A unifying theory of Elon Musk
Musk is dismantling science as we know it. Understanding his motivation helps us know how to respond.
If you don’t know someone who works in research, you may not realize that the science community around the world has been upended by the actions of the Trump administration and the ongoing agency-by-agency dismembering by Elon Musk’s so-called “department” of government efficiency.
USAID, arguably the most important non-military peacekeeping force in the world, is being all but erased from existence. Research supported by the National Institutes of Health, who fund over 30 billion dollars of health and medical research each year, has been halted. The National Science Foundation, NOAA, NASA, and other federal agencies have been ordered to stop any work that includes words from a length list considered too woke. That list includes such simple words as female, status, and victim.
Its essentially a moratorium on social science, one that will take a lot of other good science out as well.
Musk has previously vowed to destroy the “woke mind virus.” What he means by that seems to be to destroy any science that helps us be socially aware — anything that helps us understand the lives and experiences and health and safety of others.
Musk’s posse has also descended on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. NOAA is responsible for the National Weather Service. NOAA is responsible for Tsunami warnings and Tornado warnings and Hurricane Tracking. Wired reported that NOAA has been instructed to stop working with any international partners. There is a credible threat that the most important datasets for weather and climate are going to disappear. Currently open and free, the myriad critical information services that NOAA provides, from weather forecasts to satellite imagery to emergency alerts, look ripe for privatization.
At first gloss, a lot of this doesn’t make sense. Why would a self-styled techno-futurist dismantle and dismember the world’s most robust scientific institutions? But when you see it through Musk’s real ambition, the pieces all come together.
Elon Musk is a longtermist. Which means his singular focus is realizing a galactic potential for humanity 10,000 years from now. The first step for him is reaching Mars, one of many he thinks are critical for our species to become multiplanetary and trans-human. Eschewing our physical existences and relationships and dependencies so that we can existing everywhere in the physical and digital cosmos simultaneously. And to do that, he’s willing to sacrifce a lot. Well, a lot of us, anyway.
If there is a basic single premise of longermism, it is that the people of the future are more important than the people living today. In Musk’s words, “life shouldn’t just be about solving one miserable problem after another.”
You know, like helping people with AIDS.
So, what do buying Twitter, aligning with a populist, dismantling foreign aid, ending social science, and putting all of our information about what’s happening in the world behind a paywall, all have in common?
Answer: they make it very hard to see harms that people and ecosystems are experiencing today in service of Musk’s fantasy society 10,000 years from now.
Let me explain. First: climate change is real. Second, Elon Musk knows it. He just doesn’t think its the extinction-level threat that it probably is. Rather, he’s concerned that the cost of addressing climate change will cause too much of a delay in his plans to get to Mars and beyond. He may even think that the global societal response to climate change that we are capable of would threaten his aspirations entirely, because an effective response to climate change will likely involve a societal transformation that dismantles the very systems from which he draws his power and wealth. So he wouldn’t be the puppetmaster anymore. Which as far as he’s concerned means Mars will never happen, even if it does someday. Because he won’t get credit for it. Because he’s also a narcissist.
Imagine you believe that in the next 30 years, climate change is going to cause billions of people to suffer and die (and mostly People of Color). But you also believe that in that same time period, if you ignore all the bad and focus all of your own resources on developing a way off this planet, you can succeed. You can start your slave colonies on Mars and ignore the destruction you left in your wake. Well then, that destruction is well worth it. “Life shouldn’t be about solving one miserable problem after another,” after all.
But people are pesky. Woke. They don’t like to just sit idly by when a bunch of other people are dying. So you have to hide the evidence. The evidence of environmental change. The evidence of climate breakdown, The evidence of the widespread health impacts. The evidence of mass migration and death.
To hide all that you’d need to control how people share information and learn about current events (X). You’d have to shut down access to global health data (WHO). You’d have to shut down access data about climate change (NOAA). You’d have to stop scientists from studying it all (NSF, NIH), especially when you know most impacts will be on Black and Brown people (DEI). And you’d have to eliminate our on-the-ground engagement with communities around the world already struggling with environmental and climatic breakdown (USAID).
If you are reading this and feeling incredulous, imagine how I feel writing it. But here we are. What other explanations fit the entire set of events? Prove me wrong, please.
Let’s test an alternative hypothesis. What if this really is just about evicting a deep state and creating a smarter government for a safer world? Musk falsely claimed, shortly after taking over USAID’s systems, that the agency was behind the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to position his work as undoing some great global crime against humanity. But where’s the data? The proof? Why wouldn’t he share it? He’s a smart guy, surely he would see that sunlight would not only be the best disinfectant but also the best way to garner more universal support for his inquisition.
That proof, of course, never came. He just dropped the notion out there to circulate and spread among people already hypnotized by his swagger and sleights of hand.
The goal is to create a world full of hurt, because he has so little imagination he sees no path forward other than through destruction.
This isn’t a “what we should do” post, and for that I’m sorry. Doing everything we can to stay connected, kind, empathetic, and in solidarity is probably where I’d start if I was writing that piece.
So far, our failure to fully anticipate how bad things would get (and how fast) is as much a matter of their planning as it is a failure of our imagination. So that’s what this is, I suppose, an attempt to think outside the lines, to try to imagine their vision and how they think it will play out.
I hope I’m wrong and its just the racism, but I don’t think so.
Note: I’m far from the first person to write about this. If you want to read more, search out the writing of Timnit Gebru, Émile P. Torres, and David Troy to name but a few people doing their damndest right now to shine a light.
