2025-01-21

This morning’s image was taken in 2016, on Kodak Tri-X with an old Lomo camera from the early 80s (which, to my knowledge, has never been serviced). It was taken in Santa Monica, California. I dug this picture out because it predates, if memory serves, both Brexit and the first Trump election. It is an image from happier times.

I don't know if that was a Nazi salute. Yes, it certainly looked like one. But it equally looked like the uncoordinated flailing of a middle-aged nerd who's not comfortable in his own skin and got carried away attempting some undefined gesture of power and enthusiasm.

On the left, they're saying it was a Nazi salute. On the right they're saying it was a Roman salute (this is a weak argument given that a. there's no such thing and b. if there was such a thing, post 1945 it doesn't mean that any more). Nazis are excited about it, but their enthusiasm doesn't count for anything because they'd claim it even if it wasn't intended for them. And they're all too stupid to listen to anyway.

A lot of digital ink is going to be spilled debating this, and the sides are going to be predictable and we're going to hear a lot about Elon "owning the libs" and on and on. But I don't think it actually matters either way because, from his actions on Twitter moderation to his support of the AFD in Germany and of Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk has shown us that he is, at best, a Nazi sympathiser. We don't need the salute to seal the deal. We know what he is. Just as we don't need to parse the context of any given Donald Trump word salad to know, by his actions, that he is a racist.

The Bike Shed Effect, which is an element of Parkinson's Law of Triviality, tells us that people within an organisation will give outsize weight to trivial matters (the position and colour of a bike shed) in order to run out the clock on making more important decisions. See also "Why did Biden attend the inauguration?" or "It was all Kamala's fault" or a host of other details you can see being debated online. These aren't irrelevant in and of themselves, but they seem to be obscuring the main event, which is that the American electorate, by a majority, in a free and fair election, decided to vote for a fascist oligarchy. That's the problem the global community faces. It's one to which I see no obvious solution, but I don't think that a definitive answer as to whether or not Elon gave a Nazi salute is going to win the day. That debate, like the bike shed, is a distraction.

Within seconds of Elon's gesture, Bluesky lit up with "It's a Nazi salute." Then along came some people claiming that Elon Musk is autistic and therefore doesn't know what he's doing and that calling him a Nazi was now somehow ableist (one might argue that if he has such little control over his actions, giving him this much power in Government might have been foolish). Some people thought we should be plastering the image everywhere and affected not to be able to fathom why the New York Times were not leading with this "news", while other said we should hide the image and pretend it didn't exist, so as to starve the world's most visible human of publicity. Then along came some Jewish posters, who told us that merely replicating an image of a man giving what may or may not have been a Nazi salute was a hate crime in and of itself, because Jewish people find the image of the salute triggering. And then some other Jewish people showed up to say that they didn't find it triggering at all and that people should be able to see what Elon did.

And so social media spent the next few hours eating itself alive while the new President signed Executive Orders to close the borders, get rid of immigrants, roll back climate measures, pardon insurrectionists etc etc.

I do not have a solution for any of this stuff, and I despair as much as the next sane human being, but one thing has become clearer and clearer since 2016; social media, like Monty Python's Camelot, is a silly place.