This is one of the most informative things on the net about the rise of tech billionaires, and specifically E Musk. It is not in any sense meant as promo at a time when he gets way too much attention anyway (we might say he came to dominate TW in the absence of Trump). It is public knowledge that this attention and influence is translated into the rise and the fall of stocks. Somehow this defines the US American entrepreneur from his Chinese counterparts (see Jack Ma). His tweetstorms are at time outrageous, post-ironical affirmations and tend to self-contradict. They are the most egregious examples that another sort of speculation in its financial sense somehow running wild at the center of economies in unpredictable and volatile ways. He is not even a cypher to decipher. Demystyfication clearly does not work if you do not deal with both the toxicity and the ‘aura’ of such online celebrities and the myth of their success feeding on itself. Not in order to ‘smear’, to sacrifice them (as Thiel fantasized in his sacrificial mythopoetic flights of imagination), nor to adulate or pimp them further. They do not need this because they have armies of followers (50 million on TW), nor is it interesting to focus on such idolized targets (and increasingly dangerous) – at a time where everything is tied to personhood. Musk is no superhero nor is he a monster or Marvel villain, although he likes to LARP as one. The media certainly encourages him to do so. That’s not say techno pessimism or tech billionaire bashing is the solution – but rather to see what gets excluded or how cautionary tales are transformed into realities.
What stands out is how he plays on certain SF tropes and a certain pop iconography that pre-existed the rise of Space X or Tesla. Such a mid-XX century infatuation with the future or a certain total future of societies completely transformed by technology does not hold currency in today’s best SF, yet it still pervades commercial mass culture (least Western mass culture) and the minds of tech billionaires. Or in SF terms the ‘rapture or revenge of the nerds’ on the societies that shunned them. The world of Mars colonization, of libertarian no-government no-interference and microchipped pigs – is the world of the Golden Age of SF. The new inventors are not new at all, they are revived American imperialistic Gilded Age dreams with its electrical wizards that are hardened callous capitalist inventors, and half wondershow showmen performing demo- spectacles for us all. This only happens, if it ditches and deletes the anti-colonial and anti imperialistic tenor of such early works as HG Well’s War of the Worlds. If you are still entranced by these tech billionaire’s self-confessed SF fannishness, please contrast them with the vibrancy and biting wit of an author like Alfred Bester. That is why in spite of its ‘dare-do’ and ‘no panic’ signs theirs is a severely constrained and conservative worldview. For all its preoccupation with X-risk, extinction and saving the human species, for all its buzz and veneer of newness, such enterprise is ignoring systematically the working condition of their employees. There is “no future” outlook – because they refuse systematically to actually stay with the trouble here on Earth. One can witness daily for oneself how this impoverished yet productive techno capitalist SF is selling huge amounts of easily repackaged “buzz”. That does not mean we should ignore or pretend such such “buzz” does not exist. So while annoyance is almost inevitable it is also important to address the obsolescence cycles, hyped attractiveness and overrated aesthetics of the “gimmicky” and the “gadget”– that Suzanne Ngai puts at the center of our hyper-consumer culture. Just consider like Lepore does the adventure of letter “X”. X is ubiquitous in SF. Lepore makes an incredible roller coaster ride through the history of this letter’s adoption by futurists, scientists and popular science accounts of progress. How did such X- become required, why does it stick to X- Risk? And how does X signal novelty automatically, or how does it conjure up eXtra planetary visions or X-files and X-men?
Lepore is a historian and as a historian, she digs into a lot background materials, pop residues and infusions, focusing on how such actual contemporary figures tend to look more and more like Marvel characters than their baseline human counterparts. She digs not only into family stories – the largely ignored South African Apartheid background of Musk, but also a larger background of ideas and fads like the Technocracy movement (not to confuse with the Bogdanovist tectological ideals of a meta-science of organization) of the 1930s that his grandpa was involved with. What is evident in this case is that entrepreneurs can cherry-pick and built-up on de-fanged versions of critical and ironic materials such as Douglas Adams’s The Hitch Hicker Guide, or even online jokes and (Dodgecoin) memes to exploit and build expectations and turn reality upside down, topsyturvy riding the speculative wave that runs rampant on fictions and online chatter. What proliferates in this milieu is a particular brand of reading and using such SF materials and then trampoline oneself across from startup to startup, if possible never admitting wrongdoing or losses. There’s also a worrying alignement of space colonization revivals and back to the moon plans and conservative politics in the states. There’s also no mystery about Space X having contracts with the military since it all turns out to bs less an escape plan than a battleground strategy. It’s visions are more Star Wars than Star Trek and the DoD is backing it all up with 1 billion $.
What Jill Lepore terms “Muskism” is plain capitalism don’t kid yourselves, yet this recognition can barely keep up with these unleashed speculative, no limits yet incredibly farcical, bland and gee whiz forms of extreme techno-scientific capitalism. This does not mean there is a qualitative change or that we are entering another stage of cosmic capitalism. Yet it is worth grounding it, looking into its material origins, its diffusion, productivity, institutional effects. It’s not about technological pessimism but accepting that there are trade-offs and question why its few beneficial effects never get mentioned or never never the press attention (such as the battery farm in Australia). What does get mentioned is how tech entrepreneurs and ‘founders’ actually read, pillage or speculate around such pop influences and preexisting iconography. What type of scientific and technological imaginaries are we left with? How can one understand the current political and economic situation by looking into the real Cold War foundation of Marvel’s (or Stan Lee’s) Iron Man that became such a model for Musk. What has Peter Pan and fairy dust and Neverland having to do with mining crypto coins, or what do other less discussed science fiction stories from the 1900 (The Moon Metal by Garrett Putman Serviss) tell us about gold, inventing equivalents to gold or 1970s getting off the gold standard.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics, history, law, and literature. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, her latest, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, longlisted for the National Book Award.
“The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.
Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.
The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.” (from the Goodreads description)
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