Well, except that this solipsism betrays a profound similarity between the
cheerful billionaire exploiter and the unfixable deplorables. It's almost
psychotically self-centered. I can imagine a slow, corrupting process where I
would if I could, as well. But that transformation would have to be complete
closure to prevent any light of empathy or sympathy from peeking in and popping
the boil.
I suppose people like Gates are more interesting than Musk, shambling about extruding
money according to an opaque template ... less transparently ideological than Musk's
profiteering. All philanthropy smacks of this sort of thing, though, Effective Altruism
being the worst of the bunch. Power corrupts. It's not a lesson the non-powerful can
actually learn, though. So it's a good thing to keep around a nicely scaled gradation of
the super rich and the destitute poor, with some walkability up and down the scale. That
way we can, as a collective, re-learn the lesson that power corrupts on a steady basis.
The assumption of equality prevents that lesson from being re-learned. The absurdity of
philanthropy and poverty are "collateral damage" in service of the latent
trait, spoken as a well-off white man born into a racist patriarchy, anyway.
On 1/21/22 08:31, Marcus Daniels wrote:
If anything, Musk is suspicious because he is not overtly apocalyptic. Some
criticisms of Don’t Look Up were along the lines that it fails to try to
persuade a change of course in favor of being condescending. That was the
whole point of the movie: Comic relief among the reasonable who must suffer
those who are just unfixable. Musk is amusing because he is cheerful going
about his billionaire life as it all comes crashing down. Doing what he can to
profit from insane energy policy of the last several generations and making
what contingency plans he can. I certainly would if I could.
On Jan 21, 2022, at 7:48 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
This video essay concludes with the same point:
The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk
https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y
Perhaps a better title would have been "Muskian Futurism is Eschatological". But there's some deeper stuff
there in the middle of the video about the appeal of geezers like Sanders to "the youth", perhaps dovetailing
with our prior discussion of the [opt|pess]imism vs hope-despair plane. The mistake the Muskians seem to make is
conflating Musk's "apocalyptic help the rich survive the end times capitalism" with the good old fashioned
future orientation of classic science fiction ... and, perhaps, even the optimistic glossing of the present by authors
like Steven Pinker. While Pinker seems to be a hypnotized neoliberal cultist, his views still retain some sense of
"shared values" in the Enlightenment, where something, vague as it is, like equality founds the whole
perspective. Egalitarian utopias like Star Trek were, it seemed to me, standard fare for classic sci-fi. Gibson, Blade
Runner, et al turned that dark and brought us (perhaps correlated with the rise of Hell and Brimstone Christianity) to
Muskianism.
But this is all just from my nostalgizing as a dying white man. It would be
interesting to see a disinterested historian present the plectic arcs.
On 1/20/22 14:33, glen wrote:
Even if there are multiple paths to nearly equivalent optima, each unit (human,
hospital, corporation, state) has to share some values with the others in order
for the the optima to be commensurate.
--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
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