In 2012, the Argentine philosopher Hugo Biagini published his Dictionary of Alternative Thought. Biagini invited me many times to collaborate with his projects, and on that occasion, my contribution was only an entry on “The Disobedient Society.” There, I took the opportunity to repeat a response to the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, when, in 2007, he abandoned the project because he considered it a failure due to its lack of authority. In 2020, Larry Sanger accused Wikipedia of being dominated by “leftists”. Something debatable. It is not so debatable that if someone loves money, they will not dedicate their life to teaching or Wikipedia.

For me, with all its flaws, Wikipedia was a recent and successful example of an organization of knowledge independent from political and economic authority, a “form of cultural disobedience.” In Biagini’s Dictionary, I noted: “Contrary to what might have been predicted, the writing of information by millions of anonymous individuals around the world has not resulted in chaos, but in a reliability (according to traditional studies) as high as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica (…) In the disobedient society, post-industrial education progressively takes the place of industrialist (uniformizing) education, in the same way that the latter took the place of scholastic education during the Industrial Revolution. In the political sphere, one of its requirements is direct democracy (…) According to this diagnosis, it is possible to predict that traditional representative systems (such as the parliamentary system) will lose their importance in the decisions of societies, in the same way, that, at one time, absolutist kings lost it in favor of parliaments. Likely, this same idea of ​​worsening conditions imposed by an imperial power (in this case, the globalization of North American culture…) is the product of a reaction of traditional powers against the emergence of a disobedient society… However, we can think that it is not this inevitable radicalization of disobedience that is the origin of the conflict but the reaction of traditional powers…” (506-508)

Of course, all this is despite the continuous pressure and interference of institutionalized mafias, such as the CIA (for which Elon Musk works and is an agent with access to classified documents). Since the first years of Wikipedia, wars of edits generated with IPs from the same CIA have been detected before the NRL developed Tor. This anonymous browser also got out of hand (it was inevitable to make it “open source” so that it would be truly “untraceable”). However, the CIA did not decrease its use; instead, it increased it. The same is true with Linux, as its founder acknowledged by denying it with his mouth and affirming it with his head.

Wikipedia’s other founder, Jimmy Wales, started with a libertarian and capitalist philosophy. Still, his project confuses right-wing anarchism (anti-government, like the original Marxism) with left-wing anarchism (egalitarian). In 2005, he had already called the Libertarian Party a “horde of lunatics.”

Elon Musk has mocked Wikipedia’s begging to survive, similar to the surviving public radio and television networks in the United States. Musk hates NPR and PBS, and he wants to see them disappear. Due to progressive state defunding, these public networks have had to resort to donations.

Wales has insisted that Wikipedia’s principle of not being financed through advertising is to preserve its independence. Of course, when they are not limited, donations are a double-edged sword. The medication dosage makes an absolute difference between life and death. An obvious example was the abolition of the cap on donations to political parties in 2010, which recently made it possible for Musk to buy his way into the White House with a $250 million donation to Donald Trump’s campaign.

Politicians, the media, and public opinion can be bought. But some things cannot, such as love and dignity. In the case of Wikipedia, it is a thorn in the heel of ultra-rich people like Musk: How is it possible that there is a global source of information not listed on the London or New York Stock Exchange? If Musk was able to buy Twitter for 44 billion (and without putting a dollar out of his pocket), change its name, and, in the name of freedom of expression, begin to manipulate the algorithm to censor and privilege the global visibility of Trump and himself, how is it possible that Superman, with all his superpowers, cannot write his own biography or the history of political, social, sexual and racial ideas? How horrible!

To make matters worse, Wikipedia in English keeps a fact that hurts his naturally inflamed ego: “On the first anniversary of the acquisition [of Twitter], Musk declared the value of the company at 19 billion dollars, a 55 percent depreciation from the purchase price of 44 billion.”

If, since the Middle Ages, nobles donated to churches and cathedrals built by artisans, who then went to listen to the sermons of priests who lived off the donations of nobles and bourgeois, how is it possible that even in the current return to the Middle Ages feudal lords can still buy God and not a damn encyclopedia?

Musk offered a billion dollars for Wikipedia and proposed calling it Wokepedia or Dickipedia (Vergapedia), which confirms that the owners of the world are neither happy nor have any capacity to live in peace with themselves―much less with the rest of humanity.

The commander in chief of the White House, who came from South African Apartheid, knows that Wikipedia is one of the few examples of independence from significant capital, so he cannot live thinking that there is something that can exist without the possibility of being bought, that is, controlled by the psychopaths of global and class apartheid.

Just like the fortune of his father, who also suffered from deep racism, classism, and sexism that today has been romanticized with the ideology of the Alpha Male of the fascist New Right, as the natural leader of a pack of wolves roaming in the snow in search of prey to dismember. That is the model, the utopia of humanity that restricts and constricts the intellectual capacities of individuals who believe themselves to be demigods for the sole fact of possessing (their favorite verb) the ability to accumulate money to buy human beings (whether workers or sycophants), to buy themselves the right to use a whip against every form of thought, against every form of being that does not fit their mediocre existence.

Elon Musk buys everything he hates and hates even more everything he cannot buy. Hence, he hates Wikipedia and offers to buy it for a billion. He probably hates life itself because he knows he cannot buy it.

Jorge Majfud, January 4, 2025.