Tech Won't Save Us - Elon Musk is a Cult Leader w/ Ilari Kaila

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Ilari Kaila to talk about Elon Musk's latest unhinged tweeting episode, his self-serving calls to end COVID-19 lockdowns, and how the outlandish promises he makes and stories he makes result in a cult-like devotion by those who follow him.Ilari Kaila is a Finnish-American writer and Composer-in-Residence at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work has been published by Aeon Magazine, Jacobin Magazine, Muftah Magazine, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, and others. Read his blog post about how Elon Musk is a cult leader at LimitedHangoutBlog.com and follow him on Twitter as @IlariKaila.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

Who cares what he tries to do? What he's actually doing is incredibly dangerous. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that wonders why anyone is listening to tech billionaires for medical advice. Today I'm speaking to Ilari Kaila, a Finnish-American freelance writer and composer-in-residence at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His writing has appeared in Aeon Magazine, Jacobin Magazine, Mufta Magazine, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, and others. He also blogs at limitedhangoutblog.com and tweets at at Ilari Kaila. Today, we speak about Elon Musk, his recent tweeting about COVID-19, lockdowns, and everything else he's up to right now. Ilari also makes the point that

Musk also sounds a lot like a cult leader. If you like our conversation, make sure to leave Tech Won't Save Us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That really helps more people to find the podcast and to listen to it. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter, where it's at Tech Won't Save Us.

And you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. And enjoy our conversation. Hey Larry Kyla, welcome to tech won't save us. So happy to be here Paris. It's great to speak with you. So obviously, you wrote this blog post about two years ago, on kind of like the the cultish aspects of Elon Musk to put it mildly. But first, I do want your impression on what he's been tweeting lately. Obviously, he's very focused on the virus and kind of the government's response to that.

He's called shutdown measures, fascist. He's been tweeting a lot about the science of COVID-19. And a lot of scientists and doctors say that he's getting a lot of that wrong. And obviously, there's this really infamous tweet that he sent back on March 19th, where he said, based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in the US by the end of April. And as we know, the US is still reporting about 25 to 30,000 new cases a day at this point. Slightly wrong there. Yeah, yeah, just a little bit wrong. And even before that, he already tweeted just simply, this coronavirus panic is dumb, right?

Yeah. Kind of flaunting his apparent expertise in infectious disease. He's an expert in everything, you know. He's a universal expert, it seems. Yeah. And he clearly buys his own hype. Like, he believes himself when he says this stuff. Oh, definitely.

Which is very interesting, you know, because there's a pattern, obviously, not just when it comes to, you know, fields that he knows nothing about, like virology, but when he talks about his own field or own fields, you know, nominally his fields or projects that he spearheads, nobody should be surprised that he makes outlandish claims about a pandemic since things that he's promised throughout his career aren't just unrealistic. But like, to me, they should be to any rational adult, just complete drivel. Right. I mean, you were talking about how we both wrote pieces two years back in the spring of 2018 about Musk. And I was just thinking back on that. And already back then, it was really baffling to me. Like, how were people taking him seriously? You know, totally reasonable, rational people,

even like leftish people, really seeing him as some kind of exceptional individual who makes these fantastic contributions to mankind. And this is a guy who has promised that he'll be ferrying tourists around the moon by 2014. So, you know, he should have been doing that for the past six years. Why didn't I get an invite for one of those? Exactly. It's been happening for a while now. Or, you know, he our brains connecting directly to computers. And, you know, these stories are reported and then people read them and they're excited and then nothing happens and people move along and it doesn't affect his stature at all. Mars colonies. Paris, do you remember what his deadline,

his self-imposed deadline was for making us an interplanetary species? No, I don't actually. 2024. So he has four years to pull that off. Once this pandemic is over, it's going to be full speed ahead. I can definitely see that being an achievable metric.

For sure, yeah. Four more years. And the funny thing is that then, of course, you know, the fact that we will be, of course, traveling between New York and London by rocket is, in Musk's estimation, apparently somewhat more unrealistic because that's only happening in 2025, right? So five more years before we can, you know, look forward to that. And that's not even going into all the metaphysical stuff. He makes claims that are mythical. He talks about singularity. Computers will become conscious.

They run the risk of becoming our overlords, basically. And at the same time, somehow we're you know in some kind of cosmic computer game simulation so that was 2018 um and i'm sure you had the same reaction definitely you know there were people of course coming out of the woodworks he's most uh ardent followers defending him um but then also totally reasonable people saying like come come on, Musk is still doing something. He's not like the other bad billionaires kind of thing. Yeah. And I think we both timed it pretty well because that summer saw one of his first most epic public meltdowns.

The whole thing with the soccer team caught in a cave in Thailand and he tried to pull off this silly publicity stunt, which didn't work out. And of course, because it didn't work out, he decided that the next best strategy is to call one of the actual rescuers a pedo. And that case was only resolved recently, right? Like, it was only a few months ago that he was actually in court. And shockingly, the judge like ruled against, I can't remember his name now the british man who elon musk called the pedo and and like it's just wild that along with this pattern of making these really kind of outlandish claims that are completely unbelievable really um unless you are really like kind of in this el Musk bubble and believing all of this mythology

that he's that he's made up about himself. Right. Like time and time again, he doesn't meet these deadlines. He takes actions that if any other person had done that, like they would face consequences for for sure, either legal consequences like he's avoided with the SEC. Right. And that scandal worked that same summer, a couple of months after the Thailand incident. Apparently, he was high on something, at least according to a friend of his girlfriend's, who knows. I mean, whether he was high or not is actually kind of immaterial because he behaves in this

totally reckless and bizarre manner all the time. But yeah, like you said, you know, there's no repercussions. And I don't think it's just his persona. It's, of course, the same laws don't apply to the super rich. So he got a slap on the wrist from the SEC from something that should warrant a criminal investigation, right? By the DOJ. Definitely. by the DOJ. But that was then followed by a kind of a pylon in the media. He was pummeled by papers. And, you know, in some sense, maybe that was overdue. In another sense, it was oddly specific.

Like it was really just about his erratic behavior, you know, how he damages his own companies by, you know, being so irresponsible and nothing about, you know, how he damages his own companies by, you know, being so irresponsible and nothing about, you know, promising to, you know, whisk us out into outer space and save the species and give us telepathy, which, you know, are things that should be much bigger red flags than what he tweets when he's high, I'd say. His tweeting and his corporate actions became a problem. But the notion that he can still send us to space and build 100 tunnels beneath Los Angeles and stuff like that was still like, pretty believable, apparently. And still to this day, you know, his star is fading to an extent. But the real question should be like, how is he still a thing? Like after these

two years of completely, you know, ridiculous behavior and these insane promises, he's still a thing. If you take something like Tesla as an example, you know, obviously they've never had a profitable year and yet they are, you know, Tesla stock is ridiculously overvalued. Apparently he even thinks so, yeah. year. And yet they are, you know, Tesla stock is ridiculously overvalued. Apparently he even thinks so. Yeah. Yeah. We did that just this past weekend. And if that's all based on, you know, his persona, you know, he's not, he hasn't claimed that he's invented the electric car, but he's selling point is that because he's so brilliant, he'll be able to do it for so cheap that it's

actually a commercially viable thing to do, you know. And that still hasn't come to pass. And something that you've written about a lot is that this kind of stuff is actually very dangerous. It's bad for our attempts to combat climate change. We have the technology, we have the infrastructure solutions. We don't need some revolutionary new technology to come and save us. We need the political will. And people like Musk, who's vocally opposed to public transport, for example, they hinder our efforts to combat climate change. Exactly. And that's even part of the mission or goal of this podcast, right, is to kind of shine a light on how, when we focus on these kind of outlandish tech solutions, or these promises by tech billionaires, that their technological innovations are the things that are going to solve all of these massive problems, and then they never seem to actually be able to follow through on these big promises, or the benefits that they promise us that will come of them don't materialize, and they just end up being things that further benefit this really wealthy group of people, then it distracts us from the actual solutions that we already have,

and that we already know how to take to combat these problems, right? But because people like Elon Musk are saying, oh no, we have electric cars, blah, blah, blah, we can do all these things. We don't take the actions that we really could take on climate change, for example, because instead Musk is selling us this fantasy that if we just buy his technologies, climate change will be solved. Precisely. And it's all from the playbook of neoliberal policies and privatization. And that seems to be the driving force in a lot of big projects, including wars. Very often, one of the main goals is just to come up with a way of convincing people that taking public resources and channeling

them into private pockets is somehow beneficial to everybody or necessary for our survival or our security. And, you know, when it comes to Musk's space technology, I mean, you know, people make the claim that, you know, the price of building rockets has gone down. Well, who knows? Who knows whether that's true or not? Space exploration has always been a money-sucking venture. Thanks to Obama's space exploration policies, many of the functions previously held by NASA were then privatized. And that's been great for Musk because he was able to jump in there.

But then people have this illusion that it's Musk who sits around inventing new spaceships, as if he heads the research and development of his companies when he doesn't. So that's kind of the selling point there, like how to get people so excited about something that they actually think it's a good idea to invest in one particular person's vision. And Musk is very invested in what his public persona is. He's called inventor in many, many places. I think the Atlantic called him one of the greatest inventors of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And he's not an inventor at all. He actually calls himself apparently something like product architect and designer. All these kinds of like euphemisms for like the guy who just tells the actual R&D what they're supposed to be doing or what he wants his new car, you know, space car to look like. But that's about it. And the entertainment value that you derive from, you know, space exploration is, there's a tradition for that, right? I mean, there's very little utility, for example, with manned space missions. Like, why do we need to put people into space? Pretty much the only thing you can do is research manned space missions.

But then you derive this, you know, entertainment value because it evokes this sense of adventure, you know? Yeah. That our, you know, future generations will take us, you know, beyond the stars and all that stuff. And I mean, I guess that's fine to an extent, you know? People get excited about that kind of stuff. But Musk has taken it to this kind of religious scope and put himself in the center of it all. And I think that's really dangerous. Right. And you talk about that in the article that you wrote, obviously, kind of talking about this larger cult that Musk is building for himself. So can you talk a bit about that and explain how you see Musk building that

and what it looks like? Yeah, well, in my essay, I think my take was slightly, or my angle was different from yours. Definitely, yeah. Which is nice because our pieces came out around the same time, coincidentally, and that's how we got to know each other.

Yep. But I wanted to look at it from like a literary point of view and inspect kind of the gray area where being a cult leader and being a storyteller kind of overlap, because there is that area, right? And I thought that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, provided a fantastic analogy to Musk.

Because Hubbard was also a storyteller originally. He was like a two-bit sci-fi writer, you know. Actually, Hubbard didn't like sci-fi originally. He was more into writing like westerns, you know, and other more like earthbound adventures. But it just so happened that his space adventures, you know, space opera genre adventures were the most popular. So he kind of got stuck writing those against his own will. He says he hates gadgets, which is the funniest thing. If you remember how big a role gadgets played in his career as a religious leader.

Then Hubbard, of course, came across the oldest storytelling trick in the book, which is that you convince your audience that what they're hearing is actually not fiction, but it is reality. And I think there's even like a justified place for that sometimes. You know, people can do that without it being ethically dubious or manipulative to great effect. You know, like the movie Fargo begins with the statement, in honor of those who survived, everything is told as truthfully as possible while names have been changed.

And of course, it's a completely fictional story. And Coen Brothers never tried to claim that it's not a fictional story. It's just an effect you get at the very beginning of the movie, which is very impressive. And writers have been doing this forever. But stories and myths are pretty potent. You know, we use legends to inspect the ultimate questions about our purpose and, you know, the purpose of mankind and future and life after death and all that stuff.

And Hubbard, being a sociopath, of course, you know, tapped into that and made an incredibly lucrative living being a religious leader. And I think what was funny about that is that if you look at the lore of Scientology, it's so trite that it would be very hard to imagine anybody getting excited by a story like that. But if you suddenly believe that it's true and that some ultimate reality about the world around you is being revealed to you, well, that's very exciting, of course, if you can get into that kind of mental state where it actually taps into some kind of religious feeling or sense of purpose. Musk does the exact same thing. And as we've established, the stuff that he says about telepathy and self-sustaining Mars colonies and our future as an interplanetary species, he has no basis for any of that stuff. And, you know, he's not the only person who believes in all the singularity stuff and

conscious computers. It's a belief just like any other religious belief. It's very close to other religions. There's a creator and there's a rapture and all those elements. So that's, I think, why Musk has this status as a prophet. He gets people so excited about his stories. But, you know, when people have some people, again, totally reasonable people, rational people have taken issue with my comparison and said, you know, at least Musk tries to do something good. I mean, who cares what he tries to do? What he's actually doing is incredibly dangerous.

And I'd say that the biggest difference between Musk and Hubbard is that Musk is way more dangerous. Hubbard had his following. Musk's influence spans the whole globe. Massive amounts of resources and effort and money is poured into his vision because people buy it. When, as you pointed out many times, we could be doing all of the very simple, reasonable things that we should be doing to prepare ourselves for the climate catastrophe. And to tie this back into what he's been tweeting about COVID-19, I think that was a huge mask off moment because originally he was saying this is stupid, it's not happening, it's not happening. And when it happened, now he's angry that people have to stay home. And clearly his reason for being upset about that isn't because he's so concerned about our basic civil liberties.

It's because his California plant is closed down and it's bad for business. So the person who kind of profiles himself as a savior of mankind, when there's actually people running the risk of dying en masse, he doesn't care. And in that infamous conference call where he was cussing and getting all upset, it's pretty clear. He says, this is not only going to hurt Tesla, but many other companies as well. He didn't even say anything about people except, you know, people need the freedom, the, you know, unalienable freedom to work for me. And his kind of tweets and his outbursts in that recent shareholder call have also kind of given permission to many of these other Silicon Valley leaders to come out and say, yeah, you know, we actually should reopen the economy and let people go back to work now, right? For sure. Yeah. So Elon Musk,

because he has this profile also serves to give permission, I guess, to these billionaires who don't have the same kind of, you know, the media isn't as interested in them or doesn't give them so much of a pass to not only say, yeah, reopen the economy, but also to push these kind of outlandish visions, like, you know, the singularity and how we all live in a simulation and like all this other kind of stuff. Right. Right. And, but I think an interesting piece that kind of ties into your Scientology comparison is that so many of the big visions that Musk puts forward, and you also see that they read when they were younger or at various stages of their lives, right? Jeff Bezos has been explicit about the influence of Star Trek and the ideas of, I can't remember his name right now, but there was a prof that he had when he was in like university or something who designed the O'Neill cylinder that kind of forms the basis for his space vision right and so you can easily see that even a lot of these ideas are not completely original they come from other places and they're inspired by things they

read earlier right and actually quite unoriginal yeah like the things that they peddle are the most you know the most obvious basic tropes of science fiction you know whatever they happen to be watching when they were teenage boys basically yeah totally yeah in the case of musk it's you know terminator and matrix uh pretty much you know not that those are the only works that have you know utilized those concepts but you know they just happen to be the most famous ones. But we're all familiar with them. And then somebody comes along and says, I love this story and I'm going to make it real or I'm going to claim it's real.

And that's much more exciting than the original story, even if the retelling is really bad. And Musk has been very vocal about the fact that he was very inspired by all this sci-fi stuff that he read as a kid. Interestingly, since you're talking about his literary influences, there's another interesting connection to Hubbard, which has made many people kind of suspect that maybe the connection between the two is more than just incidental. Because I can remember when it was was maybe four years back or five years

back, Musk was hyping this book by a South African journalist from the early 20th century called Twelve Against the Gods. Have you heard of that book? I have briefly. I can't say I've looked and read the book for myself. I had a look at it. It was kind of funny. I mean, it's very random. It's not badly written, you know, in terms of the prose is kind of funny and kind of, you know, in a way gripping, at least would be for somebody who takes the message seriously. But it's basically about these larger than life individuals, you know, who forged their

own path. And by forging their own path, they changed the fate of mankind, of course. It is pretty funny that it was not a well-known piece of writing at all, except probably among Scientologists, because Hubbard was so fond of the book. And then suddenly that Musk would say that this is one of my favorite books. You know, so clearly, I think Musk has at least been kind of studying Harvard's career, taking some notes. It is a really random book. You know, it's these great individuals that he chooses. Some of them are like, OK, I get that. OK, Alexander the Great. Sure. Napoleon. Sure. OK, Napoleon III. All right. Sure. and then suddenly casanova and muhammad

like a very very random collection of people um you know and the historical value of it is pretty dubious of course it's so odd and and you also write about how there are these other kind of similarities between Musk and Hubbard, because Hubbard obviously was, to my understanding, kind of influenced to start a religion, you know, for tax evasion purposes and things like that. Right. And, you know, as you talked about earlier, like with NASA privatizing much of its kind of spaceship program, I guess to the notion that he's this big, like self-made man, especially when his family came from such wealth in South Africa. But you know, it really kind of calls into question this, this larger story he's trying to tell.

Yeah, just like you said, he's, his image is that of the ultimate self-made man, you know, whose fate, you know, will dictate the fate of the entire species. And like you said, you know, he's received an insane amount of government subsidies, you know, in various forms, tax breaks, direct subsidies, government contracts. You know, in 2015, the Los Angeles Times, I think, reported, and that's only five years ago, they reported that he's benefited from government money and government subsidies and government help by that point to the tune of $5 billion. So, you know, that's what we would call socialism for the rich. And at the same time, he's this kind of libertarian who believes that it's kind of an every man for himself kind of, he claimed that he's a socialist, but not the kind of socialist who just thinks government should give us everything. He never really defined what kind of socialist he is. connection between the two. And I'm not saying that his companies are any less deserving of government help than any other companies, but just he should at least own up to the fact that that's how he has made his fortune. And again, if we calculate if things are cheaper through privatization,

whether NASA is paying less money because they've outsourced their functions, not just to Musk, but a bunch of other companies. It's very hard to make that assessment without having a parallel universe where you see what would have happened if they hadn't privatized. But of course, there's tons of evidence that privatization doesn't do any of the things that we're always told that it does. Speaking of cults and religions, neoliberal dogma is just a religious belief as well. We keep being told that private sector and the markets do things more efficiently, and somehow they never do. And there's nothing efficient about Musk himself personally getting a compensation package of 2.3 billion from Tesla.

Like that's just money, you know, thrown out the window, basically. It doesn't benefit anybody. It doesn't go to the people who actually do the research and development. It doesn't go towards the material cost of what they're doing. Exactly. It goes to the hype man. Exactly. Yeah. It goes to basically the PR person. Yeah, totally. And he's done a good job in the PR department. Yeah, well, that's his job, right? I mean, yeah, he used to do a good job. Now that he's this erratic, he really has lost even that function.

Especially in the past few years, right? He's not really serving that role as well as he used to. Certainly not. But, you know, his most hardcore followers don't seem to care. No. You know, and that's the other thing. When we compare Musk to a cult leader, I don't think we should even be using the word compare. I don't think there's anything hyperbolic about using that word. Again, you must have had the same experience as me after publishing pieces about

Musk, that his fanatic devotees come out of the woodworks. And it's actually kind of tragic. In Twitter debates, you always have this impulse that you want to own the other person and you want to crush them in debate. And I had these moments where I just realized like, oh my God, this person is really like seriously lost. And there's many of them. So they seem like they have endless amounts of energy to debate you in the hopes of converting you or maybe convincing somebody else who's following the debate. They seem incredibly personally invested in the persona of Musk.

So any criticism of Musk, even pointing out something like, hey, he predicted that we'd be on, we'd be, you know, doing sightseeing trips around the moon for the last four or five years, even saying that will get them angry. Like pointing that out is offensive to them. And, you know, they've invested their selves of kind of purpose and maybe even, you know, the sense of mystery that I think people need in their lives into the persona of Musk. So in that sense, it really is a very real cult. Those people have very real religious feelings that are badly misplaced. And if he can inspire that kind of level of fanatical devotion from so many people, of course, you know, his influence on senators or successive presidents will dictate, you know, his success as a businessman. Yeah, pretty much. If he can keep that going, you know, if he can

keep his self-authored legend intact, his companies are going to keep going and his companies are going to keep getting government funds. Of course, now we're in a historical moment where it's anyone's guess what's going to happen. What's going to happen to the global economy? Nobody knows. So right now there might be that. There's a wrench thrown in the machinery of Musk's empire,

but nobody really knows what's going to happen next, including to him. But barring any unforeseen events, he's going to be doing probably just fine for indefinitely, it seems. quite sad for the people who would respond to it because as you say like they were so fanatical like there was no factual information you could give them that would make them kind of question what their prophet had said right um and it kind of made me wonder why these people are looking to Elon Musk instead of like anywhere else for their inspiration and I feel like part of that is linked to neoliberalism as well right because neoliberalism has so decimated the public imagination and any idea that things are going to get better in the future and like it has made our governments basically like slowly making things worse for us at best like it's not really trying to do anything that's positive now like even we see in the united states right now over a million people have had covid19 so far and like the best that they can do for people healthcare wise is to make testing

free. But then it's kind of still like a free for all and hope that you have insurance and, you know, hope that your insurance company isn't going to still bill you thousands of dollars for it. Like, it's ridiculous, right? So it made me wonder, like, okay, so these people are like desperate for some hope and some vision and unfortunately like one of the only people at least until recently who was like in a big way putting out massive visions for the future was elon musk and the media was hyping him up and his profile and everything he said and like obviously in a very uncritical way not really thinking like is any of this achievable so then I got to thinking like it's no surprise

that so many people have bought into his bullshit because there was nothing else and when neoliberalism has made you so depressed and demoralized about your life, like you do need some hope. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And, you know, Musk himself has sometimes, you know, when he's given some, you know, preachy talks, he said that I'm just, I don't want to be anyone's savior. I just want to think about the future and not be sad. And like you you said we live in this totally atomized society where we're told that the way we do things is not just a good way to do things it's the only way we can do things there is no other way this technocratic neoliberal

society is the end of history and we figured out how to do things. Then look at what's happening to mankind and to the planet, like any metric. Is the temperature getting warmer? Are rich getting richer? Are poor getting poorer, et cetera? Like any metric, things are getting worse. What is also kind of in the zeitgeist is to hold on to some kind of faux rationalism, like the idea that

your beliefs are based in hard science and logic and all that. And, you know, a lot of, you know, I'd say analytically, you know, superficially very intelligent seeming people like Musk. He taps into their geeky sensitivities and they somehow manage to construct a world where the things that he's saying are not religious dogma or are not cheap sci-fi stories, but are actually the fate of mankind. And yeah, where else do you find hope?

But then there's the other thing, which I think is inadvertent about the way Musk has built his religion and his following, which is that cognitive dissonance very often weirdly makes people even more devoted. He has that cognitive dissonance himself. He hasn't built it into

the system. He clearly believes that he's on a great cosmic mission. And I think a lot of cult critics and people who research cults have pointed this out, that if the system and the stories make perfect sense, it's almost easier to start doubting them. But if there are kind of really blatant cracks in there, like things that don't make sense, then you invest even more of your mental energy on a day-to-day basis, covering them up. And in a cult context, that becomes a joint effort. You help your fellow cult members by egging them on or giving them other reasons to believe in something. And the more absurd it becomes, the more, you know, the more tightly you hold on to the belief. That's the whole idea behind the When Prophecy Fails book.

You know, the world didn't end, but you still want to believe. So what do you do? You come up with something completely outlandish. The world ended and a new world was built or something like that. And we kind of live in this age where there's this infrastructure with social media, with Twitter, where people can easily find that kind of validation of their belief in these outlandish ideas, right? The notion that we're going to be living on Mars, like even in the next decade or something, to some people, that is actually something that seems achievable. And exciting. Yeah. And, and the other thing is, like, I feel like a lot more people than actually should,

who aren't even like really dedicated believers in Musk, actually believe that that is something that might be real because of the role that the media has played in kind of parroting these ideas, right? And making them seem like they are legitimate. So then when it comes to like criticizing Musk and what he says, it's not only these like cult members, to put it that way. But it's also like a lot of the public that say like, but aren't we kind of heading in this direction? Because like I see it in the media, and there's always stories about it and blah, blah, blah, right? Exactly. Yeah. This was just going around Twitter. But there was some article a few years back where they were predicting that dinosaurs would be cloned in a few

years. I remember that. And then people had saved a screenshot of it and said, you know, where is it NASA? You know, you should always take all these promises with a grain of salt just because they are printed in a newspaper or appear on a respectable news site doesn't mean that they're not total drivel. And the funny thing is that then they're tied to this kind of faux rationalist worldview. It's in a way one of the most hypocritical worldviews because it's based on this idea of like, well, I'm evaluating the evidence and I'm making a rational judgment

of whether this claim is true or not. But then when you ask for evidence from, for example, all the people who talk about singularity, like what is the principle that's dictating that this thing is going to happen? This sentient, super intelligent computer, which has been prophesied for half a century now or more, ever since the 60s. It's always been just around the corner. There's no response. It just sounds science-y. And there's a spectrum there. I'd say that a lot of these people who are members of all kinds of skeptic societies, for example, and followers of people like Sam Harris, there seems to be some kind of a vaguely definable culture there. And oddly, I'd say that it also

seems to go hand in hand with misogyny and kind of this vaguely alt-right-ish vibe that permeates these groups. I feel like there's like a certain growth of that kind of belief system or orientation out of what was it called the new atheist group which sam harris was part of that was really kind of popular i guess like five or ten years ago you know right um and then it seemed like all of the kind of interest in what they were doing kind of diminished a bit and the alt-right kind of came up and less attention. But a lot of those same people then became like leading figures of this alt-right movement. It's the same sort of people who believe those sorts of ideas who are potentially also grasping on to some of this future thinking that Musk is putting out there, right?

For sure. It seems to be a trope. And these things are very similar. So there is, you know, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, you know, these figureheads of the so-called new atheist movement. Their Islamophobia is very real, even though they claim that they're just critical of religion in general, when that's not true at all. And it is very dangerous what they've done to give this veneer, this intellectual veneer, to really horrific, bigoted ideas. And Sam Harris even tried to backpedal in our time, even though he clearly is. The very strange thing is, like you were also saying, that kind of the same crowds of people who seem to be, you know, gravitating towards these quote-unquote thinkers, that they very often also adore mosque and that in all of these cases,

there's some kind of a religious, underlying hidden religious or metaphysical or mystical belief masquerading as science or masquerading as rationality. I always kind of saw what they were doing more as like obviously they're they're sort of demonizing islam um and and talking about how it's like this really kind of extremist religion with these like really backward views and what i always saw is that they were kind of creating this like kind of fundamentalist version of atheism, right? Most atheists would not be so bothered by that and just don't believe in a God and like, that's it, right? But they seem to really want to take it a major step further. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think they've even given

atheism a bad name. Like people don't like to call themselves atheists anymore, because it seems to be something that goes hand in hand with having bigoted views and religious convictions or metaphysical convictions about things that you can't say anything either way and claiming that you have some irrefutable evidence for it. Now, I completely agree. Now, before I let you go, I did want to ask you about one further thing. Have you read or heard of this book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism? I've heard of it. I haven't read it. Okay. I read this book a few months ago and I was really annoyed because like, as I was saying, we are living in this world that has very little thinking about the future or very little kind

of hopeful vision of the future. I feel like that's changed a little bit in the past couple years. Like, there has been some more kind of left thinking about what a future should actually look like that is hopeful beyond neoliberalism. But then I read this book. And I was like, so all it's sort of doing, like, it's taking this meme, and it's supposed to be this like really exciting vision of the future, but all it's doing is saying, okay, everything that Elon Musk is talking about is awesome. But instead of it being done in the name of like private enterprise, it's now just going to be communist, but we can still do the asteroid mining and the electric cars and autonomous vehicles are still going to save us.

And like all of these like crazy ideas that Elon Musk talks about, it's like, yeah, that's all fine. But now it's just communist and not Elon Musk, you know? Well, that's one solution, I guess. And we, but we've always had that, right? Walt Disney was always doing some kind of like, you know, presentations about like, this is the future home and yeah everyone will have flying cars there's always been this weird thing where you paint this picture of this utopian future and you will show like this is how everybody

will live and weirdly the word everybody always means middle class like you always conveniently neglects the people who are in poverty. What happens in between? Do we first raise them out of crushing poverty and then they get a flying car or how does this work? So yeah, that's kind of super naive to be just like, yes, I've added this crucial piece to the Walt Disney slash Elon Musk vision, which is that everybody gets this. We will share the resources equally. And I think, yeah, I haven't read the book, but based on your description there, I would agree that that feeds into this very unhelpful narrative.

We don't have any lack of resources. We don't have any lack of technology that could be useful, that could be used to help mankind, free us from excessive work and poverty and guarantee basic material needs of everybody. a problem. We don't need fully automated luxury anything. We just need to start working towards a way of sharing our resources in an egalitarian and humane way. I think that is a fantastic place to leave it. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Thanks, Paris. Talk to you again soon. See you later. Thanks. Hilary Kyla is a Finnish-American freelance writer and a composer in residence at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. You can follow his blog at limitedhangoutblog.com

or his tweets at at Ilari Kyla. If you liked our conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and follow the podcast on Twitter where it's at Tech Won't Save Us and follow me, Paris Marks, as at Paris Marks. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed the show.