If tech feudal lords and oligarchs can decide which sovereign has a voice and platform, then sovereignty is meaningless. Europeans must take note.
By Sumantra Maitra
Whatever the result of the massive Twitter purge, it made one thing clear to the world. Carl Schmitt’s most important and controversial aphorism, “sovereign is he who decides the exception” is still timeless.

In the American republic, the sovereign is not the state, which has hollowed out. The sovereign now is the group of neo-feudal oligarchs, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, who now decide and control who can speak, see, learn, and buy, and what and when. Give them an army of their own like the East India Company, and the American state is over. //

The hypocrisy here is the establishment of a new hierarchy and power structure. Twitter is doing what it can, not what it cannot. Tech companies can go against Western conservatives because they are not afraid of Western conservatives. They have realized that, due to their ideology and free-market dogma, modern conservatives are impotent about using the state or power.

Twitter cannot do that with China or Antifa, because there will be real consequences in terms of their revenue or street violence. In other words, tech companies are afraid of state power in some countries (China, Russia) and not in others (the free-market United States). The principle of power remains the same. As Phillippe Lemoine said, “Twitter banned Trump because it could and that’s all there is to it. At least the Athenians were honest with the Melians before they destroyed them.” //

No wonder China, Russia, the European Union, and India are trying to control their internet. Their sovereignty is in question if tech oligarchs decide who can speak and who cannot. And the Chinese are happy to rub it in that at least in China, the state remains supreme to a bunch of feudal lords arbitrarily deciding rules. //

The tech-lash censoring of the president and a bunch of conservatives is similar to the king realizing during Magna Carta that it’s the feudal lords who hold real power, not him. It is the duty of historians to add that conservatives have only themselves to blame if they lose the war with the tech neo-feudalists.

They had years to break up monopolies. They didn’t. Vae Victis. The coming consequences will be severe.