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  "description": "When Elon Musk calls to imprison the government, it turns out not to matter very much. But when thousands of accounts repeat each other, it matters enormously.",
  "path": "/the-permission-machine/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-23T18:01:45+00:00",
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  "tags": [
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  "textContent": "At its core, a decentralised social network is a network without a single central point, where no single person controls the whole thing. Which means it is also a network that a government cannot control. This is a story about how a government behaves when its sovereignty is explicitly threatened by powerful actors, and the threat is coming through a social network it feels it cannot control. For a blog about building social networks that governments cannot control, that is about as on-topic as it gets: if we succeed, how do governments behave toward the thing we are building? A short recap: on the 9th of June, following a stabbing in Belfast by a Sudanese man, anti-immigrant riots broke out in which crowds went door to door looking for houses occupied by immigrants and set homes, businesses and cars on fire. The riots were coordinated in part over social media, with figures including Elon Musk amplifying them to his two hundred million followers, and Musk going on to post, repeatedly, calls to 'imprison the government', and media characterising it as a 'race-based pogrom. Eleven days later, Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned, but interestingly enough, the riots and Musk's calls to overthrow the government appear to have had nothing to do with that resignation. I wrote about these events two weeks ago, saying that I was bewildered. I am less bewildered now, and this article is me structuring why. A brief point on political theory: Max Weber described that one of the core characteristics of a nation state is that it has a monopoly over violence in its jurisdiction. Crucially, Weber makes the distinction that there are two parts to this, that states must have a monopoly over the execution of violence, as well as the legitimisation of violence. Normally we think of the state's monopoly on violence as being about physical force, with soldiers and police. But Weber's point includes the authority to legitimise violence: the state claims to be the one entity that gets to say which violence is justified. Plenty of legitimisation happens outside the state, of course, with people arguing for and against the justice of this or that violence all the time. What the state claims is that it holds the final authority over what counts as legitimate, and that this authority is part of what makes it a state at all. What is striking about the UK right now is that you can watch these two halves of the monopoly behave differently. The state still defends its hold on the execution of violence, moving within days when something is on fire. But the authority to legitimise violence is being exercised, openly and at scale, by something other than the state. And the most important point of all: the state is not contesting this new source of authority over violence that is operating in its territory. Within a few days, 25 people were arrested in relation to the riots, with 17 charged in court. The coordination of the riots were partially done via social media, with people like Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson contributing to by sharing the location of protests, and Musk making posts like \"Do not make peace with evil. Destroy it.\" These acts of legitimisation were condemned in vague words by the UK government, with Starmer posting on X that there \"is no justification for the violence and disorder that we saw threatening our communities, nor for those who encouraged it, online or elsewhere\". A spokesperson for the UK government said that there is “no change” to the Government’s policy on using X, and that there are no new plans to take action against X for its role in the violence. This shows the split in the monopoly over violence. The UK government holds strongly on to their monopoly over the execution of violence, and it is capable of moving swiftly and decisively when something is physically on fire, charging perpetrators within days. But the legitimisation of violence is the part that is not touched at all, Starmer does not even manage to specifically say what happens. To see the other side of this, it helps to know about Palestine Action. Palestine Action was a direct-action group that targeted arms manufacturers in the UK, in particular the Israeli weapons firm Elbit, mostly by damaging property, and in 2025 the UK government proscribed it under the Terrorism Act. The crucial part, for what follows, is what proscription does: it makes expressing support for the group a terrorism offense in itself, and holding a sign becomes chargeable with terrorism. So the UK government is perfectly willing and capable of contesting someone else's authority to legitimise violence. The six people charged with terrorism offences were charged for organising protests and holding planning meetings over Zoom. That is the exact same structural act as what Robinson did when he posted the locations of the protests. But the UK government sees one is terrorism, and the other is not even worth a specific sentence from the Prime Minister. Furthermore, a state that reads a sign by a pensioner that says \"I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.\" as terrorism, and does not read \"imprison the government\" as something worth pursuing is making a deliberate choice on what it thinks poses an actual threat to the state. So why is this? Why does a state not react when the world's richest man regularly posting calls to overthrow the government and incitements to violence? I think there are at least three explanations that are part of it: Musk himself. There is just something to Elon Musk that manages to trigger a collective delusion in a large number of people. Whether it's his constant lies on Tesla's self-driving capabilities, launching an IPO for a rocket company based on financial projections where 'absurd' is too mild a statement, or just the fact that he gleefully destroyed the USAID program. As a global society now have to wrestle with the fact that the world's richest man deliberate and knowingly took actions that led to the an estimated 780,000 deaths. The UK government not taking actions against the statements of Musk is partially the result of the incredible painful fact that nobody can hold Elon Musk to account. Another part is that X is part of US Empire, and Trump has already demonstrated that he will retaliate if other governments take actions against American platforms. If the UK government would take actions against X, there is a realistic change that Trump would take retaliatory action in some manner. Part of the in-action of the UK government can be seen as cost-benefit weighing, where the potential cost and negative effects of taking actions against Musk or X can be too large to bear. Then there is the cynical reading, that the UK government did not take action against the legitimisation of violence against immigrants, while taking strong action on the delegitimisation of violence against Palestine, is a the government revealing their actual preference and alignment, that it finds violence against immigrants and Palestinians acceptable, and handles accordingly. That said, I think these arguments are part of the explanation, but don't fully cover the mechanisms of what is happening and changing. Starmer's resignation spanned a wide range of reasons, from discontent within Labour over policy and personel issues, poor performance for the Labour party in the local elections last month, polling as one of Britains most unpopular Prime Minsters for a sustained period, and the resignation of several members of his cabinet. What stands out to me here is that the riots in Belfast and Musk's calls to overthrow the UK government do not seem to have played any role into this at all. For a full analysis of how and why Starmer resigned you are very much in the wrong blog, but that the extensive Wikipedia article for this Labour Leadership crisis does not mention the riots or Musk at all seems like a good indication that consensus is that they have not been a major contributing factor. Again, it is hard to overstate how much of a departure this is of a common intuition on how politics work. Imagine you are telling someone a decade ago that the world's richest man had contributed to race-based pogroms, encouraging the violence and help the rioters coordinate, as well as writing explicit terms to 'imprison the government', and that the Prime Minister of said country would resign less than two weeks later, only to have the riots and calls to overthrow the government be a non-factor for the resignation. It's weird! So that leads to an even stranger observation: maybe the UK government was actually correct in judging that Musk's call to 'imprison the government' does not actually matter all that much after all. The weirdness is a result of a strange contradiction. On one hand, it looks like it does not matter all that much when a trillionaire posts to imprison the government. At the same time, the collective posts and retweets create a collective understanding and actions which very much do matter. This is evidenced by the riots itself, but also by how fascist language and thinking has become increasingly normalised, shifting the Overton window. Robin Berjon wrote a great article recently about something he calls the Retweeting Class. He borrows the philosopher Timothy Morton's idea of 'retweeting' ideas: the one-click mental process of repeating something you've heard without taking on board its structure or its consequences, something we all do sometimes. Morton's distinction is not about originality, there is nothing wrong with using an idea you got from someone else, most ideas are second-hand, and that is fine. The distinction is about whether you have actually taken the idea on board. Retweeting an idea is the one-click version, where you repeat it because it sounds right and the people around you are repeating it too, without it really mattering if the idea is good or useful or true. Berjon's argument is that there is a whole class of people, prominent ones with reach, for whom this is the entire mode of operation. They evaluate ideas not on whether they are true but on whether they are acceptable to the others in the group. Crucially, this means they never challenge power, because all they ever do is repeat what the existing structures have already digested. The reason it feels strange that Musk's post can both not matter and matter at the same time is that we are treating it as one thing, when it is actually two. There is Musk the individual poster, and there is the amplification structure that his post enters, and these have very different properties. Musk the individual is, it turns out, in this specific context fairly replaceable, and the UK government may have correctly intuited this. If you removed Musk from the equation entirely, the post calling to 'imprison the government' would still find a vector. We can see this directly in the riots themselves: the coordination did not come from Musk alone, it came from a cluster of people. Tommy Robinson posted the location, and other accounts like Rupert Lowe or InfantryDort posted their riff on it, and Musk's contribution was often a single word, 'Yes', sitting downstream of someone else's post. Musk is a particularly effective node in that system, with his two hundred million followers, but he is a node, not the source. This is what Berjon means when he writes, in the context of France's failed 'French Response' information operation on X, that you cannot beat Musk by out-posting him, because the thing you are fighting is not him but the structure. This is the part that matters for thinking about what a state can and cannot do. If the legitimisation of violence were emitted by Musk, then it would be a Musk problem, and you could imagine solving it by going after Musk. But the legitimisation of violence is produced by the amplification layer, by the collective act of a retweeting class converting individual posts into a shared structure of permission. And that is a much harder thing to point at, because it has no single author and no centre. It also explains something about the asymmetry I described earlier, the one where legitimisation of violence against immigrants flows freely while delegitimisation of violence against Palestinians is punished. Berjon's observation is that the retweeting class never challenges power, because it only repeats what the existing structures have already digested. The legitimisation of violence against immigrants is, by this point, something the existing order has digested, pointing in the direction power already leans. So it propagates through the amplification layer without friction, picked up and repeated and amplified, precisely because it is already acceptable. The delegitimisation of state-aligned violence, the sign reading \"I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.\", does the opposite. Because it points at power, it does not get the free ride through the amplification layer, and can only be spread by people who are willing to be arrested for it. What this means is that the amplification layer is not a neutral piece of plumbing, and that this instance on X just so happens to be carrying right-wing content. It structurally favours whatever the existing order has already sanctioned. The bias is not only in the preferences of the government, in that cynical third explanation I gave above. It is built into how a distributed amplification structure works in the first place. The government's alignment and the platform's dynamics are pointing in the same direction, and they reinforce each other. If the structure of permission is an emergent product of the amplification layer, and not something any single owner controls, then it is exactly the kind of thing that a decentralised social network would reproduce. Decentralised social networks have no owner after all, no object for a government to go after. The very property we are building open networks to achieve, that no single actor can control the network, is also the property that makes this emergent object of legitimisation impossible to target. That is a problem I will need a whole article to get into, and it is the one I will turn to next. A few weeks ago I wrote the following: \"The reason I write Connected Places is because I think open social networking protocols will drastically shape the next phase of how we as a society communicate online. This is, quite frankly, fucking terrifying.\" I care deeply about building an open social web, and am strongly convinced that this is important ethical work to be doing. But at the same time, I hope this article also makes it clear why I also find it terrifying.",
  "title": "The Permission Machine",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-23T18:01:47+00:00"
}