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An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.
His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.
People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.
At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.
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Musk does have a special talent, but the talent is for hype: projecting the kind of overconfidence that gets investors who also have shallow technical understanding to give him money.
That kind of overconfidence •requires• ignorance. Any actual understanding of technical details might give him a dangerous sense of nuance and complexity, which of course would scare away investors looking for an infallible Supergenius Unicorn who can offer huge returns.
He's basically P. T. Barnum.
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One of my students remarked the other day that Musk seemed like a supervillain straight out of a comic book — and I agree. Sort of Lex Luthor but a dumbass.
This piece you gives interesting dimension to that observation: charismatic incompetence can be appealing as a destructive force when people don’t believe the status quo is worth saving.
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And I guess I need to close the obvious-but-needs-stating loop on that:
This nihilistic desire for destruction is how fascism gets in the door.
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@inthehands I am impressed with how prophetic the satire Network appears to have been about the dynamics of public outrage escaping containment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Network_%281976_film%29
(edit: urlencode parentheses as %28 %29)
It wasn’t prophetic at all… its writing, development, filming was only 20-30 years from the last apocalyptic, millions of deaths outburst of nihilistic outrage.
@jmeowmeow @inthehands Satire? I thought it was a documentary.
@jmeowmeow @inthehands I’ve seen a theatre play on “The Network” on Broadway and it was amazing. Didn’t know it was an adaptation of an earlier show.
@albertcardona @jmeowmeow @inthehands wasn't there also a film "The Network", about FB? Was the play an adaptation of that?
That's different from the film "Network," for which Peter Finch won a best actor Oscar.
@jmeowmeow
I really, really need to watch that!
"We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it's true! You people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we spin! You're beginning to think the tube is reality, that your own lives are unreal! You do what the tube tells you, you dress like the tube, eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs!"