Elon Musk as the Last Bugman
Faustian potential or the ultimate Last Man?
This of course is an unfashionable opinion to now hold.
“Are you tired of winning?”
“He’s more based than he lets on.”
“The techbros are turning Right!”
I’ve heard it all before and yet somehow there is much about Musk to distrust and dislike. Fundamentally in spite of his surface level faustian desire to conquer Mars he still comes across as obnoxiously anti-human at the core. He is a man who has seduced many simply by not being like the more obvious anti-humans like Bill Gates or even Zuckerberg but he appears still wedded to noxious ideas about humanity and progress. Musk represents this contradictory position of being a mix of Nietzsche’s Last Man and also a Faustian figure who reaches to the stars.
Nothing demonstrates the limits of Musk than his obsession with electronic cars. The internal combustion engine is one of the true marvels of the age. The car, like any technology, has come at a cost of course but the internal combustion engine remains unsurpassed for its fundamental strengths. The benefits of the humble car with an internal combustion engine continue to to show themselves even as we get more and more advanced and flashy electric vehicles. Even today with all the new battery technology advances and car advances gasoline is a stronger and more robust technology. It is more resilient to temperature changes, it is more easily transportable as it weighs less, and it can scale better. Expanded tanks provide far more range than any electric vehicle could ever hope to achieve. The electric car is not a new idea but fundamentally the pursuit of it shows a limitation - this is not a new frontier. There is nothing radical about offering another variety of car. It only compounds and expands upon the problems that car centric infrastructure brings to our lives. Musk as the savant of the electrical vehicle revolution is not breaking any new ground or taking us towards a better future and his other driving related obsession is further evidence of that.
Autonomous vehicles are a poison slated for mass consumption. Like seed oils and corn syrup they may start off tasting nice but soon the effects will quietly horrify and the change will become difficult to reverse. The self-driving and computer assisted future fundamentally strips humanity of decision making and control. Nothing has highlighted this issue to me more than a training exercise I was on some years ago. We were practicing vehicle break contact drills on private land and one of the newer cars kept auto braking during reversing maneuvers. We worked out the overgrown grass was tripping the sensor. Absolutely dead in the streets. For now some of these features offer an ability to override them, hidden in the settings but more and more the trend will be to not allow such changes.
That would be unsafe.
Driving a car is usually the most complex thing most humans do on a regular basis. These are powerful machines we are placed in charge of and even now in North America we drive some of the most dumbed down versions of them. The manual clutch is a relic for enthusiasts. In fact if you ever want a car unlikely to be stolen a manual is a better deterrent than any steering lock or theft technology. People simply don’t know how to drive them anymore. That small technological advance makes for easier driving but represents a loss of control but also a loss of connection to the vehicle. Automatics now have such technology as continually variable transmissions where traditional gears are foregone altogether. This can produce more efficiency but again represent a loss of control to the user, the decisioning is made by the car and this can produce odd driving sensations. The feeling of a car always hunting for the right gear. This loss of control, this ease of access is always about weakness. Appealing to the lowest common denominator. The urge to make everything as easy, to lower the barrier to entry. It isn’t just safetyism it is something more insidious - it is the ideology of equality incorporated to every facet of life. Musk with his cars and the technology them employ is not just a believer but a pioneer in this. To the core of his being he holds that technology will free us by offering jeweled enslavement.
What are the results of such enslavement. A sense of disconnect. More and more cars on the road make stop start driving awful and dreary. Here we are captured by the infrastructure problem. The joy of driving, which exists, is smothered as necessity. Anyone sitting in LA traffic doesn’t want to constantly be using the clutch and shifting from 1st to 2nd gear repeatedly. That isn’t fun it is tedious. So the automatic makes it easy. Then the computer takes over and we are able to doomscroll on our phones sat in the traffic. Your life wasting away the same as before but hey now you can look at TikTok videos safely in traffic! Again nothing to address the actual causes of the traffic, the death of infrastructure, the abandonment of public transit to the mentally deranged and criminally inclined. Autonomous vehicles will only make the problem worse. Driven by a lobbyist class intent on pretending they can solve the problem these machines created they will only pull us further into the trap and yet also rob us of any autonomy.
What technocrats always fear is a man able to cause destruction. They don’t seem to realize just how much of the Longhouse they are building. In an autonomous vehicle we have no option to take control. To crash. To speed. To be violent. To be free is to make such choices. To accept danger and live in it, amongst it. We are free only at the limit. This is also why some liberals fear the gun so much. They can’t imagine having such control of a deadly weapon. They know themselves to be incapable of real judgment and project this insecurity onto everyone. With the gun they would feel powerful where they never have before. They both fear and relish the idea of such power but ultimately decide it must be limited for almost everyone. It leads towards credentialism and safetyism as guiding principles. Musk seems to be along for that ride though he does seem to carve out some space around freedom of speech. That has been his main contribution in recent years. The purchase of Twitter and setting the bird free, although the likes of Jared Taylor continue to remain totally censored and off limits whilst porn bots pollute the platform like never before. A friend of mine with a tiny account he barely uses has dozens of them, they suggest a dead space populated by a few loud voices. Perhaps though Musk is just more comfortable with the artificial. Yet it is this comfort that flies in the face of breeding the kind of man who desires to conquer the stars.
The safetyism that is bundled in with Musk’s techno-optimism is directly counter to how great leaps were made in the past. One of the best non-fiction reads of the past sixty years is Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” which tells the story of the fighter jet pilots who propelled America into the space age. It is not about the engineers or the technicians but about the men who flew the planes and who died with remarkable frequency. It is about the tension that grew out of these men being selected as astronauts - who were being coddled and restricted by the engineers from actually flying or controlling the rockets. Here is the core tension that seems to exist. At the birth of the space age the line between bravery and individual skill and control of the jet pilot begins to give way to the abstract technological prowess of the nerd in glasses. He who sits removed from the risk but supremely self confident in it. The same tension appears present in what Musk is doing with his drive for automation or praise of UBI. He seems content to create and build a world of the docile. Our appetite for risk and destruction has changed over time, comfort has led the way and it has crushed, or at least suppressed, a certain kind of spirit that was once more prominent. At the root of all this seems to be a discussion that should be had about what it means to be human.
This question is fundamental. It is inescapable. Yet in our modern society the answer seems ever more elusive. Within our own understanding of the debate about nature versus nurture we don’t always totally understand the effects of the environment. Heritability of intelligence is one thing but how one can apply it might drastically change due to the age one is born in. Discovery and experimentation seem critical components for actual innovators and whilst computers today are more powerful than ever there are more walls built around the technology than ever before. This range from easily ignored warranty voiding instructions to companies making technology that is ever more difficult to be repaired, specialist tooling is required at all stages. The trend of designing towards planned obsolescence is still more en vogue than building something robust that can stand the test of time. It isn’t all bad though there are some cool and interesting technology companies that have produced goods that the interested can tinker and mod. Think of Raspberry Pi little computers that people can use to build things like automated chicken coops or run a closed network cctv system or what have you. There is also good work being done by ‘right-to-repair’ organizations. Worth noting though that Musk’s Tesla operates in totally the opposite way. Tesla won’t let you repair your car yourself (warranty void) nor can a local mechanic do it either (warranty void). People talked a lot about Musk and Tesla breaking the stranglehold of car dealerships but arguably a right to repair and consumer choice on repair is more important. Tesla wants you fully locked in to their eco-system as they want you as a consumer for life. A subscription based model of existence that is not dissimilar from “You will own nothing and be happy.”
What of Musk and his neuralink as well? What are we to make of this? It feels instinctively Kurzweil esque - another mad prophet of the Singularity. Musk seems to still hold onto a belief that man and machine should merge. To become more than human - to be transhuman. He has argued that technology like the neuralink is critical for humans to compete and stay in line with the promised AI future. This technology can be seen as the kind of ‘next step’ if you are interested or excited by a sci-fi future. Perhaps the neuralink will allow humans to pilot vehicles or planes that move much faster than anything we have seen before and it is only through direct mind to machine connection that is possible. Maybe that future exists somewhere out there but I’m not so convinced. Nor am I convinced of many of the claims about how the mind works made by Kurzweil or Musk. The notion of downloading your brain to a machine is a narrow theory of mind, it doesn’t account for alternative theories and is far too Cartesian, but that aside is that even desirable? For now consider the autonomy afforded within our own heads. Prisoners throughout the world use the mind to escape the reality they face, in our more mundane existence we roll our eyes and mock the DEI nonsense during a ‘company all-hands’. What does something like a neuralink rob us of? Freedom and privacy. In the same way the cell-phone has robbed you of attention, autonomy, and community this technology (should it work) will rob you of more than you or I can ever realize. This is but one reason I am not ashamed to wear the Luddite Crown. Better that crown than one of thorns that can transmit my thoughts away or allow them to be monitored.
I titled this essay asking if Musk is the Last Bugman. There are elements of his thought that feel very Last Man about them, other elements of his thought seem very bugman like, and then still others that appear totally Faustian. He’s overly concerned about population decline, which leads into a trap about migration of any kind. He’s wedded to eternal growth but he does want to take humanity to the stars. He has both a sense of wonderment and drive that is admirable yet it feels like it pulls too far towards a future where man is ever more diminished than he is now. Truly I’d like to be proven wrong - years ago I read parts of The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space and was fascinated by the future it proposed. Wolf Tivy’s ‘The Bison Sphere’ in more recent times captured something akin to my optimism again around such notions:
Imagine the American West, before we killed all the bison, but at least a trillion times larger, in space. Imagine effectively infinite grassland steppe on vast solar-orbit space stations, populated by herds of quadrillions of bison (yes, quadrillions; I did the calculation).
As the constellation grows, giant nuclear-powered spacecraft will push rotating super-stations with artificial gravity into highly inclined orbits. Vast ziggurat cities carved out of solid billion-year-old space rock will be landed on the artificial plain, and space cowboys will range out from them, tending and hunting the herds.
Hungry space wolves will keep the herds in check, chasing them around so they don’t overgraze or get lazy. Man and beast will be in their best element, and the peak of their health, in an ecologically integrated space civilization bent on growth and life.
This is our vision for America’s future. The Bison Sphere.
That is a radical idea of what we could do with such technology and power. It’s not dissimilar to themes that occur in much of science-fiction writing. Of alien races that reach their pinnacle and essentially retreat back to a more primordial way of life. Abandon the shopping malls on Mars for something else. The idea of the Bison Sphere is kind of a binary one - you either get it immediately or you don’t:
The question that haunts me is can we advance towards that future and preserve our humanity. Every other technological dream of Musks seems to rob us of something that once lost will be hard to regain. Much wisdom of the modern age is coming from us looking further back to the past not continually attempting to innovate and technovate our way out of it. We know now that breast milk is best and formula sickly, that mothers should absolutely give affection to their babies, that seed oils are slop and soil health matters. We don’t have any need for cancer like fake meats we have only to return to compassionate animal husbandry of the past. We don’t need to continue to build crappy houses reliant on constant HVAC when we have plenty of examples from the past of functional houses that stand the test of time. Through rediscovering the past wisdom of our ancestors we can build a brighter future. Just the other day I saw a ‘smart’ water bottle advertised on YouTube - it connected to an app for you to track and monitor your consumption. Me? I just drink when I’m thirsty, but we have a whole class of people now who need an app to confirm to themselves that they slept badly on a constant basis. The rabbit hole runs deep and our late civilization decadence is revealed in these pointless quests for a new way to do the old things.
Musk certainly wants to go somewhere and many of us are happy to ride his coattails. Winning is good but more and more we may begin to question exactly what a ‘Musk’ victory looks like and whether or not that is the vision we truly want for our own lives and future.