Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

So #SpaceX looks weirdly stagnant as well, not to mention committed chiefly to destructive goals. This is our great hope for the #Future though! This is it right here, this is the best that #ElonMusk has to offer: a night sky filled with a zillion teensy disposable satellites (and perhaps concealing something else among the "constellation") and a giant composite rocket which seems altogether too reminiscent of the failed Russian lunar launcher that caused the infamous Nedelin Disaster...this is the glittering future prospect to which Maye Musk's wonderful son intends to deliver us. Oh it's gonna be great! What's the first thing you're gonna do on Elon Musk's Martian paradise? I mean aside from choking to death as a laborer in some Martian mine. Bet ya can't wait to use your Starlink Internet connection on Mars. That's what space exploration is all about, sitting in a miserable little room on Mars and surfing the Internet. Wonder how $SPCX will be doing by then... ~Chara of Pnictogen

#ElonMusk is the king of failed achievements. Neuralink has produced only some extremely sparse and sketchy demonstrations. The Boring Company has a teensy show tunnel and a lot of U.S. cities left in the lurch after Musk ran off with their public-transport budgets. $TSLA is clearly stumbling towards utter collapse after years without anything more to show than the disastrous CyberTruck and hundreds of deaths caused by his shoddy build-quality and broken fraudulent #FSD system. #SpaceX is it for Elon Musk. Nothing else in his empire can be called a success except for SpaceX, and they are ruining space. (cont'd)

So they're probably looking at falling birth rates and thinking "oh shit we're not gonna have enough raw material" because for all their nonsense and endless carping about "efficiency" the leaders of U.S. #business and #technology are horrific wastrels with the absolute worst sense of priorities. They're cheap tightwads and misers at the worst possible moment (like Stockton Rush cheaping out on his submarine) while lavishing vast sums of borrowed cash on ridiculous boondoggles that go nowhere. (cont'd)

There have been some spectacular failures. What's even more puzzling is that the #ElonMusk fans seem thrilled by the big explosions, as if they're in on some grand joke. When the last #Starship mission did a "hard landing", tipping over and producing a hell of a fireball, the crowd of onlookers cheered en masse. What's going on with #SpaceX? Exactly? Is Elon Musk serious about colonizing the Moon or Mars? He could simply be catastrophically unlucky but it's the seeming lack of urgency and sobriety about the whole thing that worries me. It's possible they've settled into a groove of incompetence. (cont'd)

So intense is the #SpaceX focus on being little more than a peddler of cheap dirty reusable rocket transport, filling up the skies with spy satellites and "constellations" of #Starlink thingummies, that it seems to have sucked some of the life out of the purported grander space ambitions of Elon Musk. Despite all his talk about "spreading the light of consciousness" and all that, despite all the rendered images of imaginary SpaceX Martian installations and all the promises about how sensational stuff was happening in ten years or five years or two years, his grand #Starship rocket is facing its 13th test flight having never once put anything into orbit for long. (cont'd)

It's not JUST a racist thing, although of course it's very much a racist thing. It's a familiar story with #fascism: they've pared down human imperatives to the smallest little cluster of fascist mores, chief among them the need to expand and fill the maximum possible space with the maximum number of fascists. U.S. "pro-natalism" is congruent with Italian fascism's "fecundita" and with the Third Reich's motherhood obsessions, a mainstay of their propaganda imagery just as babies are a propaganda weapon in U.S. #media. (cont'd)

That is to say, with #SpaceX so furiously engaged in basically Earthbound missions (see what I did there) and making the great bulk of its money through military and commercial contracts, the boring bureaucratic side of #space exploitation, it's possible that #Starship and #Mars have quietly fallen off the bottom of Musk's priorities. It's enough that the project chugs sluggishly forward perhaps, generating a steady stream of hype and keeping alive the hopes of Musk cultists who have been specifically chosen for being exceptionally easy to please. (cont'd)

The CEOs and even the #investment punters who do nothing all day but hope their portfolios go up as if by magic, they're the "builders" and "creators". Abundant pro-business pro-#capitalism agitprop have cemented the impression that there's something intrinsically creative about "building wealth" even if it's all in electronic funny-money maintained at enormous social and economic cost. One tries to tell them they're swindlers, one tries to get them to understand what actual labor is like and WHY it's laborious and "boring" to them, something they've actually become terrified of. (cont'd)

So there is THAT going on of course but there's a special urgency which suggests a practical problem looming for them: the #tech fascists' plans must call for a vast increase in the labor pool if they're to have a hope of realizing their grander ambitions. Most of the stuff they want to do can't possibly be done by robots. They need human toilers of all sorts. #ElonMusk has already hinted that his #Mars plans might kill millions but it's in the greater good. AND these laborers have to line up with their tedious eugenicist ideas and everything. It's grotty stuff and I don't like thinking about it. (cont'd)

I try not to think about how much I've been spied upon myself. I suspect it must be considerable, and I fear in particular that #Caltech has quietly never had my eye off me because crimes had been done upon my person there. And I did keep using that et@ugcs.caltech.edu email address for years, blithering on Usenet and so forth. I think I was using that e-mail address for much of my #CSLewis correspondence back when I was on various mailing lists. I have to be wary. Perhaps I should start thinking more seriously about safeguarding myself. (cont'd)

"Work", to them, is two things, two contradictory things but never mind that. The #tech barons and #finance scammers and #crypto addicts all think that whatever they're doing is "hard work" of course and it must be exhausting in that sickish dissatisfying way in which idle pursuits can still deplete a person, particularly if they're inclined to anger and impatience. As ALL of these people are. And they think of "the working class" in terms of soldiers and cops mostly and a few idealized trades like oil-drilling and ranching. Clerks in shops aren't workers of course. Government clerks are mere leeches to them no matter what vital service they provide. (cont'd)

Anyway. For whatever reason, @arstechnica@mastodon.social and @popsci@universeodon.com etc. have never quite noticed the emptiness of the #ElonMusk vision, the paucity of his ideas, the flimsiness of his promises. You'd think they'd notice the obvious things at least, and resist the cowardice that must come from knowing any negative reporting on Musk will bring in all his cultists raining down hate mail and death threats. But they do that ANYWAY! It's like with Republicans, they're always hateful. They may hate with greater intensity when the news is bad but is that any excuse for reporters to abandon their duty to the public interest? (cont'd)

If there's going to be any counterpoint to the rubbish "techno-optimism" of Elon Musk and his #tech cronies it's got to come from the mainstream media. But a profoundly craven and sneakfaced thing has happened because of the #Internet. Basically it's this: because the Internet and #socialmedia especially exist in part to maintain a flimsy premise of social equality among all persons, U.S. journalists have gotten to thinking that it's enough for Elon Musk to be hated on the Internet. To them, that's more than enough. After all, those journalists are also loathed for their cowardly reporting and their obvious corruption, so all those @arstechnica@mastodon.social etc. technology reporters are on Musk's side anyway. They loathe the general public and regard us as inferior beings. (cont'd)

@Chip_Unicorn@im-in.space awwwww

There were other signs of trouble, and in any case it SHOULD be a policy of U.S. #journalism never to believe anything a business-person says in public because they're always selling something, and selling means lying. It's utterly infuriating and unsettling to me—though I know the reasons for it, roughly—that @arstechnica@mastodon.social etc. are blinkered or corrupt enough to take people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman at their words. These people aren't the future. They never were. It should have been incredibly obvious that they were scum, mere betrayers and exploiters of #science and #technology. (cont'd)

Do you think #ElonMusk respects "the light of consciousness"? or even plain ol' #life itself? "Humanity" to him is a thin smear of techno-elitists (and their various masters). I was writing earlier about the great "Western" monomyth, their unifying story that explains why the Universe exists and what humans are supposed to do here. It's pertinent here because adherence to the monomyth is roughly equivalent to what the prevailing culture of the United States thinks of as being a good and civilized person. It's all the various tenets of Christofascist "patriotism" distilled into a single heroic fable whose nucleus is the Roman tale of Cincinnatus. (cont'd)

That's what Elon Musk always deserved. He was patently a fraud, transparently a cheat and a fake, a person who was mainly good at nepotism and getting other people to cover for his blunders. But U.S. #media and #journalism and #politics were all hot to pile onto the 100% fake synthetic Elon Musk bandwagon which must surely have been built chiefly at the behest of his mom, Maye Musk, who has always been quietly standing behind her difficult unpredictable son all these years, who connived with Walter Isaacson in writing Musk's official hagiography. How on Earth could all the journalists and reporters not noticed? There's many answers to that. Journalism has given up the better part of its lifeblood to capitalism, and it's hep to hate journalists again. (cont'd)

@KaylinEvergreen@eldritch.cafe aww pretty catte

There's reasons for the disdain. Decades of exposure to corporate #Internet, not to mention #entertainment designed to normalize bigotry and abusive relationships like #SouthPark and copaganda shows, have destroyed the general U.S. sense for propriety and courtesy. There's ever so many people who think it's a citizen's duty to rain bomb threats and slurs and "kys" on powerless strangers. As I've said, journalists are not broadly liked for U.S. #conservatives in common with the #IDF all want journalists in the hands of firing squads. They're seen as mere wreckers. Do I have to mention that Ayn Rand's favorite villains were poison-pen journalists? (cont'd)

This ties directly into the can't-do spirit, the incredibly bleak and straitened sense of priorities which the technology sector and #SiliconValley have imposed on the United States. It's simply summed up: they've got their own vision of the Apocalypse and foresee a future of ever worsening war and cultural collapse until arriving at a stagnant state of space-faring tyranny like something out of Dune or #Warhammer40K. The whole point of the "acceleration" is merely to go faster. The easiest way to go faster is to shed as much as possible. The technofascist future is one that furnishes only the very thinnest layer of social organization atop a self-governing war machine. (cont'd)

The legend might even be true, properly historical, and I still roll my eyes at it. One could never possibly trust such a system to work properly more than once. Once you start lapsing into absolute dictatorship even a little, people get to wanting more of it. It becomes just as it's become in "the West" and especially in a United States boiling over with cultists of Christ the King: nobody can imagine any other way of doing anything. And it's such a rotten way to do things. The techlords demonstrate themselves. They are bad at shit, yet #tech culture and U.S. #media still treats these stumblebums like movie stars. (cont'd)

The commentariat has become infested with people who have no other reason to be in #media or #journalism than social-climbing and seeking the proximity of men of influence (and the occasional woman), giving themselves freely over to corruption and nepotism and swapping bribes. People like Matt Yglesias and Jesse Singal and the other hyperpolitical journalists are always hoping they might luck into a plum role that really brings in the bucks and the access to power, like being a campaign advisor or a star role on #Substack or something like that. (cont'd)

Now I'm going to be a bit charitable here. While I do think that it's a scandal there's no general understanding of the sciences in U.S. #media and #journalism—and I'll go so far as to suspect that a number of top-level journalists are functionally illiterate, only able to communicate in slogans and jargon and simple charts—it should not have been necessary for @arstechnica@mastodon.social or @newscientist@mstdn.social or @TheEconomist@flipboard.com or ANY big news outlet to be scientists in order to notice that Elon Musk wasn't what his marketing campaign said he was. (cont'd)

I keep hectoring about this matter because without all that soppy gushy coverage of #Musk from the earliest days of his quite suspiciously orchestrated publicity campaign, in which Elon was seeded not merely into tech and business journalism but widely through U.S. #entertainment and even written into a #StarTrek series (thus subtly projecting Elon Musk into the distant future), it's doubtful that Musk could have gotten very far. He was never good at anything. He was never actually good at anything, there's not a trace of evidence for Elon Musk's competence, yet merely because of all the publicity and because Maye Musk (probably) scammed Musk a ROYAL FELLOWSHIP of all things--like he was actually a real scientist or engineer and not a flim-flam man--everyone went along with it. @SciMag@flipboard.com and @arstechnica@mastodon.social etc. all went for it. (cont'd)

Think of the sheer staggering volume of total bullshıt about #ElonMusk has poured out of @arstechnica@mastodon.social and @popsci@universeodon.com and @forbes@flipboard.com and a bazillion other #media outlets and individual commentators and people with YouTube channels and podcasts. There's been a precious few granules of proper investigative #journalism into Musk over the years, undertaken at great personal risk because Musk does not deal quietly with his problems and the people who vex him. (cont'd)

That actually helps cement the total-war spirit in place, however. This is a powerful social force, the feeling of resentment that the non-soldier feels at their civilian status which, under authoritarian rule, is kept inflamed till it's unbearable. It becomes easy for such self-loathing persons to allow themselves to become something really dishonorable and treacherous, justifying their crimes as legitimate in a state of total war. Everyone can be a soldier or a cop if they just want it bad enough. (cont'd)

#Technology journalism must be hyperbolically corrupt, because the fatal mixture of obsession with money and obsession with the supposedly magical powers of #tech is incredibly corrosive to ethics, like mixing nitric and hydrochloric acids in order to get a mixed acid (aqua regia, the queen of aqueous acids) capable of dissolving just about anything. There's truth in what William Gibson (q.v. @GreatDismal@mastodon.social) said about the super-rich no longer being remotely human. Quite other forces are at work, which I propose to analyse here. (cont'd)

@liquor_american@universeodon.com oh hey! thanks so much

And I assert that one of the biggest warning signs, something that should have raised far more questions than it did, was the degree to which these purported titans of #tech were devoted solely to telling us what was NOT possible. From the first their premise to being prophets of infinite possibility has been openly fraudulent. #ElonMusk actually got people to hating trains and public transport as general U.S. opinion. It was easy for him to defraud governments for his silly Hyperloop, and altogether too easy for Musk to escape what @SciAm@flipboard.com and @ArsTechnica@flipboard.com etc. should have been giving Elon Musk from the start: nonstop execration. (cont'd)

Meanwhile of course the #tech sector has aggressively gamified war. #Games indoctrinate young persons into joining the U.S. military or the IDF or some other outfit for violent enforcement of "Western" hegemony. The technology of war has itself become gamified, devoted to permitting the modern soldier to be maximally dissociated from what they're doing, like the staff of missile sites who might never actually see the missile itself. Needless to say, the techlords have gotten into war propaganda in a big way and this has been a decisive influence on corporate #socialmedia. These media are intended chiefly as vectors for propaganda. (cont'd)

They are something like the telescreens of Orwell's 1984, with the computer or smartphone or laptop supplying the actual screen and microphone and camera. Through #Twitter and #BlueSky and #YouTube and all the other corporate social media pours a constant stream of propaganda. Facts and figures are popular in Oceania and so it is with Twitter and all other U.S. #media terminally obsessed with regarding statistics (almost always used fraudulently) and polling results and official government figures as intrinsically newsworthy and requiring no real analysis or criticism. (cont'd)

It's all the familiar stuff: Evil will always worsen, Good will always feel more and more outnumbered, populations will dwindle and leadership will contract down to single emperors and generals and such. #Christian extremists love the fuck out of #Warhammer40K. As with the dismal fantasy war porn of PJ LOTR, that Warhammer "in the future there is only war" stuff is right up their street. They all want to be lil crusaders for technofascist Jesus, all the more so if they're completely unfit to be warriors. (cont'd)

Cincinnatus was a great inspiration to U.S. colonists and thus there's a city of Cincinnati and various orders and organizations consecrated to Cincinnatus. He was a legendary Roman farmer, esteemed from the Republic days, a great soldier who was called upon to save Rome from an invasion of some sort (or maybe just one of Rome's many many civil insurrections) so they drafted him as dictator, whence he did the ideal thing that everyone mimics now: he took absolute power for six months (the statutory period) and then went back to his farm. What a hero. I'm doing the Charles Foster Kane clap here. (cont'd)

The one ambition that any of the techlords have that can be construed as aspirational is #space but I've already gone into how grim is their notion of space colonization and resource-extraction. It slots right into their notion of eternal wars over space empires: the only possible way they can keep their war machine churning over the long haul is by pushing off Earth. They're getting extremely antsy about this and they must have a lot of dismal economic forecasts coming in from their pet intellectuals. The "population crisis" chatter hints at the problems they want solved double-quick. (cont'd)

And just as with the telescreens, sometimes the corporate #Internet will address itself to the end user directly, and of course it's always listening and collecting every last possible scrap of personal information, secretively and without the user's consent. The #tech barons openly sneer at the premise that they've a duty to honor the common public's privacy. They regard their invasions of privacy as fait accompli and also voluntary on the users' part. Only those of low IQ, say the geeklords, could possibly even expect privacy on the Internet. (cont'd)