We Don’t Need Elon’s Juvenile Psychopath Utopia

Ugly cars, childish aesthetics, blockchains, and cringe: Musk's future vision is the worst of science fiction come to life

I don’t know that anything better exemplifies Elon Musk’s near total lack of creativity than his obsession with the letter X.

There are really two ways that he expresses a painful amount of dork-dad energy. One is his incessant use of the “doge” meme that’s been living rent free in his head since at least 2013. That’s when he’s expressing his mediocrity in a playful way. When he’s being boring as shit in a serious way he brands himself with an X. Every human being who has ever been a teenage boy knows what’s going on in his head—X is the rad letter. It’s sharp and it means business and it doesn’t mess around. It's switchblades and racecars. It’s the Cool S.

Prototype logo for the rejected Twitter rebrand: 420Doge69.com

It was the name of his first company, the one that was later renamed PayPal. His bizarre and uncompromising demand that they keep the name “X” rather than something they could actually market to serious adults was one of the contributing factors that had him thrown off the board. Thus began a long series of attempts to convince people he’s super rad by naming things X, including his rocket company, his Tesla models, and his son, whose name is literally just a serial number.

Elon’s son X Æ A-12, censored here because he probably considers photos doxing and might very well cut my entire country off from Twitter

Now he’s stripped Twitter of its incredibly market-strong brand and burdened it with this dull thud of a name, a placeholder for a real brand that will never manifest under a logo that sarcastically screams “graphic design is my passion.” The company formerly known as Twitter is now proudly reborn as the Unicode Standard Character U+1D54F. Which, incidentally, will be the name of his next child.

That’s catchy.

Musk announced very suddenly that he was doing this, after flying into one of his legendary tantrums at three in the morning. Linda Yaccarino, the powerless figurehead he keeps on the books as “CEO” in order to placate Tesla’s stockholders, almost certainly found out about this decision after the fact as she scrambled to jot down a halfway plausible-sounding PR response at the same time as staff at the San Francisco headquarters tried to scrub the office of all traces of the bird logo with all the frantic urgency of a late night shredding party at a mob lawyer firm. Drapes thrown over blue @ symbols and illegal branding chiselled off furniture.

The rebrand was such an emergency that heavy equipment was called in to rip the “Twitter” sign off the side of the building on such short notice that the company didn’t notify the city that they were going to illegally block a street and engage in partial demolition of a building right above pedestrians. The police were called.

The bombastic display of power—destroying by proclamation the dud investment he’d failed to monetize—was an effort to prove that it hadn’t beaten him. That he could stomp the bird to death any time he so willed. But he’s also billing it as the next stage in his grand social engineering project. Elon has a plan, you see. He’s seen a vision of the future with himself as its master architect. It’s why he hordes wealth—he knows how to put it to use better than any of us inferiors ever could.

The future is X, because only a glyph that cliched and dumb could be used to represent a future as uncreative, drab, and soul-destroying as the one born from the ghosts haunting Elon Musk’s dead brain.

According to Musk, the reason he ditched the iconic logo and brand recognition that most companies would kill for is because it didn’t make sense for a bird to represent his vision for the future of the company, which is moving away from short form messaging and toward something that more closely resembles a bank.

Hilariously, it seems like he’s still so hung up on losing the fight over PayPal’s name all those years ago that he’s finally achieved his revenge by buying a completely different app, turning it into PayPal, and calling that X. If there’s one thing he does better than almost anyone, it’s carry a grudge.

There is a precedent for the so-called “everything app” he wants Twitter to move toward, and that’s WeChat, a Chinese app that hasn’t really caught on in the west due to our tendency to steer clear of large technological innovations with the CCP holding a glass against the door. But you get a real sense that he feels like he’s moving his chess pieces into place to ultimately seize control of humanity’s entire social and technological destiny—again, this being something that he, in his narcissism, believes he is uniquely qualified to decide for the rest of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that Elon Musk is ever going to be able to “take over the world” like the Bond villain he best resembles. But I do fear he can do enormous damage trying. The problem is that people as obscenely rich as him really can do pretty much almost anything they want. It raises the question of what else he, with his everything-looks-like-a-nail style of management, can smash up like he smashed Twitter before he’s stopped somehow?

Let’s take another look at an Elon Musk design to get a better idea of what his future looks like:

Are you excited for the future yet?

Musk is of course a big fan of science fiction—according to him, in particular, the work of Iain M. Banks—but like a lot of reactionaries who are science fiction “fans” he doesn’t grasp the material he looks up to. Science fiction has always been a massively “woke” genre. This despite what legions of stunted conservatives would have you believe about their favourite stories being immune from the pollution of such toxins as “themes” or “depth” because the science in the title means “no feelings.”

Science fiction is for men. Real men, real adult men, who like racecars and the letter X.

Everyone who knows Elon Musk longer than it takes to annoy him and get fired has come to the same conclusion—that he has no empathy, or at least really comes across that way. This observation isn’t just coming from people who don’t like him, so it’s not just a diss, sometimes it’s either an outright endorsement or just a casual observation. It is generally considered bad form to try to diagnose people with some kind of psychological disorder but I tell you what, if Elon Musk isn’t some kind of psychopath then he nevertheless does a great job pretending to be one.

And the bigger problem here is that he views psychopathy prescriptively. Not as an aberration, but as an aspiration. A preferred state.

Indeed, this appears to be the primary basis for the attraction Musk feels toward the furthest-right elements of the Republican party. It’s certainly not the Christian evangelism that draws him. It’s the coldness of the ideology, its celebration of strict natural hierarchy and absolute rejection of idealist notions of equity. Ideologically, his political position is technocracy, a Platonic anti-democratic social structure with its philosopher kings replaced with engineers. What it really is, is a kind of technofeudalism. Sans empathy, Musk thinks he can make society work like a clockwork engine if he pulls the right levers. Combined with his ideals of an ultracapitalist caste system and his obsession with “art deco,” it’s difficult not to picture Elon as the machine god Moloch from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The decidedly un-business-like nature of Twitter’s blue bird just doesn’t have a place anywhere in Musk’s grey technocratic assembly line future of hideous cars and brutalist architecture, where every transaction is filed on the blockchain and what closest resembles “art” is endless sets of AI generated composite NFTs powered by the energy generated by Andy Warhol’s spinning corpse.

To his mind, if you think you don’t want this future, then you’re not making a preference statement, you’re just making an error. You don’t understand that you’re making an incorrect choice, which is why you need the technocrat to make the decision for you. This applies to every incorrect aesthetic preference, from architectural styles right down to whether you view apps in light or dark mode. You think you prefer light mode, then you’re simply incorrect, and this incorrect preference will be removed.

I’d like to boldly posit that maybe we shouldn’t put an aesthetically tasteless psychopath with clear anger management difficulties in charge of human progress. And I say this will full knowledge and acceptance that we’ve got problems. Oh boy do we have problems, species-wide. What we’re doing isn’t working.

But for what faults we do have, art isn’t the problem. Our difficulties with the environment, with war, corruption, and perversion, these don’t come about because we’re too unserious, or because we find the happy bird logo more appealing than the cool X. We’re not broken due to our aesthetic tastes or that we take the dead grey technopunk futures of many hard science fiction tales for what they were intended—warnings, not instructions.

It's okay to reject technofeudalism. And it’s okay to mourn the happy little bird.