One of the main reasons for writing about the Open Social Web for me is that I keep having the question for myself of “What is this thing even?” I want to understand how this collective network functions, but also what it actually is. Normally, that means I write about the events and softwares in the atmosphere and the fediverse. But this week, I regret to say, it’s time to look at X again, because it allows for insight into how the dynamics and interaction between social networks and the physical world and politics has been evolving.
So let’s talk about why Elon Musk is Bad. There are many a reason why Elon Musk is a bad person, and I’m sure you are familiar with a good number of them. For this week, we need to talk about the race riots in Belfast.
On Monday night, a Sudanese asylum seeker was charged with attempted murder after a knife attack in north Belfast, with graphic footage of the attack spreading rapidly on X. Tommy Robinson and other far-right figures posted lists of protest locations across the UK, announcing that “the whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight.” What followed in Belfast was a pogrom: masked men broke down the doors of houses with families inside, burned homes and cars, with crowds targeting properties where migrants lived. Musk amplified the protest calls to his two hundred million followers, reposting the location lists and writing that “only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change.”
I want to be careful here to not make the entire riots about Musk, as that attributes him too much power, as well as absolves the people who committed the violence of their own agency and responsibility.
Instead I want to focus on the structure of violence, specifically violent riots. For violent riots to happen, two things need to exist: the physical capacity for violence, and the permission structure to convert that latent capacity into action. Virtually every society has a group of people in it who hold grievances and are willing to commit violence to settle those grievances. The limiting factor is coordination and permission: giving this group of people a felt sense of permission that they are allowed to commit this violence, as well as the shared understanding within the group of how they can coordinate and who or what they will target.
This makes it clear what Musk’s role is. Musk did not commit physical violence, he is not responsible for that part, that is the responsibility of the people in the streets. Musk’s role and responsibility is for the permission structure, for the sharing of targets, for providing coordination infrastructure, and for providing a (deeply twisted) sense of moral permission for the rioters.
The ability to create a permission structure for violence in a society is one of the most powerful and dangerous abilities a person can have. Musk has that capability, and this is not the first time he’s used it either. He played a similar role in the UK riots in summer 2024, elevating various groups and leaders who instigated the riots, such as the fascist party Britain First and former leader of the English Defense League Tommy Robinson, and posting that “Civil war is inevitable”. It also extends to sexual violence, where the capability to generate CSAM and deepfakes is handed to Grok and the people who use it, with Musk providing the moral permission for people to do so by interpreting it all as a joke, posting 🤣 emojis about it.
This is already Bad, and to the people who are working on building open social networks as an alternative to Big Tech platforms another entry on a long long list of reasons as to why it is important to do so. But the real interesting part is in the political (non) response here, because the more you think about it the more bizarre it gets.
In response to the riots in Belfast, Starmer’s spokesperson said that there is “no change” to the Government’s policy on using X, and that there are no new plans to take action against X for its role in the violence. Starmer’s official statement, posted on X of course, condemns the violence and says that there “is no justification for the violence and disorder that we saw threatening our communities, nor for those who encouraged it, online or elsewhere”, which is roughly the entirety that the UK government is willing to say about the social structures that created the permission for violence.
This mirrors behaviour in the EU regarding Grok’s ability to generate CSAM and deepfakes. A lot of stern posts on X and statements by politicians that this is unacceptable, with a few government agencies opening investigations, all of which conveniently ensures that politicians never have to take actual action. Meanwhile, Wired reports this week that “Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot is apparently still being used to produce and host nonconsensual explicit images and videos of women, months after Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI said it would introduce restrictions to stop the creation of potentially harmful sexualized deepfakes.”
So while the politicians will happily make statements that violence is unacceptable, their actual behaviour shows the opposite: it is clearly acceptable to operate a chatbot that generates non-consensual deepfakes and to help coordinate racist riots. And this is not for a lack of capability either, the UK directs ISPs to block football piracy sites within hours every single week, and the Online Safety Act literally contains service restriction orders for non-compliant platforms.
I’ve been hesitant to write the following section, since I originally thought Connected Places was just a blog about some cool new software.
I think we need to go all the way to the fundamentals: what actually is a nation state, and what does it do? The dominant political philosophy, going through Hobbes and Weber, is that the nation state is an entity that has a monopoly on violence. Wikipedia helpfully says here: “Weber describes the state as any organization that succeeds in holding the exclusive right to use, threaten, or authorize physical force against residents of its territory. Such a monopoly, according to Weber, must occur via a process of legitimation.”
The permission structure described above is Weber’s authorization layer, and that is the part of the monopoly Musk now demonstrably exercises. What we are seeing now is that European nation states are deliberately and explicitly retreating from their exclusive right to threaten and authorise physical force. While they strongly hold a monopoly on the use of physical violence, and that’s not something I see changing, challenges to the exclusive right to threaten force go unanswered. Just yesterday, Musk posted a call to ‘imprison the government’. The silence from any European government on this post has been deafening.
I cannot overstate enough how bizarre this is, historically speaking. The idea that a government wants to protect its continuing existence, and that a state has monopoly on violence, is so core to our understanding of politics that we take it for granted and rarely think about it. Political theory is largely built upon the idea that states will do anything to protect this monopoly on violence. So the assumption is that when states lose this ability, then this is a recipe for Bad Things.
Instead, nobody seems to have a good framework or language to describe what is happening now, as it is a category error: states are supposed to protect their sovereignty, and when that is being threatened we would know, because everyone would panic. But what we are seeing now is the opposite: when the sovereignty of states is being threatened, it turns out that nobody cares. Most of all, the leaders of the states being threatened do not seem to care. The world’s first trillionaire is openly saying that he wants to overthrow a foreign government, in plain text, for all the world to see. And the response has been nothing?
Our entire political understanding of how states behave is based on the idea that governments generally Do Not Appreciate It when powerful other entities threaten their existence. I don’t know of any political theory that has accounted for the possibility where the governments that are being threatened instead just … ignore it? And then happily continue to let said threat mediate their own communication with their citizens?
I’m writing this, not because I want to further convince you that Musk is Bad, I’m sure you’re already know that part. But I do want to put this in writing to say that how deeply and utterly bizarre this is. The type of bizarre that gets to the very core of how we view our society.
I do also want to tie this back to the whole movement of building open social networks, that are not owned by Big Tech platforms.
Last week was the Public Spaces conference in Amsterdam, with ‘Technology for Democracy’ as a theme. It was great to see so many people working in the space in-person, and it was absolutely lovely. I wish I could just write about the conference, and all the cool new stuff thats been happening, and it shows that in Europe there is now a strong sense of the need for sovereignty.
But I did want to get this out instead, because this matters directly for the open social web movement. On the European side, the pitch has increasingly become sovereignty: open protocols as the path to independence from Big Tech. That pitch assumes, understandably so, that European governments want to be sovereign. The events of this week, combined with previous non-responses, such as Grok generating CSAM, are a demonstration that the assumption is at least partially broken. The deepest function of sovereignty is that a government defends its own continued existence and its exclusive right to authorise force. What we watched instead was governments declining to do so, in public, with the world’s richest man openly calling for their imprisonment.
I’ll keep writing about the protocols and the software, because that work continues and it matters. But I wanted to put this on the record: I find what is happening profoundly bewildering and disorienting, in a way that goes to the core of how I thought states behave. We might be building sovereignty infrastructure for governments that have decided they can live without it. What that means for the movement’s strategy, I really don’t know yet.
