As a staunch proponent of ignore them and they’ll go away, it’s tough to allow myself to get dragged into the Twitter/Blue Check “controversy,” but I noticed what looks like a gold nugget in the pile of shit and I’m gonna pluck it out and take a gander.
Most of my journalism career has focused on covering small businesses in a decidedly conservative region. I interviewed good and serious people who have a dated(?) view of how democracy works (or at least how it ought to work).
Now, I’m not sure what idiots endorsed property-based voting privileges, but I have a guess. Small business owners suggesting they should be able to vote wherever they owned property coincided with the Tea Party gaining traction.
Whatever the origin, it was something I heard repeatedly from business owners in Ocean City and Berlin, Maryland.
They weren’t town residents because the people who held these opinions were wealthy enough to move to tony home owners associations where they pay an extra fee to have extra rules (and also to keep the rabble out). HOAs are corporations, not democracies. In an HOA you get one vote for each piece of property you own.
The idea behind shareholder-style voting in HOAs is that the developer has majority voting rights, which means no one can keep them from building out the way they want (or raise fees) until they’ve assured their profit.
I’d rather live in a neighborhood than a corporation, but that’s a luxury I have. Increasingly, the only decent homes are in HOAs. I would never begrudge a person for buying a home that they liked. Hell, as I mentioned before, I’m one of the reasons Andy Harris will never have to have a straight job, so I’m not throwing stones.
Let’s look at the warped thinking that is corporate democracy, though. I think it might help explain the warped thinking that buying blue checks to have your tweets elevated is somehow democratic.
The idea that shareholders should be able to vote based on the number of shares they own makes sense on a corporate level; because you have more to lose, you get more say. It plays into the cockamamie American bias that associates wealth with intelligence.
I mean, we’ve only barely stopped associating wealth with divine will, so I guess associating wealth with intellect makes as much sense as any other arbitrary intangible.
A quick aside, the brilliant Why Would You Tell Me That? podcast just did an episode on Nobel-itis, which is exactly what it sounds like.
What gets lost is whether and if life and wealth are different. Ideally, the premise behind democracy is that we all get a vote because government decisions affect our lives as well as our wealth. To conflate the two, to value a life on its earning ability, is morally offensive. At least, I like to believe it is, and I like to believe that you agree.
I quit working for Twitter and Facebook a while ago. I never got a blue check. I don’t believe they even shortlisted me for one, so I don’t have any skin in this game.
What’s disturbing is the notion that Twitter has some responsibility it can or ought to live up to. We don’t feel that way about Coke.
Hell, the podcast-famous therapy company, Better Help just admitted to selling people’s information to Facebook and paid a fine. The people who planned and profited from opioid proliferation paid their fine with couch-cushion money. America doesn’t care about corporate responsibility. If it did, it would use its death penalty more broadly.
The debate we ought to be having isn’t about whether people should have to pay a company for preferential treatment. I paid essentially a week’s salary to be treated like cattle by American Airlines recently. Had I paid more, I’d have received humane treatment. That debate is over.
It would be much more interesting to see thought leaders discussing whether Elon Musk is right about democracy.
Mark Twain’s argument against compulsory education suggested that people with advanced degrees should get extra votes. He thought that the intelligencia had the most skin in the game because they thought about the past and future as well as the present.
Twain was kidding (mostly ), but I think he set the argument up right. Some people simply have more say. The question is whether we should codify that fact or work to undermine it.