How dangerous his new toy can be
Siva Vaidhyanathan is underwhelmed by Elon Musk.
It took less than 48 hours for Elon Musk to reveal just how dangerous his new toy can be to this world. Replying to a tweet from former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the man worth more than $210bn with more than 112 million Twitter followers spread a dangerous conspiracy theory intended to distract people from an attempted political assassination just one week before a major US election.
Clinton had warned that “the Republican party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories”, in response not just to the attack on home and spouse of Nancy Pelosi but a slew of attempted kidnappings and threats against elected officials who have stood up to the Trump agenda and the attempted overthrow of the US government in January 2021.
Musk replied to it by citing a discredited rightwing blog claiming there was something else at work in the hammer attack that put Paul Pelosi into the hospital, that it might not have been motivated by animus on the extreme right. Musk later deleted his response. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote on Sunday morning.
The trouble is that like so many extremely rich people, he’s not particularly thoughtful or intelligent.
Then again, everything that Musk expresses is unclear. It’s a series of hunches and feelings, devoid of learning, analysis, rigour or consideration of consequences.
Musk, despite his wealth, good fortune and global influence, is not a serious person. He never exhibits any deep grasp of any issue of substance. He’s shown from the beginning of his dance with buying Twitter that he does not understand the company, how it makes money, how or why it tries to keep the experience pleasant and clear for its 230 million users, or why it’s such a terribly run business.
…
Musk is unserious but is toying with dangerous ideologies nonetheless. He subscribes to “longtermism”, a muddled pseudo-philosophy that emerged from an amalgam of radical utilitarianism and “effective altruism”. It exhibits complete faith in the ability of technological and financial elites like Musk himself to re-engineer humanity, transcend corporeal limits, embrace other planets as homes and destinations, and surrender autonomy to elites instead of people. It’s fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-humanistic.
Not to mention anti-knowing what’s possible. We can’t stop destroying this planet but we can figure out a way to move the necessary contents of this planet to a different planet so that we can move ourselves there?
Any group or force that can disrupt or distract serious thought about serious problems serves the cause of longtermism. If enough people resign from the public sphere and surrender their autonomy to technology, those who control that technology can guide us anywhere they want, regardless of the pain suffered along the way. The basic tenet of longtermism is something like: “As long as we can check out of this hotel room, we might as well trash it. We will build and own a better hotel in the long term.”
Except that we won’t, because we can’t, because it can’t be done.
What an odd meaning to attach to the term “longtermism”.
A sensible attitude would be “what do we do to keep earth pleasant in the long term” and if possible make other part of the solar system & beyond pleasant. I don’t see a way to do the latter without doing the former.
Actually, encouraging Musk to move to Mars might not be such a bad idea. On a one-way ticket of course.
Musk bought Twitter *because* people like Vaidhyanathan criticized or made fun of him… There’s nothing inherently wrong with pointing out his stupid shit but what’s the point? It’s not gonna change his trajectory… Hopefully he ruins Twitter as a going concern and gets the rich person equivalent of ruined doing so; that’d be the only possible good outcome here.
Well now if you’re going to say there’s no point in pointing out stupid shit then there goes my entire raison d’être.
Abstracts from some references to “longtermism”
Longtermism holds that future generations must be safeguarded, as those not-yet-born have the same rights as those alive now, which more often than not means ignoring the needs of those suffering today because humanity is full of unrealized potential that must be protected at all costs Silicon Valley leaders, from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Peter Thiel of Planatir Technologies, wholeheartedly endorse this ideology. (Jake Pitre “Who owns the future?” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 15 2022 O8)
https://youtu.be/B_M64BSzcRY 16:27 min Elon Musk & The Longtermists: What Is Their Plan? Oct 29, 2022
William MacAskill “Planning ahead”
longtermism: the view that we should be doing much more to protect the interests of generations to come; puts the needs of our children and grandchildren front and centre in our moral thinking.
1) The future matters, the moral worth of someone isn’t diminished merely be being born 100 years from now
2) The key concept is that there may be a lot of future people. future generations may outnumber us 10,000 to 1
3 We can actually do things to improve the lives of future people
There is a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction, or another event that permentally destroys humanity’s potential, this century (runaway AI, pandemics, nuclear weapons). [?does not mention climate change]
New Scientist Sept. 10 2022 p. 27
No, Ophelia #4… You doing it isn’t a problem and I continue to enjoy your posts… But you’re not writing for The Guardian; when a major left of center newspaper points a finger at you he can just go “See, I’m being victimized by the MSM and look at how they’re always saying the sky is falling!”
Now sure, the sky may be falling, but this is a guy that can get a lot of milage out of watching it fall…
This is where the whole Tony Stark trope is so destructive. To me one of the most memorable chapters from Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything was the one about the delusional belief that philanthropic billionaires will save us. Once you swallow the idea (rooted in the Just World Fallacy) that the free market is a “meritocracy” and no one becomes a billionaire unless they truly deserve it, it seems to follow that no matter what a raging narcissistic megalomaniac, asshole, and embodiment of the Dunning Kruger Effect this guy appears to be, he is in fact a super-hero who will one day save the whole universe just by snapping his fingers.
BKiSA, I don’t understand. I have always been brought up to believe it was the job of journalism to tell us things, and that sometimes means pointing out stupid shit. It seems to me that it is the job of major newspapers to report things that are stupid shit.
Elon Musk is a rich barbarian who thinks that complicated problems just need a technical fix. So, cars congesting and polluting cities – self-driving cars, cars in tunnels, electric cars. No notion that one ton of metal and resources about six feet wide is a grossly inefficient way to take one person through a city and that solutions for urban transport are political and civic as well as material. It was the same with the offering to build a mini-sub to rescue those boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Extracting in the normal search-and-rescue way was too dull – it had to be a whizzy gadget that would do it.
Thus with Twitter. Paul Bernal has a good thread:-
https://twitter.com/PaulbernalUK/status/1587353454095261696
“Firstly, he seems to think he’s bought a tech company (‘not enough coders, too many managers’) when what he’s really bought is a community of users. 2/10
What makes Twitter work, what makes it potentially valuable, isn’t the tech (which isn’t that special) but the community that uses it – that, in particular, it’s become the medium of choice of journalists and politicians. 3/10”
Bernal goes on to say that if it gets flooded with right-wing nut-jobs shouting at everyone, the liberal types will leave. And though the right-wing nut jobs would gloat at first, they don’t want their own space, they want to bait liberals. And most of all, the advertisers will leave, as they don’t want their brands associated with a demented hate site. (You may argue that there are too many left-wing nut-jobs & frothing transactivists but they haven’t wrecked the site, however much people complain that the GCs get much more heavy-handed moderation than the TRAs).
An old blogging hand like Ophelia knows that it is the community of users who make a site, and that unless you moderate, the rabid nutters can drive away the sane and sensible. I’ve been involved with a site that started off centrish and then went further and further Daily Mailwards and Trumpwards. Soon they were the only ones left, and the moderating admin finally gave up. I gave up.
I lurk at Twitter a lot, and in spite of the dross, am impressed that you can get threads from former NATO commanders about Ukraine, other experts on geopolitics, national politics, then down to acquaintances who campaign locally on a specific issue that I campaign on, linking to articles that you would not have found for yourself.
Musk does seem to have libertarian ideas about a total free-for-all, and that won’t work, any more than a hall full of hecklers can make a constructive public meeting. He probably has some half-baked idea about moderating via algorithm, which will end up not working.
There has now been a fair amount of half-gleeful tweeting that the site will fall apart, though the other half is that what has been built on Twitter will be hard to replace. More glee about Musk’s ham-fisted attempt to monetise it; also appearing on it himself as the Cool Kid with his ironic quips, but 40 billion is a lot to pay for being the Cool Kid.
Seriously. I had the thought just this morning, while bumbling around drinking coffee, that the whole point of this place is the conversations. The emphatic “point” is how my brain put it (I don’t remember what led up to it).
In the Bloggiing Era B&W was the first blog I commented on, with quite a lot of trepidation. Then I got more confident and started my own blog and joined other blogs. Ahh, times long past. There are only about two still standing from those days, and I’m glad that B&W keeps going and maintains a high standard of comments.
In case you want to look back – here are the earliest ones a search turns up:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/its-wot/#comment-18512
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/without-being-co-opted/#comment-18576
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/the-higher-learning/#comment-18625
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/to-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail/#comment-18700
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/the-no-true-scot-move/#comment-19520
Excellent comments they are, too.
Oh thanks OB, that’s very nice of you.