Hello Earth! This is Captain Tom Nicholas
speaking to you live from SpaceX
Mars Colony One, Codename: Eden
(but both the "e"s are spelt with "3"s
and the
"n" is inexplicably an exclamation mark.
Today marks 365 Earth-days
since the spacecraft Dragon V touched
down safely at Eden Interplanetary
Spaceport.
And I'm happy to report that everything
has gone according to plan. The water
mines continue to draw ample moisture
from the soil.
Food grows and grazes in the
agricultural
biomes. And, more importantly than
anything,
those who arrived here as refugees
have begun to become citizens.
What they left behind on Earth in terms
of creature comforts
is more than made up for in their
ability to dream,
their newfound capacity to imagine a
future beyond
rising sea levels and ecological
collapse.
If this colony represents anything, it is
hope.
And the ability to once again imagine
a future for humanity.
And, wherever you're watching this on
Earth,
know that you too can join us.
To live and to dream and to build on
that future.
For the low, low price of just two
million dollars.
Elon Musk is something of a lightning
rod for popular opinion;
at least online anyway. To his supporters,
he's a continual source of inspiration,
a real-life Tony Stark; not only is he a
successful entrepreneur but an innovator
whose swagger is matched only by his
unending ambition
to make-real technologies which
previously were the reserve of science
fiction.
To his detractors, he's a point of
ridicule;
someone who seeks to take credit for the
work of his engineers
and who often proposes solutions to
problems
for which better, more workable solutions
already exist. A great deal has thus been
written and
said about Elon Musk. On this website, for
instance, Oliver Thorne of Philosophy
Tube has provided a great examination of
how Musk tries to present himself as a
kind of counter-cultural figure,
whilst in truth being pretty much the
archetypical capitalist in how he runs
his companies.
In this video, I want to take a different
approach.
For, I don't think that those who hang on
Musk's every word
have simply been duped; I think that
there are ways in which Musk is fairly
distinct from the other entrepreneurial
figures which surround him.
And this distinction lies in his
unashamed belief
in the future. Tech entrepreneurs in
particular
often talk about disruption. They
regularly try to position the various
products that they're bringing to the
market
as having the potential to completely
change the way we live.
This lofty rhetoric, however, is soon
undercut when it turns out that what
they're actually trying to sell us
is a microwave that connects to the
internet, or something similarly mundane.
Whatever questions we might raise about
Elon Musk's specific
proposals for the future (and I will
raise a few towards the end of this
video),
they're at least genuinely pretty bold.
One might argue, for instance, that the
underground roads that he wants to build
as part of his loop project
would likely have less impact on
congestion
and on efforts to combat the climate
crisis than simply
laying on a few extra buses or metro
trains each hour.
Nevertheless, the idea of boring a web of roads under a city
is at the very least genuinely ambitious.
While I'll talk a little bit about what I
think some of the potential
social, economic and political
ramifications
of the individual projects which
comprise what I'm going to refer to as
Muskian Futurism are towards the end
of this video,
what I want to focus on for the most
part is why
Musk's vision resonates with so many
people.
If you're a Musk fan yourself, then
you'll likely have your own specific
reasons for admiring the man,
and I don't want to take those away from
you. But I do want to ask
more broadly what it is about our
contemporary moment
(and the recent past) that makes Musk feel,
to many, like such a breath of fresh air.
I want to ask what societal desires
Musk's invitations to imagine bold
futures
respond to. Frequent viewers of my
channel will not be surprised to learn
that doing so is going to involve a bit
of a history lesson
and a ramble through changing
perceptions of the future
from the early 20th century to the
present day.
I hope you'll stick with it though,
because understanding
how we got to where we are now, and how
people's relationship to the idea of the
future
has evolved over time, is, I think,
essential for gaining a fully
contextualized understanding of exactly
what Elon Musk is offering
us and why our culture has, for the most
part,
so enthusiastically embraced his
futuristic
dreams.
While many of Elon Musk's ambitious
visions for the future remain at concept
stage,
there's one thing for which we have to
give him some credit:
the popularization of the electric car.
In a 2019 paper summarizing a study into
consumer perceptions of electric
vehicles,
Zoe Long et al. wrote that 'several
participants explained that Tesla
changed their perceptions that electric
cars
are slow, ugly, have limited range,
and not fun to drive. Several
participants noted that Tesla is
"cool" and that owning one communicates a
symbolic message to others'.
As recently as a decade ago, electric
cars were seen as pretty lame.
Their quietness and eco-credentials were
the antithesis of the kind of vehicles
that were fetishized in the Fast &
Furious franchise
or in games such as Gran Turismo, Forza
and Grand Theft Auto.
Tesla's interventions in the market,
however, have changed
all of this. Electric cars are now not
only more widely available,
they're also seen as pretty cool. Of
course, neither Elon Musk nor Tesla
invented the electric vehicle;
their success lies in having changed the
popular perception
of an already existing technology. And,
in this, Musk has more than a little in
common with the original
automobile entrepreneur: Henry Ford.
Similarly to Musk, Henry Ford did not
invent the car;
cars had been sold commercially for more
than a decade prior to the founding of
the Ford Motor Company
in 1903. Early automobiles, however,
were expensive, hard to come by and often
highly unreliable.
It was only with the launch of the Ford
Model T in 1908
that the motorcar became the middle
class's preferred means of
transportation.
The Model T was not only more reliable
but quicker and cheaper to produce,
thus meaning that there were more of
them available and that they were
cheaper to buy.
While innovations in the internal
engineering of the car likely also
played a role, most of this was made
possible by the Ford company's
innovations in the process of
manufacture.
Ford used machines to ensure consistency
across
parts and, rather than having one highly-
skilled technician
assemble all the pieces together, broke the
assembly process down into individual
tasks which could each be performed by a
worker
who only needed to be trained in that
specific task.
This method of manufacture would come to
be known as the
'Fordist model of production', and would
fundamentally alter
how goods were produced to the world
over. There are further parallels with
Musk and Tesla in the present day here,
too.
Although it's not been entirely without
its problems, Musk has sought to automate
as much of the car manufacturing process
as possible in order to similarly
'increase
manufacturing speed and drive down costs'.
What's more instructive in our attempt
to understand the appeal
of Muskian Futurism in the present
day than
Ford's technical innovations, however, is
the broader cultural
atmosphere of the time in which he was
working.
Two years after the Ford Motor Company
began production of the Model T
in Detroit, the Italian poet Filippo
Marinetti
wrote a short document called The
Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism.
This manifesto, which was shortly
published on the front page of the
french newspaper Le Figaro,
decried 'futile veneration for the past'
and exhorted the reader to embrace
speed, light, creative destruction
and, above all else, the possibilities of
the future yet to come.
Marinetti's document set the stage for
an artistic and social movement known,
as the title of the manifesto would
suggest, as Futurism.
In his desire to break with the past and
look excitedly towards the future,
however,
Marinetti also ably summed up what we
might call the "spirit of the age".
For, human beings haven't always believed
in the future.
Certainly, people have always known that
each day, week, year and decade would be
followed by another.
Nevertheless, the future hasn't always
been viewed as a realm of possibilities,
and our journey towards it has not
always been viewed as a positive.
The Christian faith, for instance, has
often seen the passage of time as a
negative,
as a progressive journey away from the
innocence of the garden of Eden
and the word of God. Across art,
industry and politics, however, during the
early 20th century,
the future came to be celebrated,
fetishized even. We can see this in the
economic sphere, with industrialists such
as Ford
racing to find ways of making goods
cheaper
and of higher quality. We see it in the
cultural sphere, too.
Following Marinetti, artists of all forms
and disciplines
constantly published manifestos
detailing how they would tear up
previous expectations of what art could
and should be. We see it in the political
sphere,
in which followers of ideologies
including communism,
fascism and even the dominant creeds of
liberalism and capitalism
dreamt up new ways of structuring
society.
Across each of these spheres, we see
attempts to imagine
bold futures in which society is almost
unrecognizable
from the present. All of this is detailed
in Franco Birardi's 2011 book
After The Future, in which he christens
the 20th century
'the century that trusted in the future'.
He writes that 'the 20th century is
pervaded
by a religious belief in the future'.
This belief was perhaps put under some
strain by the horrific consequences of
Fascism in Europe
and of Stalinism in the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless,
after the Second World War, it continued
on relatively unabated.
One only has to think of the "space race",
at the heart of which was a utopian,
futuristic vision of humanity conquering
the stars.
Or, in the UK, Harold Wilson's
declaration that the country would
embrace the 'white heat' of technology
and undergo a 'scientific revolution'.
If such bold appeals to the future
existed throughout the 20th century, then,
why is it that Elon Musk's proposals
often feel so unique in the present day?
For, again, whatever we think of his
specific proposals,
the unashamed manner in which Musk dares
to dream
of a future which is on some level
different to the present day
certainly stands out. And this clearly
says something
about the way in which the future is
viewed elsewhere in our culture
(or at least has been viewed until
recently). In order to understand
why Muskian Futurism often seem so
unusual in the present,
we therefore need to understand what
happened in the interim
between the bold dreaming of the 20th
century
and our present situation: what Birardi
refers to as
'the slow cancellation of the future'.
Starting in the late 1970s and early
1980s,
the undying belief in the future which
dominated the 20th century
began to steadily decline. Perhaps this
was the result of sheer exhaustion,
perhaps this was a result of the
economic crises which dominated the
period.
Either way, we can identify this fading
belief in the future as a realm of
possibilities
most clearly in the political sphere.
After her election as Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom in 1979,
Margaret Thatcher soon became associated
with the slogan
"There Is No Alternative". As
she, along with Ronald Reagan in the US,
set about transforming society in line
with their neoliberal vision,
they pushed hard on the idea that their
politics was not just
one of many possible ways of governing
and
organizing society, but that this was the
only
logical way of doing so. This kind of
rhetorical flourish is certainly not
unique to Thatcher, Reagan and other
supporters of neoliberal capitalism.
Nevertheless, in this case, it gained
significant traction
throughout society. This was compounded
in 1989,
when the fall of the Berlin Wall led to
the dissolution of the Soviet Union
and, with it, the most prominent
example of an alternative to capitalism.
Whatever your views on capitalism,
Soviet-style communism or
any ideological formation for that
matter, it should be possible to see
that the absence of any actually-
existing alternative to the dominant
ideology of a period
makes it far harder to imagine society
being structured differently
in the future. Francis Fukuyama famously
declared that the collapse of the Soviet
Union signaled
"The End of History". He cited 'the total
exhaustion of viable
systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism'
as proof that the world had reached 'the
end point of mankind's
ideological evolution and the
universalisation of Western liberal
democracy
as the final form of human government'.
In many ways, then, the end of history
also meant the end of the future. In
contrast to the bold visions of the
early 20th century,
the politics of the subsequent decades
thus became
increasingly managerial. In the UK, US and
elsewhere,
political parties rarely pitched radical
proposals for the future
but, instead, merely sought to present
themselves as the
least offensive candidates, as reliable
administrators of the present.
In his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life, Mark
Fisher explores how this was mirrored in
the cultural output of the era.
He points, for example, to a lack of
innovation in popular music,
writing that 'it was through the
mutations of popular music
that many of those of us who grew up in
the 1960s,
70s and 80s learned to measure the
passage of cultural
time. But faced with 21st-century music,
it is this very sense of future shock
which has disappeared'.
Where the Futurists and other 20th-
century artists had constantly sought to
tear up the perceived rules of their
various art forms,
Fisher posits that the 21st-century
music scene was
absent of any seismic event in which a
band or artist
suddenly produced a new sound which
shook up expectations.
In fact, in the late 2000s and early
2010s,
an active distrust in the future became
a central theme in english-language
storytelling.
Black Mirror, for instance, works directly
on the premise that
technologies which we might be tempted
to view as enabling a more hopeful
future
will actually be a corrupting force. More
concerningly,
until very recently, young adult fiction
was dominated by dystopian futures
in properties such as The Hunger Games
and Divergent.
What does it say about a culture when
its most popular tales for children
envisage a future in which young people
have to fight each other for their very
survival?
If the 20th century was "the century that
trusted in the future",
both Birardi and Fisher posit that the
early 21st century
saw the future viewed either with
skepticism or dread.
The world's coming to terms with the
climate emergency and increasing
awareness that politicians were doing a
little to combat
it likely also played a role here. What
point was there in dreaming of the
future
when the very planet on which we live
has a terminal diagnosis?
In the past few years, however, this
bleakness and pessimism towards the
future
has begun to come up against some
opposition.
And, up there among its chief opponents
has been
one Elon Musk.
So, after more than a brief detour
through the history of perceptions of
the future,
we find ourselves back in the present
where I want to argue that the future
is making a bit of a comeback. And, this
is interesting in relation to Birardi
and Fisher's work. For, both authors
display some skepticism about the
younger generation
(primarily millennials), with Fisher
writing that
'the assumption that the young are
automatically at the leading edge of
cultural
change is now out of date'.
Both predicted the pessimism of the 80s
90s and 2000s
continuing for some time and being
largely accepted by the generations
growing up
within it. This, however, has not been the
case,
with Musk being a prime example. Polling
of UK residents by YouGov in the past
year found that 46 percent of
millennials have a positive opinion of
Musk,
in comparison to only 22 percent of gen
xers and 15 percent
of baby boomers. Despite Musk himself
being 49, then,
it seems to be millennials who are most
responsive to his futuristic
vision. And, while I remain of the opinion
that Musk is relatively unique among
other entrepreneurs
in his consistent articulation of
genuinely bold visions of the future,
I think, in his gaining popularity
primarily amongst millennials,
there are similarities between Musk and
figures in other spheres
which hint at him being not so much a
lone wolf than a symptom of a broader
cultural shift
in popular perceptions of the future. In
particular, I think we can identify
several parallels between Muskian
Futurism
and a recent expansion of the political
imagination.
On the left, figures such as Bernie
Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and "The Squad"
in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK
have also,
when not being millennials themselves,
found support primarily among younger
generations
and have also set about imagining bold
new visions for the future. Where the
politics of the previous decade
accepted much of the existing dominant
order and contented itself with
proposing
minuscule changes to the status quo,
we've seen a resurgence of both
politicians
and grassroots movements such as Black
Lives Matter advocating for
comprehensive reform,
guided by the belief that the future can
be better than,
and fundamentally different to, the
present.
I think that this context (and that of
the darker visions of the future offered
by the contemporary political right
in the form of Donald Trump and the
post-Brexit Conservative Party
is essential to understanding why Elon
Musk has become such a revered figure
in the contemporary moment. I think, in
many regards, his appeal lies less in his
specific
proposals than in the more fundamental
fact that he answers a contemporary
desire
to believe in the future again. We can
propose countless reasons why this
desire might have re-emerged.
I would place the financial crisis of
2008's revelation that neoliberalism was
not the perfect system that it had
presented itself as
high up on that list. Whatever reason one
lands upon, however, what is evident is
that people
(young people in particular) seem to want
to trust in the future again.
And Elon Musk answers that call.
What remains is to consider what the
ramifications
of his vision might be.
For the most part, in this video, I've
attempted to contextualize Muskian
Futurism
to ask what its appeal is and what other
social,
political, economic and cultural
movements
it might have something in common with. I
want to end by making some observations
about Musk's projects
themselves. A few weeks back, Musk posted
a rendering of the plans for Central
Hall
Station, one of the stops in the Las
Vegas Convention Center "Loop" tunnel
system which,
according to an article by Mike Brown
for Inverse, is
'designed to take 4,400 attendees per hour
in one of two directions over a distance
of nearly
a mile'. The responses to Musk's tweet
were
filled with people comparing it to other
forms of transportation.
Many pointed out, for instance, that each
car can only take
five passengers, with the proposed
minivan-type pods
only being able to take twelve. When we
take into account the fact that most
metro trains can carry more than
1,000 people at any one time, the Loop
system thus seems to be
a little bit lacking. Yet, I don't think
this is a bug
but a feature. In a 2018 episode of Star
Trek: Discovery,
Musk was mentioned as an example of an
innovative pioneer.
Now, I've never actually watched an
episode of Star Trek,
but the world of the show is, I'm told,
relatively utopian.
In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase uses
it as an example of a potential future
in which both scarcity and social
hierarchy have been eliminated.
He writes that 'we could indeed call it a
communist society,
in the sense that Marx used the term, a
world run according to the principle
"from each according to their ability, to
each according to their need"'.
I mean, I don't think anyone's under the
impression that Musk is any form of
communist; although
he did once claim to be a socialist and
he evidently has a deep understanding of
Marx's work.
Nevertheless, I do think we can often
fall into the trap
of assuming that Elon Musk's various
projects
are about building a future in which, as
in Star Trek,
we'll all share. When we see mock-ups of
the Loop system or
hear of colonies on mars, we assume them
to be intended to serve
everyone and appraise them on that
basis.
I think this is a mistake. For, I don't
think Muskian Futurism
is intended to serve everyone. I think
the limited capacity of the Loop system
is a central feature. This is not a mass
public transportation system,
this is a proposal for a series of
gilded corridors
which enable elites such as Musk to get
to their destinations quicker
and without having to mix with the rest
of us. The colonies on mars, too,
are not a futuristic vision of new life
for the many,
but a means for the few to escape the
effects of the climate crisis.
Where the egalitarian mask of Muskian
Futurism
slipped most obviously was in the
announcement of the Cybertruck,
a bulletproof (supposedly) solar-powered
electric pickup truck.
We often think of electric vehicles as
being intended to stave off the climate
crisis
(although whether they're the best means
of doing so is itself debatable).
This vehicle, however, is not a vehicle
for stopping the coming of the end times,
this is an early concept of a vehicle
for the end
times. Speaking to Jay Leno about the
Cybertruck, Musk himself stated that
'we want to be a leader in apocalypse
technology'.
This, then, is a vehicle for the elite to
traverse a world which is both
ecologically devastated and in which
there is likely to be increasing
hostility towards them.
So, to conclude, Musk's vision of the
future
may be bold. Muskian Futurism may, on
the surface,
fulfill a present desire to believe in
the future again,
to imagine how human ingenuity might be
harnessed in order to overcome the
problems of the present
and to fundamentally reshape society.
The pressing question to ask of these
projects, however, is,
to my mind, not what their logistical
viability might be,
but who they're for. To argue that Musk's
proposals do not solve the problems they
are intended to solve
often leads down a path of forcing
people to make a choice between the
future
and the present. And, things are not so
binary.
A better future is possible. The
challenge
lies in trying to articulate one that is
as bold as that
offered by Elon Musk but is one in which
we can
all share.
Thank you so much for watching
this little broadcast that I put
together.
If you've enjoyed it or found it
interesting in some way, then I would be
super grateful if you'd consider sharing
with a friend or
someone else you might think might get
something out of it.
A massive thanks as always to Michael V
Brown,
to J Fraser Cartwright, to Richard, to
Kaya Lau,
to LaLomi, to David Brothers and
to Chris Brown for being signed up to
the top tier of my Patreon.
Patreon support is massively
useful in helping me
put together bits like this and to
set aside the time to make these videos.
So, if you enjoy them and would
like to help me make more,
as well as getting Early Access to my
videos and to scripts and stuff,
then you can find out all about how to
do so at patreon.com/tomnicholas.
Thank you so
much for watching once again though,
and have a great week!
