Tag Elon Musk

Things I DON’T Have in Common with the Tech Bros

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Well, let me start first with the things I DO like that they (Silicon Valley tech bros like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel) also are known to like.

I like the first 80% of Atlas Shrugged.

I do still love Douglas Adams. Mostly.

But I think I don’t like Iain M. Banks. I read somewhere that Elon and his buddies have referenced in multiple instances their love of Banks’ Culture series of space opera novels. So in my casual side quest to read what they read, to understand their motivations for controlling this current hellish movement in American history, I downloaded a copy of Consider Phlebas, the first book of the Culture series.

And it’s bad.

I’m only 43% in, and I recall seeing some user reviews that suggest the first book isn’t well regarded and the series gets much, much better. But my lack of faith in that opinion is like arguing with someone against Jordan Peterson, when they say “But you really have to watch this 3 hour video he did on personal responsibility and the importance of tidiness” or “You really have to watch these 7 videos of him DESTROYING these left wing cucks in carefully curated straw man debates”. Uh, no I don’t.

There’s enough for me to dislike already.

First, there is very little that’s compelling about the main character, Horza, a “Changer” operative that can impersonate anyone and has advanced self-bio-hacking abilities. Yawn.

Then, eventually, he is dropped into a “the natives are restless” hostile island situation, where the villain is this disgustingly obese (see, I avoided using the word morbidly which is so overdone) corpulent cesspool of a tyrant. And it’s just so gross and cruel and without purpose or reason, to get so graphic and torturous. I feel like the intention is to be funny, but it’s dreadfully unfunny, and lacking of the wit and underlying kindness of say, Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

And then there’s this casual tossing around of words like slut and bitch to refer to incidental background character women. I imagine it’s possible to explain this away as “it was a different time”, which I imagine to be the 90’s and early oughts. But still, it’s just done so artlessly and without humour. It’s out of touch and dated.

Anyway, I am struggling to finish this one and won’t be buying more.

Give me my woke-ass appreciation of Octavia Butler anytime. That shit is breathtaking, especially in comparison to this apparently upwardly-failing Englishman, may he rest in peace.

Atlas Shrugged, Autistically

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How did I get to Ayn Rand? Not the usual way. I was listening to an episode of the podcast Uncanny Valley, “Is Silicon Valley Actually Libertarian” and they were discussing how Atlas Shrugged is one of the foundational Ur texts of the so-called libertarian tech bro movement. I realized I’d never read it and sought out to do so. I had an idea of what it was about but I wanted to evaluate to source text for myself .

I think I’ve always had an unconscious bias against Rand because of how she’s referenced historically, and imagined a dry, preaching tome of ideology. And even if that might be true to some degree, I found that instead I was surprised by how delightfully compelling her writing and narrative turned out to be. I’m really enjoying this book.

This is not a review and just the first impressions of the first several chapters, but the examples of autistic traits are so clear to me, and so finely wrought in prose.

Dagny Taggart is autistic:

Hank Reardon is also, totally autistic, in this scene hyper-focused on the new type of steel he had developed, during a social situation:

And here is Hank suffering from autistic overwhelm:

Just wanted to get these thoughts out for now. I may have more to say after I’ve finished the book. (Editor’s Note: I drafted this post months ago so I have since finished it.) I also have a whole, long piece I’m envisioning on the intensely autistic themes of Octavia Butler’s oeuvre, but that will need to remain in draft for now.

X.com a thing?

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So Elon just rebranded Twitter as X, the Everything App. This is partially a response to Meta putting out Threads a few weeks ago and expanding to 100 million users super fast.

People are saying it’s crazy to destroy the Twitter brand as that’s the most valuable thing about the company, but in truth it’s already tarnished by it’s apparent decline and by Musk himself. It dropped off the list of 500 most valuable brands.

So will we look back on this as a brilliant move?

We all laugh and point at Elon as this out of touch joke. But then one day he literally launches into the sun an electric car he literally built on a rocket ship he literally built, and while we are still laughing, we are also thinking… wait, woah.

My updated predictions are that he’ll finally get Trump to start “x-ing” again (which he will do anyway as the criminal charges ramp up and he tries desperately to become president again primarily to pardon himself), and that X will embrace porn. There is probably not a bad business case for both. Deplorable but… woah.

What Will Elon Do?

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Here I am starting a series where I predict things.

Like, I claim to have predicted the iPhone in a technical journal article in the year 2000. And, to myself, I claim to have thought of Shopify in 2008, when I started a similar company of small online shops and amassed dozens, yes DOZENS, of sellers paying me 30 bucks a month.

So why not record more of these thoughts on my blog so I can check myself, later?

Here’s a prediction about Elon Musk that I haven’t seen others think of: he’s totally planning to introduce crypto micro and macro transactions to Twitter, as a subscription and transaction and “Patreon” model. He’s just been so obsessed with Crypto and it won’t go away.

Also I think he’ll buy Rivian.

The Helmet Has Spoken.