You were right. You knew you were right. They knew you were right. They knew you knew you were right. And now we know. There’s proof. The “Twitter Files” confirm that behind the cloak of the algorithm, liberal employees of the tech giant were turning a nature preserve into their personal petting zoo, hiding the Hunter Biden laptop story, shadowbanning dissenting voices, and kicking a sitting president off the platform contrary to their own protocols. And, yes, they were up to their neck in government contacts, from the White House to the FBI, who requested and directed the restriction and manipulation of the public square. Now, of course, we are told by their colleagues in media and politics that these revelations are anticlimactic, that everyone knew Twitter had quality control procedures that, sure, might be described as shadowbanning but aren’t technically, since they get to make up the definitions. This, they insist, was all normal, things working as they were supposed to. 

Twitter presents us with a case study in the most pressing problem of our digital age. As technology has grown both in capacities and use, it has seemed to outstrip human scale and to mediate every aspect of human life, to the point where it might cease to be an object of human intention and will. Instead of a tool, it has begun to appear, whether in the form of bureaucratized corporations or even greater abstractions like the global market, as almost a sort of god, subjecting humanity to a will of its own. But as C.S. Lewis reminded us in The Abolition of Man, the growing power of science or technology over biological nature is in fact the growing power of some men over other men. Which means then that the apparent absence of human responsibility we associate with current technological order is only that, appearance. The human beneath such scale is obscure, but technologies are made by human hands, so it is never truly absent.