One Small Step for Musk...

Elon Plays His Trump Card

Look, it was always going to happen. As soon as Elon realized he had spent $44 billion dollars on a black hole that swallows money, there was exactly one move that made financial sense. Musk just made it.

Do not ask me to take this seriously. Do not ask me to take anything seriously ever again. A billionaire got dumped by an experimental pop star and it set off a chain reaction that ended with Trump getting his microphone back when he was at his very lowest and saddest point. The sullenest boy, so depressed and tired at the podium, announcing his 2024 presidential campaign with the same stolid resignation of the horses who pull the carriages at Central Park. “I guess we’re doing this again.”

And then, at his Darkest Hour: redemption. A treasure to help him win his final battle. This is classic Hero’s Journey shit and the hero is Trump. Sorry to everyone who thought otherwise.

Elon Musk giving Trump his Twitter account back is without a doubt the funniest thing that has happened in 2022 and I’m already tired of pretending it isn’t.

This is the first smart thing Musk has done since walking through the door of Twitter headquarters carrying a sink and grinning like an idiot: not good, in fact quite bad, but smart. Twitter is crumbling in real time but it still exists as a platform, still has some of that cachet. The rats are saying goodbye to the sinking ship but most have not yet fled it. There is still a microphone for Musk to offer.

On January 8th, 2021, the major social media companies entered into a hybrid game of of prisoner’s dilemma and chicken. Whoever let Trump onto their platform first would enjoy both an intense advertising backlash and an enormous increase in both traffic and relevancy. The game was to wait until the perfect moment when the traffic and relevancy increase would offset the advertising backlash, then move before any of the other social media platforms came to the same conclusion.

In a world where Grimes does not break up with Elon, the platforms are still waiting and that time has not arrived. We live in this society, though, and conditions have changed. Twitter is already hemmorhaging advertisers. Musk is constitutionally incapable of being normal enough to get them back. The platform has nothing left to lose. Twitter has now become the Joker.

This decision will probably change history.

We did not arrive here by accident; we travelled here, step by inexorable step, for decades. Centuries, maybe. Elon Musk broke no rules to get here. His rise is not some freak occurance, his massive wealth no abberition. The Invisible Hand handed him these reins of power. It did not care what kind of man he was, only that he was terribly good at making money.

This is your God now. Elon Goddamn Musk, with the mind of a child and more wealth than any man has ever possessed in the history of the planet. This is capitalism’s ultimate masturbatory fiction. He is Iron Man in every way that matters.

This is capitalism, baby, way too late-term for an abortion. For decades now Elon Musk has exploited the incandescent genius of others and claimed full credit. Started with millions and conned his way into billions, wormed his way into the engine of the American economy and started pulling levers just to see what would happen. Then he got bored of that and decided to move cultural mountains instead.

Welcome to the future. It’s as stupid as it seemed before the midterms; material conditions have not changed. We are all Twitter now. Our country is gutted, tottering; there’s nothing inside, the core is empty. The winds are coming, stronger and stronger, and no one knows exactly what’s going to break next but they do keep breaking, and they will continue to break, until some support beam snaps and the whole thing comes crashing down. Maybe 2024. Maybe later.

Any system that leads to a Musk singlehandedly making monumental political decisions based on whims and Twitter polls is a system that cannot survive for any length of time.

The only question is what comes next. The top contenders at this moment are fascism and techno-feudalism, safe money’s on some combination of the two.

We need a miracle.

We need leftism and I don’t know what leftism is. Not the whiny Ouroboros of Very Online spoonie slap-emoji cooking-for-your-neighbors-is-oppression leftism. Not the stolid joyless 1930s-cosplay Marx-as-prophet leftism either: Marx was brilliant and has much to offer and was also clearly wrong about how material conditions would play out. Anarchism works on a small scale as long as no assholes sneak under the wire and poison everyone against everyone else, but the world’s scale has never been larger and assholes never more plentiful.

Every day I wake up and think about possible alternatives to those two terrible options and every night I go to sleep thinking about them and in between I stare into the abyss of American conservatism because that I understand, that I can make sense of, I can at least narrate the things that are happening down there in real time, try to explain what’s going on in hopes that someone else, someone smarter, can do something with it.

Every time I really sit down and think about the problem of What Is To Be Done, I end up sitting with Žižek or Jameson or Fischer or whoever originally said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The more I stare at it, the more that statement starts to look like a timetable.

I am not an accelerationist. Accelerationism implies that without our help the world might not end, that we could theoretically go on like this forever. It is the illusion of control where there is none. This — whatever this is — is going away. I cannot end the world any more than I can save it. None of us can.

Trump has locked down the Hero’s Journey. We will have to go on a different one:

Taken together, Tarot’s major arcana tell the story of the Fool’s Journey. Unlike the Hero, the Fool does not reject and then accept the Call to Adventure but instead falls off a cliff into the thick of things regardless. He encounters archtypal forces of great power. Loses himself and finds himself again. The earth shatters beneath his feet, he dies and is reborn. He wanders the desert by moonlight and recovers beneath the stars. The sun comes up. Clarity. Judgement. Resolution.

The Hero achieves victory. The Fool achieves understanding. He finds himself in harmony with all the world. His victory is internal.

The journey is circular. Soon, the fool will embark all over again.

At first glance the Fool card is terrifying. Look at him: lost in his own thoughts, carefree and unaware of the dangers of the world. He refuses to heed the warning of the dog at his heels and so heads blithly towards disaster.

But look more closely. His face is serene. The Fool opens his arms to the emptiness ahead of him. Perhaps he does not walk blindly into thin air at all, but actively chooses to fall. To take that next step rather than stand still and stultify. Perhaps he trusts himself to figure it out once he gets there. Absolute confidence in the warp and weft of the universe.

This was another step forward, but that’s OK. Open your arms wide. Enjoy this world we live in: the sun on your face, the grass beneath your feet. The summer air, the slight breeze. Another step forward. Don’t look down. Nothing is forever. We had a good run, a lot of wonderful things happened. Material prosperity, technology, time for leisure. Art. Music. Step. You have done this before. You will do it again. This is what it means to be alive. The breath in your nostrils, in and out. An endless cycle, just like this one.

Step.