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.
This is an accelerationist’s dream, and a centrist and moderate’s nightmare. The question at the heart of the debate within conservatism, of “who holds the real power,” was settled for good as the tech purge rolled.
After the reprehensible violence at the most respected state symbol of the American republic, tech companies and corporates took the fight to the other half of the populace. This is not just about banning President Trump as an individual or deleting his tweets from the official POTUS account. This is about choosing sides and flying a flag of war.