Is Twitter really worth 44 billion dollars ? Nobody knows. But for some background and history, Google acquired Youtube for 1.65 billion dollars in 2005. In 2021 and for 20 billion Microsoft bought the company “Nuance”, specialized in conversational artificial intelligence. In 2016, Microsoft again spent 26 billion dollars to buy LinkedIn. In 2014 Facebook bought WhatsApp for 22 billion dollars, half the amount that Musk is investing today to acquire Twitter. And in 2012 the same Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. The company is now worth 100 times more. All of the companies targeted by these acquisitions have a history. And the biggest offers don’t always make the best stories.
Why Twitter ? Considering the companies that Musk runs today, why acquire Twitter, which is as far from the aerospace sector (SpaceX) as it is from the telecommunications sector (Starlink), public works (Boring Compagny builds tunnels to solve the problem of urban traffic jams), the automobile sector (Tesla) or neural interfaces (Neuralink)? Let’s formulate some hypotheses.
Maybe because Twitter is the best PR agency on the planet and no big boss would give up the chance to get exclusive use of it. Maybe because in the great contest of dominant toxic males in the “tech” sector, it was unbearable for Musk that Zuckerberg owns Facebook (and WhatsApp and Instagram), that Bezos owns the Washington Post and that he only owns a fleet of cars and rockets. Maybe the man who tweeted compulsively found it unbearable to be able to express himself so much and with so much enjoyment on a medium that was not his own. Perhaps he is making his transition to what Mc Kenzie Wark calls the “vectorialist class” :
Here, in the overdeveloped world, the bourgeoisie is dead. It has ceased to rule and govern. Power is in the hands of what I have called the vectorialist class. Whereas the old ruling class controlled the means of production, the new ruling class has a limited interest in the material conditions of production, in mines, blast furnaces and assembly lines. Its power is not based on the ownership of these things, but on the control of logistics, on the way they are managed. Vector power has two aspects, intensive and extensive. The intensive vector is computational power. It is the power to model and simulate. It is the power to monitor and calculate. And it is also the power to play with information, to transform it into narrative and poetry. Extensive vector is the power to move information from one place to another. It is the power to move and combine anything with anything else…
La suite est à lire sur: affordance.framasoft.org
Auteur: Olivier Ertzscheid Olivier Ertzscheid
