SO is Elon Musk “one of the most dangerous men on the planet”, as Humza Yousaf asserted this Thursday, at the Edinburgh Fringe?

My own, honest answer would be: I’m ambivalent. There’s a couple of Musks in the one Musk, with not much coherence between them. There’s also likely some mind-altering drugs involved, that keep them bashing up against each other. My jury is out till the end of this piece.

Certainly, there’s a Musk who uses his social media site Twitter/X to restore the voice and influence of far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate (and many others in the US). A Musk who sends inflammatory messages to his 193 million followers that the recent UK anti-immigrant riots show that “civil war is inevitable”.

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This Musk retweets false far-right claims about British rioters being deported to the Falklands. And let’s not forget: he responded last year to a poorly edited Yousaf clip (itemising white dominance of Scottish establishment roles) by calling the former FM “a blatant racist!”

Add to that Musk’s long-standing tirades against the “woke-mind virus”, and his endorsement (and reported funding) of Donald Trump’s candidacy after the assassination attempt, the progressive case against the mogul – at least as the owner of X – would seem to be closed.

What do long-term Twitter/X users do in these circumstances? There’s no doubt the platform feels much less policed against extremes and extremists than before.

It has a “For You” feed which is so full of what the tech strategists called “slop” (sentimental or violent content), and anti-woke polemic, it should be renamed “At You”.

Some of it is just not working properly (for example, the search field in X’s Mac app doesn’t show the text you’re typing). That bespeaks the chaos of Musk’s management.

And what shall I do, with 32,540 followers on my Thoughtland X handle, the bulk of which have been picked up over 14 years of activism for Scottish independence. Do I close it down, and ask you all to shift over to less toxic services like Mastodon, Threads or LinkedIn? Or do I stay and fight the good fight against far-right voices gaining power there, not just abandoning the place to the wreckers? I’d appreciate your viewpoint on this.

One certainty is that social media is not so easily “shut down” by public authorities. Even when it’s cast as a menace to public safety, as X was at the height of the recent rioting. The digital realm is nowadays as much “the public square” as the usual physical realm. How it’s policed matters.

It may well be distracting baloney – but in Musk’s public justification, he claims to be protecting “free speech” by rectifying the previous liberal-left bias of Twitter.

Even with X as it is currently functioning, there’s a case to be made for it. Might not the scenes of destruction and hate that commanded the platform be equally as mobilising and motivating for anti-racists and anti-fascists – as we saw in the many thousands appearing this week?

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However, the underlying challenge goes beyond the predilections of any particular corporate bampot. How do we ensure constructive-not-destructive behaviour, in an age of mass self-communication? How do we design social networks to encourage those better angels?

Who do we hold accountable to secure that?

Me and my colleagues in the political lab Alternative Global have recently been engaging with Taiwan’s first digital minister, Audrey Tang.

We’re exploring the relationships she (and her movement) established between citizen, democracy, government and digital networks. They are so fruitful and dynamic – but also trust-laden. There’s much to learn from. And we could do worse in Scotland than seek the media powers that would allow us to prototype and experiment with new kinds of digital public realms.

At the very least, Musk’s quixotic (and increasingly ideological) shaping of his own platform shows how important the ownership question has become for social media. We should test it.

Apart from “using his wealth to amplify the far-right”, as Humza concisely put it this week, is Musk a global danger in other areas of his operation? Here’s where my ambivalence starts to creep in.

For example, is he a global danger for pioneering the electric car, as a plausible and mainstream option?

It looks like China, as in much else, is going to dominate this green industrial sector. But if you’ve ever seen the 2006 documentary Who Killed The Electric Car?, you reel at the collusion between Big Oil and Big Auto, who together strangulated progress towards electric cars in the 1970s and 80s.

Musk’s entrepreneurial determination to break this repression has to be marked in history. Yes, it matters how the electricity that powers electric cars is made; the raw materials they need are problematic; and recycling rates could always improve. Also, it’s less of an advance than a shift away from individual car ownership, towards sustainable mass transportation. But on balance, maybe not a step to a more dangerous world.

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Are Musk’s space operations, like his SpaceX reusable rockets and internet-enabling Starlink satellites, a global danger? It depends on where your gaze falls. The spacefleet comes in a sparkling cloud of ambition, as a means of making humans an “interplanetary species”, aiming to establish a base on Mars.

But we found out earlier this year that SpaceX was doing standard military-industrial business, putting US space spy satellites in orbit.

Similarly, Starlink can connect any part of the planet to any other—but is also now a tool and a player in warfare, as Ukraine’s use of it shows.

Musk’s space ambitions are also, to my mind, poorly theorised. He wants humanity to have an “escape option” for some other planet, in case we disastrously subvert ourselves on this one. But surely, the social warring and polarisation that Musk foments through X, makes it more likely we won’t get through what Enrico Fermi called “the great filter” of self-annihilation? Even to serve his own interplanetary vision, Musk should aim to be a peacenik on Earth.

Musk’s adventures in artificial intelligence and transhumanism – his co-founding of Open AI, makers of ChatGPT, and his brain-machine interface Neuralink – can seem to some like the ultimate danger. Why are we devising machines that may cogitate so powerfully, we’ll look to them as plants look to us?

I honestly do respect the old Luddite response. If this machine doesn’t “benefit the commonality”, as General Ludd often proclaimed against the textile factories, then you smash it up.

But even if only blunderingly, Musk is asking a different question: how do humans change when faced with this next, computationally-driven step in evolution? What is the new “commonality” between humans and these infinitely-subtle machines that we’ll need to forge?

Will it be through wires inserted into our brains, so we can mesh our thinking with these artificial minds? I recoil, as no doubt you do. Something else, less icky, please.

But I’ve been expecting to share this world with artificial super-intelligences for most of my life. The curve is exponentially speeding to that moment.

However, for Musk, there’s a perplexity. Most of the science fiction that he reads and loves is either deeply critical of capitalism and militarism (Douglas Adams), or is positively “utopian anarchist” (Iain M Banks).

Again, a response to Musk’s vision for humans and supertech might not be to tear this potential to pieces, but to promote a progressive, democratic and alternative use of it.

“Hippy commies”, Banks once described the human (or cyborg) occupants of his AI-populated Culture novels. Maybe Musk’s promotion of the far-right, in the putative name of free speech, would be corrected by his careful re-reading.

Or maybe not.

Nevertheless, there’s every reason for Yousaf to call out the current danger of Musk’s media behaviour. One way or another, the peace must be increased. Until our souls and characters are worthy of it, Star Trek can wait.