[POINT DE VUE] Elon Musk, the bulldozer: and now, haro on Wikipedia!

It's the world's biggest fortune, and it's not about to stop there. Elon Musk could well become the first trillionaire in history, meaning his fortune would be in the trillions of dollars. Behind this astonishing and dazzling success, there is an extraordinary intelligence, a capacity for work which is no less extraordinary… and, above all, the habit of cutting corners and doing things as we have never done them before. never done. No wonder, in these conditions, that Donald Trump, immediately elected, entrusted Musk with the administration's optimization department. We can't imagine that in our latitudes. Optimizing administration, you don't think about it…

In short, Musk never goes out of his way to say what he thinks, and that didn't work out with fortune, obviously. He who said he wanted to recruit “ higher IQs willing to work more than 80 hours per week » for its future department intended to downsize the American administrative mammoth decided, this week, to tackle Wikipedia. With an almost “Trumpian” sense of play on words, he renamed the online encyclopedia “Wokepedia” and asked the 209 million subscribers of the social network until they restore balance in their editorial authority “. Among the reasons which angered the billionaire, there was firstly the fact that Wikipedia wants, in a caricatured way that has become almost corny, to promote “fairness” to the point of dedicating 31 of the 177 million dollars collected by the Wikimedia foundation to it. More generally, there is the recurring lack of objectivity in articles from Wikipediawhich is today the fourth most visited site in the world and whose left-wing political orientation is regularly singled out, in France and abroad. On its English-speaking site, Wikipedia talks about “ systemic bias », but it is mainly to criticize the… over-representation of white males who have completed higher education.

Maybe Musk is angry that Wikipedia considers that he “ facilitates the return and spread of conspiratorial discourse » and that some of its “ declarations » « are disinformation […] sexism and racism ”, as quite pleasantly noted Le Figaro. However, he puts his finger on a structural problem of Western “democracies”: the left is over-represented in the categories which prescribe opinion and when the people, until now rather docile, are moved by it, we 'insult. Perhaps it is time for this to stop, in fact, and for us to ensure a minimum of completeness in the representation of opinions.

However, behind this apparently saving rant, there is a cause for concern which should alert us collectively. The battle of opinion is no longer won on a human level and is no longer written with talent. What is needed now are sounding boards. Wikipedia is one. X is another. This is a battle of juggernauts, a battle in which the truth has even less importance than before. Everything is played out outside Europe, with billions, and with ideological biases (wokism on the one hand, libertarianism on the other) which are not ours and have nothing to do with philosophical tradition of Europe.

So, first of all, we can applaud Elon Musk, because his bulldozer side has something pleasing: wokism still has so many levers… But secondly, let's be wary of what is happening , way above our little taxpayer heads. Musk and the woke Americans probably don't care about our existence. What they want is the power to dictate the truth. And that is what should worry us.