A unifying theory of Elon Musk

If you don’t know someone who works in research, you may not realize that the science community around the world has been upended by the actions of the Trump administration and the ongoing agency-by-agency dismembering by Elon Musk’s so-called “department” of government efficiency.

USAID, arguably the most important non-military peacekeeping force in the world, is being all but erased from existence. Research supported by the National Institutes of Health, who fund over 30 billion dollars of health and medical research each year, has been halted. The National Science Foundation, NOAA, NASA, and other federal agencies have been ordered to stop any work that includes words from a length list considered too woke. That list includes such simple words as female, status, and victim.

Its essentially a moratorium on social science, one that will take a lot of other good science out as well.

Musk has previously vowed to destroy the “woke mind virus.” What he means by that seems to be to destroy any science that helps us be socially aware — anything that helps us understand the lives and experiences and health and safety of others.

Musk’s posse has also descended on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. NOAA is responsible for the National Weather Service. NOAA is responsible for Tsunami warnings and Tornado warnings and Hurricane Tracking. Wired reported that NOAA has been instructed to stop working with any international partners. There is a credible threat that the most important datasets for weather and climate are going to disappear. Currently open and free, the myriad critical information services that NOAA provides, from weather forecasts to satellite imagery to emergency alerts, look ripe for privatization.

If there is a basic single premise of longermism, it is that the people of the future are more important than the people living today. In Musk’s words, “life shouldn’t just be about solving one miserable problem after another.”

You know, like helping people with AIDS.

So, what do buying Twitter, aligning with a populist, dismantling foreign aid, ending social science, and putting all of our information about what’s happening in the world behind a paywall, all have in common?

Answer: they make it very hard to see harms that people and ecosystems are experiencing today in service of Musk’s fantasy society 10,000 years from now.

Let me explain. First: climate change is real. Second, Elon Musk knows it. He just doesn’t think its the extinction-level threat that it probably is. Rather, he’s concerned that the cost of addressing climate change will cause too much of a delay in his plans to get to Mars and beyond. He may even think that the global societal response to climate change that we are capable of would threaten his aspirations entirely, because an effective response to climate change will likely involve a societal transformation that dismantles the very systems from which he draws his power and wealth. So he wouldn’t be the puppetmaster anymore. Which as far as he’s concerned means Mars will never happen, even if it does someday. Because he won’t get credit for it. Because he’s also a narcissist.

To hide all that you’d need to control how people share information and learn about current events (X). You’d have to shut down access to global health data (WHO). You’d have to shut down access data about climate change (NOAA). You’d have to stop scientists from studying it all (NSF, NIH), especially when you know most impacts will be on Black and Brown people (DEI). And you’d have to eliminate our on-the-ground engagement with communities around the world already struggling with environmental and climatic breakdown (USAID).

That proof, of course, never came. He just dropped the notion out there to circulate and spread among people already hypnotized by his swagger and sleights of hand.

The goal is to create a world full of hurt, because he has so little imagination he sees no path forward other than through destruction.

This isn’t a “what we should do” post, and for that I’m sorry. Doing everything we can to stay connected, kind, empathetic, and in solidarity is probably where I’d start if I was writing that piece.

So far, our failure to fully anticipate how bad things would get (and how fast) is as much a matter of their planning as it is a failure of our imagination. So that’s what this is, I suppose, an attempt to think outside the lines, to try to imagine their vision and how they think it will play out.

I hope I’m wrong and its just the racism, but I don’t think so.