Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him

[cbabe]

https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/

Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him

BY PARIS MARX

AUGUST 8, 2022 7:00 AM EDT

Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. Paris is also the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.

Excerpt:

In crafting his future visions, Musk draws on the libertarian tendencies of Robert Heinlein and a technocratic longtermism inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, not to mention the dreams of Nazi-turned-NASA rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Future visions cribbed from the pages of science fiction—often of the dystopian variety—and reshaped to fit the desires of the richest man in the world don’t serve the broader public. But there are other authors who provide very different answers to the questions of technology and the future.

In 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin took aim at this “imperialistic kind” of science fiction that inspires Musk, in which “space and the future are synonymous: they are a place we are going to get to, invade, colonize, exploit, and suburbanize.” The renowned novelist explained that science fiction is not actually about the future; it’s about us and our thoughts and our dreams. But when we get confused about that, “we succumb to wishful thinking and escapism, and our science fiction gets megalomania and thinks that instead of being fiction it’s prediction.”

That’s exactly where we find ourselves now: having our future dictated by powerful people who seek to recreate the space colonies or dystopian virtual reality worlds they read about as kids without considering the consequences. Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars trilogy helped inspire some of the recent interest in colonizing the red planet, has called Musk’s plan “the 1920s science-fiction cliché of the boy who builds a rocket to the moon in his backyard” and one that’s dangerously distracting us from the real problems we face here on Earth.

For Le Guin, part of the problem is how we tell the human story: as one where a singular hero aggressively pushes it toward resolution, whether it’s the hunter with their bow or the Great Man driving society forward. It also infects our conception of technology, positioning it as “a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph”—or as a call to “build”—rather than “the active human interface with the material world” and the more mundane technologies we rely on every day.

Make no mistake: there is a need for people to think about the future and what a better one looks like, especially as we face serious challenges like the climate crisis. But we also need to question the idea of “progress” being sold to us and who it ultimately benefits. The tech industry enjoys casting itself as our savior, delivering empowerment and convenience, but along with it has come an unprecedented expansion of surveillance, an erosion of workers’ rights, and the empowerment of white nationalist and fascist groups.

For years, Elon Musk sold us fantasies to distract from the reality of the future he’s trying to build, and to get people to accept his growing belligerence. What we really need right now is not more cars, colonization dreams, and technokings, but a collective project to improve the lives of billions of people around the world while taking on the immediate challenges we face regardless of whether it generates corporate profits. That’s something Elon Musk can never deliver.

[Blue Owl]

1. Um, yeah, Elon... I'm gonna have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there...

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Eloon's future is the same old past where oligarch's own everything and we pay rent

Notice how it never gets to the little guy wiping the floor with the wealthy goons by not needing a thing they provide?

Self-sufficiency doesn't feed the boss man, but it works for people.

[grumpyduck]

5. "by not needing a thing they provide"

Yup. Exactly.

Somewhere along the line I read something about people being more willing to buy something they want than something they need, and it makes total sense to me. So the trick is to get past the advertising and "peer semi-pressure" that want to convince you that you want whatever-it-is.

[RKP5637]

3. Lots of people are visionaries, Elon. Yours is deranged and dystopian. Elon equals Eloon! n/t

[bronxiteforever]

4. K&R. Thanks for posting! I love Ursula Le Guin

The perfect foil for Musk’s “visions”. Musk would be a perfect fit for the genetic dynasty of Asimov’s Foundation.

[cbabe]

6. Le Guin is my hero. And she was so impressive in person.

[orthoclad]

8. Musk thinks he's Tom Swift Jr

I had all the Tom Swift Jr books as a kid, learned to read on them.
Scion of inherited money with a flying lab, huge corporate fiefdom, and loyal followers/serfs. Kiddie books. Fits his emotional age.

[orthoclad]

7. Heinlein's OTHER works

People who think they're the heirs of Heinlein's "wisdom" need to read these works of his:
"Coventry", where libertarians get confined to their own piece of quarantined turf. The hero realizes we need society. I think about this story a lot during the pandemic.
"Logic Of Empire", which seems to say that slavery and imperialism are the inevitable future of corporate space colonization.
"All You Zombies": time travel paradox story where the herox is teir own mother, father, etc. Involves sex change surgery.

Heinlein was a liberal when young. Then he married Ginni.

I've seen Heinlein stans who seem to resemble Muskateers: they think they can borrow his glory.

SF* has a long, strong humanist and socialist streak. H.G. Wells (The Time Machine was about class struggle), Theodore Sturgeon, John Wyndham (climate change, genetic engineering, fundamentalism), ... and the late, exquisite Ursula K. LeGuin. Lately, the SF community has overcome its right wing and moved forward: Afrofuturism, cli-fi...

"mundane technologies": I keep wishing we'd forget the Boring bullet trains for the rich and restore train travel to what it was 40 years ago, when it was an actual pleasure to travel, rather than cram into tiny, conflicted spaces in jet tubes.

*I agree with the late Harlan Ellison:"sci-fi" is an abomination. Use "sf". He used it as an abbrev for "speculative fiction", but it fits "science fiction", too.

[SWBTATTReg]

9. I'm already looking beyond him. After his rants and garbage crap that he has been, is spewing

out, who in the world would listen to him on a serious note? Especially after his stint at Twitter and his dismantling of it in the manner that he did, and now he furiously backtracking himself. That should tell anyone about him and his so-called superman attributes. What is this thing about people who have too much money and thus, they alone know it all? Haven't we heard this dead and tired song before?