Pylimitics

Robert Reich compared Musk with the orange baby, pointing out that “Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.“

And “Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.”

He suggests the reason for the ascendance of these super a*sholes is “a loss of our sense of common good.” I’ll suggest, further, that this has been the decades-long aim of the conservative movement (or maybe “neoconservative;” I can’t be bothered keeping all their labels distinct). The underlying principle of operatives like Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman, Bork, Welch, and many more was neatly encapsulated in Wilhoit’s Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The SAs were toiling away at their agenda for decades before the arrival of the exact system that Norbert Weiner warned about in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings. Individual surveillance and control devices carried by everyone. The SAs may or may not have thought it all through. If nothing else they tend to have a reptilian reflex toward dominance and everything that enables it. And when Musk, out of the blue four years ago spent some of his ill-gotten gains on Twitter, that was almost certainly why.

If the apocalypse the SAs seem to pine for really happens, it will take a long time (if ever) for civilization to reappear. Maybe enough records will remain for historians to write about how many warnings were ignored, and how, in retrospect, the errors, mistakes, and misdeeds became obvious. Maybe.