On the Unbearable Dumbness of the Moment We’re In

Like so many, I fear, I’ve spent the past few days glued to one form of outrage machine or another as the United States—and, with it, the entire post-Cold War order—undergoes what is perhaps best described, in honour of its main character, as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

I’m not entirely sure this says anything good about me as a person. But what upsets me the most about this is the sheer, untrammelled stupidity of almost everyone involved. Unlike Boris Johnson, a character I fear we cannot yet consign to history’s dustbin, I’m not a believer in the Great Man theory of history (and, yes, it is ALWAYS a man).

Let’s be clear: the confluence of tech wealth, post-truth, the clickbait economy and the oncoming climate apocalypse was always going to throw up one or more men whose main skill set is that of the old-school carnival barker. Tesla’s price/earnings ratio is currently around 200:1, compared to 7:1 for Stellantis, while sales are actually falling: It’s a valuation driven historically by rubes and lying tweets and now by assumptions about institutional corruption. Trump was so abysmal a businessman that he managed to bankrupt a casino and would have been considerably richer had he just invested the inheritance he acquired from his racist father in the S&P500.

But we are where we are, and the dynamic duo that someone described as a stupid person’s idea of a smart person and a poor person’s idea of a rich person are rampaging around breaking things. And, like it or not, they’ll have real impacts on all our lives. We have at least three easily identifiable bubbles threatening to pop (AI, weight loss drugs and crypto) and a freakshow of religious loons, 4chan fascists, “leopards won’t eat MY face” tokens and the kind of dumbass conservatives that appointed Hitler as Chancellor at the helm of the world’s largest economy when that happens.

Let’s just say nations rarely become more democratic or more functional during a massive economic downturn in a time of immense social change.

Like a lot of the tech overlords doing their damnedest to destroy the one planet we can currently live on, Musk is a big-picture thinker.

We live, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it, in interesting times. Throughout human history, people have collectively gone nuts during times of stress, and a very large proportion of the developed west got sucked down sundry internet rabbit holes during lockdown and never really emerged. The invention of a set of machines that can, using just plagiarism, overpriced GPUs and planet-desiccating quantities of energy and water, lie fluently in a range of media has not helped this. (And, yes, there are other uses for AI, and, no, it’s not all bad, and, yes, like dot.com in 1999-2000, it remains a massive bubble.)

Donald Trump was not a billionaire until he played one on TV. He does not believe in climate change. He also does not believe in exercise, believing that a human being is born with a finite amount of energy that should be reserved for dining on charcoaled steaks or room temperature Big Macs. At least 26 women have accused him of sexual assault, including his first wife, while a New York judge went to some lengths to explain that a jury found him guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll, albeit with his fingers not his dick. He is profoundly and wilfully ignorant about everything from California water flows to basic economics.

Like Hitler (or, perhaps more relevantly, Berlusconi), Trump is as risible a figure to his adversaries—the hair! The orange! The white bits around the weirdly squinty eyes!—as he is a cult hero to his acolytes. And, yet, he’s capable of doing huge, huge damage to the entire planet at a critical stage in its history. He wants to open coal-fired power plants to feed the plagiarism machines. He wants to reset the clock to an era of colonial expansion, closed economies and unchallenged white male dominance, perhaps because this is the only period of history he remembers from school, and perhaps because it’s the only way to get the Trump name on the physical world map.

Musk is, also, in many ways, a laughable figure. A pathologically unfunny shitposter and internet troll, a man so bizarrely fragile that he takes time out of his busy day to steal the jokes of others, a man so high on his own supply that he’s been radicalised by the platform he owns, a self-proclaimed free speech warrior who’s currently suing advertisers who didn’t fancy their ads running alongside the CSAM, racism and crypto spam that now infests X-Twitter. (Side note: One of the more appealing elements of Donald Trump compared to Musk is how conspicuously Trump despises his core constituency, while Musk is quite embarrassingly thirsty for the approval of his own.)

Even more laughable, perhaps, is his Mars obsession. Like a lot of the tech overlords doing their damnedest to destroy the one planet we can currently live on, Musk is a big-picture thinker. He’d like to be a type of Hari Seldon figure, the ultimate great man of history, the visionary who got us off Earth and made us a multiplanetary species, thereby future-proofing humanity against supernovas, cosmic death rays, stray asteroids and sundry other existential risks. (I suspect, from his alleged freakish enthusiasm to donate his sperm to even the most passing acquaintances, that he’d also like to be one of those super-procreators who ends up in everyone’s DNA in a few centuries time, like Genghis Khan or Edward III.)

The corollaries of this elevated perspective are unfortunate, perhaps especially so when coupled with ketamine and the trollish sensibility that led him to deliver a Nazi salute at Trump’s coronation. Getting to Mars is step one in ensuring that trillions of future humans get to exist, so justifies any amount of suffering caused to any number of people in the present moment. The existential risks of death rays, supernovas, etc outweigh the current small-picture risk of the climate crisis, meaning he can continue to block high-speed rail, burn through tonnes of energy on his plagiarism machines, and ally with climate-change deniers such as Trump.

Obviously, not only because Musk is a shyster with an abysmal workplace safety record and a tolerance for risk that won’t really cut it on a hostile planet where a mission has to survive six months without external support, but because of fundamental issues such as there not yet being an energy source light enough to bring six months’ worth of food and material to Mars, he ain’t going to be putting people on Mars anytime soon. But he seems hellbent on destroying the only planet we currently have in pursuit of doing so.

Looking at the raging Dunning-Kruger cases who are currently leading the world’s largest economy, this feels, both tragically and comically, more and more plausible to me.

It’s a hell of a premise for a sitcom. Two monstrous narcissists with unresolved daddy issues and a white supremacy fetish are sharing a White House. But one wants to take America back to the Gilded Age and the other wants to bump humanity into the twenty-fifth century. Who’ll win out?

Except it isn’t funny, because it’s happening now, it’s happening for real, and the many, many people around the world leading more-or-less blameless lives and trying to do the right thing by their loved ones, their communities and the planet are on the receiving end of it.

One explanation of the Fermi paradox is that the closer a species gets to becoming extra-planetary the more likely it is to extinguish itself through (to name but a few of the more currently obvious possibilities) climate change, rogue AI, bioweapons, chemical weapons or nuclear war. Looking at the raging Dunning-Kruger case studies who are currently leading the world’s largest economy, this feels, both tragically and comically, more and more plausible to me.

Happy February!

Image credit: Madhav fallusion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.