Files Archive by Johnna Crider here.
Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – January 5 2022. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
My writing about Twitter strives to be accurate & leave you feeling optimistic and excited about the future. If you’re able, consider a donation to support!
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[…] AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a revised article from the original I wrote for my blog What’s Up Twitter on January 5, 2023. Elon Musk is hell bent on changing the status quo. How these 3 books relate to the Twitter Files. […]