this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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How the fuck can Elon Musk claim to be a Trekkie? When he is against everything Star Trek stands for?!
The psychological dissonance of that man is insane!
He also claims to love the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book series where technology corporations are absolutely loathed and every AI is either a broken or an asshole or both.
'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes." '
We lost Douglas Adams way too soon.
And I think he has endorsed The Culture books, which also is kinda Startrek on steroids. Omg that universe is amazing.
Given Musk's prejudices, that surprises me -- especially since in The Culture being transgender is extremely uncontroversial. (Hell, even the spacecraft are permitted to determine their roles and choose their own names; meanwhile Musk is desperately trying to wrench Grok into his own image.)
Musk's target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.
His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about "traditional Western values" the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.
I suspect Gwen Shotwell had more to do with the naming than Musk did.
He also said the Cybertruck is "what Bladerunner would drive".
he doesn't actually know a fucking thing about sci-fi.
Like every Conservative, he either knows fuck-all, or only has a surface-level knowledge, about art. It's why they think a socialist like George Orwell would write books defending their ideals or that songs like "Born in the USA" are patriotic.
Musk would definitely be the guy operating a digital hell for everyone who buys his neural backup products and doesn't pay a monthly fee to opt out.
Ah yes, that too.
Meanwhile his old friend from PayPal seems to have a thing for the villains from The Lord of the Rings universe.
I wonder if he ever read the 5th book, Mostly Harmless. In that book there's an aside which describes how the people of the planet Golgafrincham tricked all the useless members of their society (management consultants, etc) into thinking the planet was doomed and getting on a ship to escape the planet which they programmed to fly to another salary system and crash into one of the planets there. That part of the book always stuck with me, and more and more I wish there was a way we could do the same to Musk and his billionaire cronies.
Of course I don't think Musk has actually read any of the HHGTTG novels, especially not the 5th one so maybe there's still a chance?
$10 says he loves the wiki brief of the mos def version.
Or he claimed to be hugely into trek and hhgttg to fit in when in uni and now can't untangle himself from the lie without an ego blow
The more he says about these things, the less I'm convinced he's ever watched an episode of Star Trek or any version of HHGTTG. He also thought that Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner was named Bladerunner.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-main-character-blade-runner
I think he likes it because he identifies with the tech corpos and wants to bring that piece of it, complete with shit broken AI to life
What I think is that because they are incapable of empathetic thought, the message gets lost.
TNG’s Time’s Arrow, DS9’s Past Tense, VOY’s Life Line are all just made up stories to them. No human condition there.
I think this is indeed it, unfortunately.
To such sociopaths incapable of empathetic thought, Star Trek is awesome because future and technology and winning battles. So if you’re a tech bro and you’re winning (money) and pushing technology forward regardless of the costs, and everybody knows who you are because of it, well then you must be an awesome human that’s winning at life! Because obviously good life = victorious life.
It's a common theme. There are a lot of conservatives who are still somehow fans of Star Trek because they the lack media literacy needed to figure out that they're values are not shared by the good guys on the show.
Remember how conservatives think that Rage Against The Machine is on their side. There's no delusion too great after that.
It's not deusion. It's a cooption narrative. 'All the cool things came from us!' Because they don't create anything of worth of their own
It's not about values, it's about image and symbolism. And the fact that a white dude got to go all over the universe telling aliens they're wrong and they need to accept the American... uhhm Federation way!
Yep. The whole utopian future of Star Trek is mostly off-screen. They talk about how they don't need money anymore and have abolished hunger, etc. but we never see that in the actual episodes. What we do see is people who are absolutely certain that their way of life is superior to everyone else's, that the status quo must not be questioned and that the military represents the pinnacle of society.
I have to disagree a little bit on some of that.
I'd say we see a hell of a lot more than that. We see within the named characters their drive to become better versions of themselves. We see people doing cheesy acts of self sacrifice for the good of others without an expectation of payment, gifts, etc. We see terraforming doing their job for the sake of it. There is a multitude of scenes that take place on earth and various colonies, all in which people are well fed, and live in walkable communities in which quality of life is the primary purpose of production.
I've only read two of the Star Trek books at this point (The first two in the Picard series), and we see humanitarian aid missions. We see how production facilities on Mars/Earth operate.
Could you give an example?
Star Fleet is definitely a military organization, but it is not solely a military organization by a long shot. It seems few people join for the military aspect of it, it always seems to be a decision based on family tradition, or exploration. And when they're jerking themselves off over the values of Star Fleet, it's never about the military aspect.
But all of this is either compatible with a conservative reading, or requires more analysis than most conservatives are putting in. I mean I doubt Musk read the Picard books.
But then you go on to mention stuff like family tradition, which is literally a key value for conservatives, especially when it involves joining the military.
Or people being well fed, or valuing self-improvement? Think about all the rightwing grifters who go on about self improvement all the time, or how they claim that communism killed 15 vigintillion people from starvation and only CAPITALISM can feed the world. Conservatives don't want people to be starving, starving citizens are the sign of a poor society. It's okay that the Federation doesn't use money because it is post-scarcity thanks to replicators, a technological solution to the issue of feeding the poor. This is perfectly compatible with the techbro mindset that tech is the solution to all our problems, and isn't challenging to those who believe that socialism is impossible without advanced post-scarcity technology.
What I'm trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology, in much the same way that a liberal will read it as a triumph of liberalism or a leftist can interpret it as socialist. It isn't challenging to those ideologies, because it's vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.
I think he didn't really get that "Picard gets a neurological link to the Borg" == "not good"...
Imagine he's developing the Neurolink because he thought it was good.
To be fair there would be some interesting consequences to a hive mind, it's almost like having perfect empathy. You would have no desire to harm anyone else, because you'd be literally harming yourself.
I was hoping the plot in Picard was going to kinda go this route, and just like the Borg were in part a critique of Soviet communism, it could have presented a more anarchism inspired idealistic version of communism framing a queen-less Borg collective as a perfect consensus-building cooperative community.
The same way so many idiot fans seem to think star trek is "too woke" now lol
...I'm sorry?
It's a thing repubs said when we got a black female captain (who btw has had the best captain arc since Picard.
You don't have to apologize. It's ok.
I dunno. Hang out around Trekkies and you can meet some real knuckleheads. People who seem to have missed the whole point.
I think the closest thing Elon is to Star Trek would be a Romulan/Ferengi hybrid wannabe. Dreaming of having a star ship to manipulate, conquer and extort the galaxy.