Not lengthy after commandeering Twitter in October for a sum of $44bn, Elon Musk – who can be the CEO of SpaceX and the self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – dispatched an ultimatum to Twitter workers giving them two choices. The primary was to decide to being “extraordinarily hardcore” and dealing “lengthy hours at excessive depth”. The second was to give up.
Musk had already fired roughly half of Twitter’s workforce – since anybody with a mere $44bn to spare on shopping for a social media platform is clearly within the enterprise of pinching pennies.
And so it’s that my editors have pressured me to return on my promise to by no means write about Elon Musk once more. However, hey, that is capitalism, and we’re all hardcore.
On the floor, writing about Musk must be like taking pictures fish in a barrel. The 51-year-old US-based South African live-tweets his bowel actions, makes penis jokes, will get off on anti-Black racism, and builds not-so-self-driving electrical vehicles that crash into parked emergency automobiles. Sadly, this specific fish occurs to be the richest particular person on the planet, who wields disproportionate management over terrestrial issues just like the inventory market and Donald Trump’s Twitter presence and who’s now decided to make humanity a “spacefaring civilisation” as nicely – metropolis we prefer it or not.
As Musk instructed Time journal, which shamelessly topped him “Individual of the 12 months” in 2021, the “subsequent actually massive factor is to construct a self-sustaining metropolis on Mars and convey the animals and creatures of Earth there”. In response to Time’s obsequious writeup, Musk predicted colonising Mars inside 5 years. Ultimately, rocket ships would shuttle 100 folks at a time to the Purple Planet after which journey again to Earth, powered by Made-in-Mars gasoline.
In fact, it’s not immensely reassuring that the person who’s main the conquest of outer area is similar man who as soon as tried to bribe a school child $5,000 to take down a Twitter account that tracks Musk’s non-public jet utilizing publicly accessible knowledge. When the bribe didn’t work, Musk resorted to blocking {the teenager}.
However within the occasion Musk’s cosmic experiment succeeds, what precisely would possibly a Muskian Mars-scape seem like? Even leaving apart logistical issues like respiration, it’s protected to imagine the atmosphere could be pretty, um, hardcore.
For starters, employees’ rights would probably be nonexistent. Musk has already blissfully violated earthly labour legal guidelines, threatened employees wishing to pursue unionisation, spied on workers, and been bombarded with allegations that his behaviour encourages sexual harassment and racism within the office. And he reopened one among his California factories in Might 2020 in defiance of native coronavirus pandemic restrictions, resulting in a whole bunch of COVID-19 circumstances.
On Mars below Musk, taxes would additionally probably be nonexistent – a minimum of for multigazillionaires like him who’ve historically been loath to contribute even the tiniest fraction of their wealth to US authorities taxes ostensibly collected on behalf of the general public good. Naturally, Musk and his firms have by no means hesitated to obtain billions of {dollars} in public subsidies and authorities contracts.
As for the composition of the self-sustaining Martian metropolis, the 2021 “Individual of the 12 months” explains that will probably be “type of like a futuristic Noah’s ark” – however with greater than two of every animal as a result of “it’s a bit of bizarre if there’s solely two”. Again in 2020, he reckoned that “one million tonnes” of vitamin C could be required to make human life sustainable on Mars, the place a system of “direct democracy” and self-governance would even be carried out.
By no means thoughts that Musk’s conception of “democracy” is mainly no matter Musk himself thinks ought to occur in any given scenario – simply as his self-identification as a “free-speech absolutist” just about signifies that Musk and solely Musk can say completely no matter he desires.
To make sure, “free speech” hardly applies to the antifascist journalists and activists who’re at present being purged from Twitter with the intention to enable right-wing extremist delusions to extra effectively take flight and orbit the digital world. For an instance of Muskian “democracy”, in the meantime, think about his reinstatement of Trump’s banned Twitter account, which transpired following a 24-hour “ballot” of Musk’s Twitter followers.
A slim majority of respondents voted in favour of Trump’s return, whereupon Musk tweeted: “The folks have spoken… Vox Populi, Vox Dei” – a Latin expression that means that the voice of the folks is the voice of God.
One guess who’s taking part in “God” within the equation (trace: it’s not Trump).
However what, in the long run, would anybody truly do on Mars, except for manufacture gasoline for Musk’s rocket ships and ingest huge portions of vitamin C? Time journal informs us that Musk foresees a future by which all labour is carried out by robots and items and providers abound: “There’s, like, lots for everybody, basically,’ he says. ‘There’s not essentially anybody who’s the boss of you.’”
There have been little doubt loads of Twitter workers wishing for simply such an association in mid-November when boss-man Musk despatched his “hardcore” menace. It stays to be seen how a human race that’s quickly killing itself and the Earth with capitalism will spontaneously face an overabundance of assets and worker-robots in addition – or the way you go from having to work “lengthy hours at excessive depth” to not having to work in any respect.
And who is aware of what “lots for everybody” means coming from somebody whose web value has reached almost $300bn. What’s going to the eight billion people who usually are not Musk have to just accept as “lots”?
In different phrases, the main points of Muskian fantasy want some ironing out.
In the end, although, the futuristic colonisation of Mars that Musk envisions would merely entail launching into area every part that’s mistaken with the Earth. Enlargement, in any case, is the secret in capitalism – and what higher place than the universe to increase astronomically?
Musk gravitates in the direction of Mars as a result of it’s tabula rasa: a spot the place legal guidelines, taxes, and different pesky phenomena received’t intrude with megalomaniacal, narcissistic tyranny. Obscene earthly wealth simply doesn’t minimize it; Musk is taking pictures for the celebrities – or to be CEO of Mars.
However as everybody’s favorite “Technoking” works at increasing his intergalactic CV, it appears that evidently, on the finish of the day, he simply desires to be the god of the cosmos. And if Musk’s Martian moist dream pans out, relaxation assured nothing will ever be all the way down to earth once more.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
