A bigger boat - Shawn Loughlin editorial
Well, my fellow peasants, how does it feel to be right smack-dab in the middle of a whole bunch of rich person stuff (if we were talking on the street, my dear readers, I might use a different “S” word)? Because that’s exactly where we are.
In his 33 years as a member of the Toronto Police Service, my father tended to view gang violence as being rather benign. Guys in gangs were killing other guys in other gangs - what should he care? That began to change (though it could be argued that it was never really true to begin with) around the time he decided to retire. I remember the 2005 Boxing Day shooting of 15-year-old Jane Creba stuck out to him as a shameful incident of gang violence spilling over and affecting civilians.
Rich person stuff used to be like that. Super rich dudes would show off to one another by measuring their... wealth in front of each other with big boats and bigger boats, or they would debate topics we couldn’t fathom in rooms we couldn’t access while drinking Scotch we couldn’t afford. This is no longer the case.
We are all now caught up in rich person webs as commodities they can’t do without. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, would be nothing without the millions of us on Twitter and billions of us on Facebook. Musk is doing whatever the hell it is he’s doing with Twitter (running it into the ground, according to many) and Zuckerberg (as well as Google) is playing God with Canadian media.
Facebook and Twitter have already turned into shameless marketplaces and disruptors of democracy, spreading misinformation and changing our world for the worse, which is a far cry from their humble beginnings as a way to connect with others half the world away.
Now, however, they’re turning into something entirely different. And we’re all along for the ride - whether we like it or not.
Musk heralded Twitter as this generation’s town square - open to all and for the good of humanity. Well, that didn’t last long. He has restricted Tweets to those who have an account (that counts me out and I couldn’t be happier) and even limited the number of Tweets those who have accounts can read in a day (unless you pay to be part of Twitter Blue - so, a town square for those who can afford to pay to read people complain about daily goings-on).
This is in addition to all of the other horrible changes he’s made, giving a platform to some of the world’s most hateful people. (Kudos to my cousin Mike who, several years ago, correctly identified Elon Musk as a sort of James Bond villain who was planning some sort of three-pronged world takeover from land, space and the internet. He was right.)
Then we have Zuckerberg. Portrayed in The Social Network as a brilliant mind who went out of his way to share his creations with the world for free, all that man now cares about is money, getting more money and retaining the money he already has. He is at the forefront of the pushback to Canadian Bill C-18 and will soon be pulling Canadian news availability from his sites in an effort to dodge paying for that content - kind of like a television station not paying for any of its shows.
The late NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer has been credited with this brilliant quote that only gets more relevant with age. “The answer to all of your questions is money.”
This is unfortunately true. Unfortunately, once again is that these dust-ups have moved from overstuffed leather chairs in oak-adorned cigar rooms to our smartphones, affecting our daily lives and, for some, our livelihoods, all so they can buy bigger boats.