William D. Cohan, How Loud Billionaires Convert Their Wealth Into Power, NYTimes, Feb. 5, 2024.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, is an annoying and persistent contrarian. Not content just to help oust Harvard’s president Claudine Gay on charges of plagiarism, and for making public statements he disapproved of, he’s been using his social media presence (including his 1.2 million followers on X) to campaign for the removal of Sally Kornbluth as the president of M.I.T.
Whether you think Mr. Ackman is a billionaire blowhard or a courageous iconoclast, he is part of a paradigm shift in social media, where rich people are increasingly able to convert financial capital into social capital. He’s hardly even the first or most outrageous beneficiary of this unfortunate reality: That distinction probably belongs to his fellow billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who, like Mr. Ackman, have also discovered that unfiltered, limitless social media platforms are heaven for those with unconventional opinions and God complexes.
But why do wealthy people like Mr. Ackman make such a fuss on X, posting lengthy diatribe after lengthy diatribe? His passion for the platform, especially since Mr. Musk bought it, suggests that he wants to enlist in his battles more than just other wealthy donors to Harvard and to M.I.T. He wants to reach the public, a public that doesn’t enjoy the same freedoms on social media that he does.
Is free speech a luxury good?
When only the ultrawealthy, as a practical matter, can afford to speak freely without consequences, what does freedom of speech really mean? There is a vogue among the superrich like Mr. Ackman, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump for misconstruing the First Amendment as permission to support their particular vision of how public speech should work. [...] With the guardrails increasingly coming off on what can be shared on these social media platforms, it’s no surprise that the rich are benefiting disproportionately.
This is a strategy intended to make power, not access, the main determinant of who gets to participate in free speech. On platforms such as X where an unhinged definition of free speech is wildly prevalent, the people who are harassed into silence are thought of not as a loss to the public discourse, but rather as properly constrained bullies. This thinking is unacceptable. [...]
But when people without his megaphone or his wealth cannot dare to respond to him — or his kind — without fear of significant reprisal, we risk heading into a world where free speech is yet another luxury that only the wealthy can afford.
And this kind of authoritarian ranking has heightened in many places. I retired at the right time: the nursing administration had become similarly rigidly judgmental in distinguishing their power over the peons of floor staff.
ReplyDelete