Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Utopia

Do we solve the problems of our time through technology or politics? What are the limits of Steve Jobs’ and Elon Musk’s technology-driven utopia?

Published in

Star Gazers

12 min readMar 14, 2021

I am a fan of Elon Musk, but I also think he is a person with some deep flaws. This is not unusual. I also admired Steve Jobs, but also recognize that he sometimes treated friends, family and employees terribly. And I don’t prescribe to this idea that some people have, which is that being an asshole was somehow the secret to Steve Jobs’ success. To the contrary, I think he had success despite these bad traits.

Technology Utopia vs Techno-Utopia

Steve Jobs pushed a technology utopia while Elon Musk is pushing a techno-utopia. What is the difference? Jobs was all about the personal aspect of technology. What you can hold in your hand or sit in front of. What makes your imagination flow. A world of marvelous gadgets enriching your life.

Musk is promising something very different. The Musk vision is about using technology to solve the big problems of our society: How do we power society without leading to global warming. How do we transport people and things without polluting or increasing CO2 emissions? And finally, how do we make human life multi-planetary. This is big scale stuff, not what you hold in your hand.

The Limits of Technology

As a life-long technology enthusiast, it is hard to not get ensnared by these visions. However, as I have gotten older, I have begun to see the darker side of this approach to humanity and society. It began with my own children. I remember imagining the iPad would be a revolution for children. It would allow them to learn and explore so many things in ways I never had a chance to do as a child.

But the experience of introducing my children to the iPad made me deeply skeptical of technology as some kind revolution for child development. Not just my own experience but what I have observed from other parents and children that are not my own.

Instead of fostering imagination and spurring curiosity, in many ways it kills it. The iPad is akin to heroin. It is so addictive, especially to young children, that it seems to inhibit the ability to really learn anything. I am not saying we have not found useful programs. But all too often I have found that when the kids were younger they would simply smash buttons and click on anything rather than actually learn the system.

If you want to teach your children about drawing and colors, do it the old fashion way and skip the iPad.

Let me clarify with some examples. I thought I could teach my children drawing with an iPad. Drawing programs had lots of tools you could use and experiment with. Instead they got lost in all the gadgetry. Real skill in drawing was instead made with old-school pens, pencils, brushes and paper.

Similarly, with topics such as reading and writing, I find that comics, books, magazines, etc., are far more effective. When you sit down with a comic or book, there is not much else to do besides reading, so that is what you do. With an iPad, there are too many possible distractions. Kids don’t just stay in one app. They jump around like crazy, doing everything and nothing.

German wooden blocks, Bausteine. Seems boring and unsophisticated but works really well in child development in my experience.

In terms of development, I find that regular watercolor paints, wooden blocks, pencils, comics, Lego and books have worked best. These things have a proven record. Generations of kids have been raised with these kinds of toys and yet in our technology utopia we seem to have to rediscover these truths.

This experience has only been amplified in this COVID19 period. Previously, my kids spent more time playing with other kids outside, building Lego together or playing board games with other kids. I found them far more balanced at that time. Now we have ended up with more computer game usage, and again I see the addictive and corrosive nature of computer games. We also know companies are deliberately investing in ways to make their content addictive. It is much harder to make a book or comic addictive in such a corrosive manner.

But now the cat is out of the bag. I remember we spent quite some time before our oldest son got to taste ice cream, chocolate and other candy. That saved us a lot of trouble. But once he discovered it, you cannot go back. Technology is the same. It is hard to undo exposure to an iPad or gaming console.

Some years ago, I remember seeing the movie Captain Fantastic with Viggo Mortensen. It is about a father who basically did the opposite of me and raised his children out in the wild away from technology. While his way in the movie was kind of dangerous and crazy, I could not held but feel a certain longing for such a world. I could never have done anything like that and this would also be going to another extreme. But the movie certainly made me reflect upon the choices I have made and we as a society have made.

I love my Mac and technology. Programming and computers have been my life for almost as long as I can remember. But when I see everybody sitting on the subway in the morning (pre-COVID19; nowadays, I am no longer on the subway) and staring at their iPhone screens, I cannot help but think we have really gone awry. I spend more time on my phone and social media than I think is healthy. Sometimes I dream about saying good bye to it all and move to some remote pacific island. But then you remind yourself that there is is probably no decent health care system there. Making a living, cooking food, etc., is probably a lot of work. So we are stuck with our technology utopia. There is no going back. But maybe we should reflect a bit more before going to the next level. Maybe the next revolutionary gadget will not be as good as you think.

What Does All This Have to Do With Elon Musk and His Vision?

I homed in on our personal life. What we do at the home, with our family, children, etc. But there is also a discussion of how we solve the big problems at the scale of nations — such as where do we get energy and how to we transport goods and services.

Elon Musk has given us no less than five complementary visions for transportation:

Electric vehicles like Tesla replacing the gasoline car, ridding us of the need of producing CO2 to move from A to B.
Robot taxis. Self-driving automated cars reducing the need to have a car in the first place. With automated cars, renting a car becomes much cheaper.
Networks of tunnels carrying cars removing congestion in cities.
Hyper-loop connecting cities.
Rockets transporting people to anywhere on the planet within 20 minutes.

While a lot of this makes sense to me (I live, after all, in a Tesla-obsessed country, where I see 3–4 Teslas as soon as I step out the door), I still think these visions are heavily influenced by the fact that it comes from a guy who has spent most of his life in the Silicon Valley technobubble and driving in cities like LA. It is the experience of the American hyper-individualistic approach to life.

Now, of course Elon Musk spent his youth in South Africa, but that seems similarity car-focused as America.

Having lived in societies with quite different approaches to this has made me reluctant to embrace this techno-optimism. I remember living in an American city of only 50 000 inhabitants and was astonished by how many roads and much traffic such a relatively small town had. Places like LA are, of course, a whole other level of crazy.

Living in the Netherlands exposed me to a diametrically opposite approach to handling city life. Dutch towns of much higher population often have far lower traffic density. Why is that? It is all about city planning. American cities produce huge amounts of traffic because they are spread out and strongly zoned, meaning different types of activities is both spread out and clustered. You have your big box stores one place and the mega movie theatre in another place. In a Dutch town, there is a lot more mixed zoning. You have restaurants, doctors offices, shops, etc., all locally available. You can walk or bike to them quickly. Less-frequently used stores and activities are concentrated in the city center rather than in the outskirts like a strip mall. That means they are easy to access by public transportation or biking.

None of this really has anything to do with technology. This is all about city planning and political choices. How you zone and lay out your city is a political choice. In the Musk vision of the future, politics and collective choices don’t exist at all. A heavily zoned car-centric city is taken for granted. What could have been fixed with better policies is instead fixed by technology.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do think we need electric cars and robot taxis. However, I am far more skeptical of the idea of building layers of tunnels under the cities. There is nothing natural about the road nightmare in LA.

Living in the Netherlands, I saw a vision of a society that was greatly inspiring. I had one of the best times of my life living there. Biking in the Netherlands was pure joy. And when you did not bike you could get almost anywhere with trains. An elaborate network of trains connected all sorts of Dutch cities, where you would get straight into the center of the city, where often you found the main offices stores, hotels, etc.

I would rather live in this world than in a world of 4 layers of tunnels or 12 lane highways.

If you think about it, how much is the Musk vision of transportation actually improving your life? Do you want to spend hours of your life in dark tunnels going between work, your home and shops? I guess at this point somebody could pop in and suggest that it will be fine because you can use your iPad while doing it. No time wasted!

I remember biking along canals in historical quarters of Dutch cities as pure joy. Feeling the morning breeze, watching the sun come up. Ducks in the canal. People out and about their business. Maybe somebody sitting by a table having their morning coffee. You felt like you were part of something. Part of a society. Part of some organic life. Okay, before I get carried away waxing eloquent about this bliss, I will drag myself back down to planet Earth. There were also some shitty and and rainy days biking through some rather dreary places.

But as a whole I felt better off. All that biking put me in better shape and gave me more energy.

This Will Never Work in America!

I know what some people will say. Countries are different. My native Norway is certainly not the Netherlands. I seldom bike here. Hills, mountains, fjords and more extreme weather are part of the problem. Cities are also more spread out. An American will also argue that American cities are not dense like Dutch ones and America is large and spread out. All true.

I am not suggesting some carbon copy of the Netherlands but rather using it as an inspiration for how the world can be driven forward by other things than just gadgets and technology fixes. What few people today outside the Netherlands seem to be aware of is that the Netherlands was not always a biking utopia. People think it was just born that way. It wasn’t. In the 1970s it was getting choked by car traffic. A broad and almost militant grass roots movement rose up to fight the car. Gradually, the Netherlands began a radical transformation away from a car-oriented society to a bike- and public transport-oriented society.

Everybody can do this. I see the same in the city where I live: Oslo, Norway. Sure, we have disadvantages with out terrain, climate and lack of density, but the number of bike lanes has really risen. More people are biking than ever. Cars are being pushed out of the downtown area. Change is possible.

And before we get too hung up on size of country and population density, think about this. The LA metropolitan area covers 12 562 km2 and contains a population of 12 million people. The Dutch Randstad area, which covers the major Dutch cities, is 8 287 km2 and has a population of 8 million people.

In other words, these areas are not all that different in terms of population and area covered. Yet living and traveling in these areas are profoundly different. LA is almost exclusively connected by massive highway networks. The Randstad is heavily connected by railroad at the large scale and zoomed in you see trams, bikes, buses, etc.

An Alternative Vision of the Future

We can use technology to move us from A to B in large, sprawling cities. But has it occurred to you that in many ways this Musk vision of the future with robot taxis and tunnels is kind of old fashioned? It assumes a world where we drive to a faraway office every day. Where we take a car to for a spin each time we need to buy something.

As horrible as COVID19 is, it has already given us a glimpse of another possible future. One where many of us do most of our work at home. I haven’t been tothe office in about a year now. I have used public transportation and a cab a handful of times. A lot of what I buy —be it books, computer hardware or food — has gotten delivered at the door.

Of course, I would love to travel back to the city and eat out at my favorite taco place with the family. But that is beside the point. Why I am trying to say is that we have options in how we organize society. A lot is possible. Our need to travel long distance is not fixed.

There is a sort of joke among us software developers that the most robust and bug-free code is the one never written. Likewise, there is no road as congestion-free as the one you never had to use. What if we instead reimagined cities so they did not need to have all these roads in the first place? So you don’t need all these tunnels?

Dutch cities and our COVID19 nightmare give a glimpse of this possible solution:

Have more mixed zoning. More services available locally. For example, you can spread a lot of small stores out over a larger area than if you have a few megastores.
For more specialized things, cluster at public transportation hotspots. Thus you can travel to a central location and then branch out from there by walking or biking.
Reduce the need to travel to offices by using more video conferencing. Perhaps establish more shared offices spaces. Why not have shared office areas in the neighborhood?

What if instead of fixed offices we go to various rented office spaces locally? At less frequent intervals, all workers could meet up in a more distant centralized location. If offices are flexible rentals, you could imagine that one could grow or shrink office space through the week. It would be a bit like a hotel. You don’t need to own all the space, because you don’t need to use all of it through the whole week.

I don’t imagine this as THE solution. It is just an example of how we can think differently about how we organize ourselves. Why assume that we commute and work using the same pattern as the 1950s and the only thing that changes is that the cars become computerized EVs that travel underground? It is about as innovative as a science fiction movie which is just the Wild West with robots and laser guns.