Elon Musk versus MAGA: Republicans have reached a tipping point

Yahoo

2 days ago

I had the weird experience last evening of watching the new film "Mountainhead," written and directed by Jerome Armstrong, the creator of the iconic HBO series "Succession," while simultaneously doom-scrolling social media. The premise of the movie is that the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in the guise of four tech billionaires, gather at a 50 million dollar mountain castle to play poker while the world literally burns due to the richest one's release of a new AI program that allows undetectable deep fakes and disinformation. (It's not hard to figure out who his character is based on.)
As I was watching and scrolling, like the card-carrying internet addict I am, imagine how startling it was to come across this headline from Time: "Google's new AI tool generates convincing deepfakes of riots, conflict, and election fraud—sparking fears about AI's role in misinformation"
Life imitating art in the creepiest way possible. Just as creepy was the movie's dialogue that sounded almost verbatim like the kind of techno-utopian, puerile sci-fi, billionaire geek speak we hear from the world's richest man, who recently told Fox News that he plans to go to Mars (and die there), because:
'Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun. The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated.'
I think we have more immediate planetary survival issues than the sun exploding, but he's the big billionaire genius, so what do I know? Having just read the latest in-depth interview with Silicon Valley guru Curtis Yarvin in the New Yorker, I felt a little bit off balance watching this "Mountainhead" broligarch fan-fic satire because it's obviously not a total fantasy. Such people exist in real life, and they are exerting a lot of influence on our society and our politics.
They're not, however, omnipotent. And to the extent they are visionaries, it is probably more limited in scope than we might think.
Musk's SpaceX is going into space, and that's notable (despite his recent failures), but let's be clear, his accomplishment is doing it as a private company. It's all been done before by the U.S. government. He didn't invent electric cars, he just created one that has bells and whistles people like. (His Cybertruck, designed wholly by him to his own tastes, is a dud.) His Neuralink company is creating implantable brain–computer interfaces, but it isn't the only one. (His long term plan is to bring about "transhumanism," which was inspired by a series of sci-fi novels.) Musk's Boring Company, created to build tunnels in order to relieve traffic in urban areas, has accomplished almost nothing. His satellite company, Starlink, has been very successful, although lately they've been falling out of the sky. And then there's X, formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought and turned into a free-for-all social media site, which clearly influenced the creation of the Musk character and his dystopian website in "Mountainhead."
Musk is a very successful entrepreneur, obviously. His fortune alone attests to that. And some of his companies are truly visionary, even if he isn't the only one to have had that particular vision. However, what we've seen recently with his foray into government is a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their general abilities.
It's tempting to think that the truly perfect example is Donald Trump, but it doesn't quite fit. Trump's only talent lies in one domain — self-promotion. That leads him to lie about his talents in other areas. I don't think he actually cares if he has any competence in them because he is content with simply saying it and convincing others that it's true. Musk actually believes that he is a genius who can do anything. But as we've seen with his experience in government and politics, he is not.
He used to be a pretty standard-issue liberal from Silicon Valley. But Musk began to drift right as he became more and more red-pilled on Twitter, where he quickly went down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories like "The Great Replacement." It's clear that he hasn't read much about history, philosophy, or politics and developed his political worldview in an online intellectual silo, like so many other people who are temperamentally drawn to the right. He bought the platform so he could remake it in his image, thinking that would automatically make it even more successful. That was not to be. It's still functional and has many users, but it's no longer what it was.
Musk really enjoyed holding court on his website, and it stands to reason that all the adulation he got there and elsewhere (as anyone with his kind of money always gets) gave rise to the belief that he's a genius at everything he touches. So he got involved in politics and we've all watched him go from eccentric curiosity to big time donor to campaigner and then government reformer. I think we can safely say that he was unsuccessful at all but the donor part and even that eventually led to diminishing returns.
Trump gave Musk some questionable credit ("he knows those vote-counting computers") for his win in Pennsylvania, where Musk parked himself in the last month and gave away million-dollar checks to voters. He came to believe he'd invented a strategy that could guarantee a win for any Republican he chose to back and a lot of people in politics agreed with him. But when he tried to replicate it in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Musk spent over a hundred million dollars and put himself out on the campaign trail, only to suffer a humiliating defeat. It turns out that he doesn't know as much about political campaigning as he thought he did. And money can't buy you love.And then there was DOGE, the department he talked Trump into letting him have to slash at least a trillion dollars, which he promised to do without even breaking a sweat. After all, when he buys a company, he immediately sets out to save money by firing massive numbers of people and dismantling entire departments and only replaces them if he later finds out it's necessary. Naturally, he believed a genius strategy like that could easily be done in the federal government. He ended up accomplishing very little except causing chaos, creating pain and, in the case of putting USAID "into the wood-chipper," ending the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
In the process, he destroyed his reputation and the reputation of his companies, losing a lot of money and prestige. Now that he's backed off, the White House is back-stabbing him ruthlessly, passing on gossip about his drug use and personal life, necessitating that he go on a sad-sack media tour to restore his image, which isn't working. And now he seems to be going to war with the White House over the GOP budget bill, which he calls "abominable," telling anyone who voted for it they should be ashamed. That means he's referring to all but two Republican House members.
He's fallen a long way from the pedestal he was on as the ungodly wealthy, visionary genius who was going to save mankind with his prescient techno-utopian imagination. Now he just seems like another Republican whiner lamenting that nobody understands him anymore.
All the broligarchs like Musk think AI is going to make the world over in their image. It is to be fervently hoped that what they are creating is better than they are, because they really aren't very good at anything but technology. And technology isn't everything.