#69 - Elon Musk is a Fucking Idiot

Look, regardless of who it is, bootlicking a billionaire will always be a deeply lame thing to do.

Billions are not acquired without committing human rights abuses.

(Beyond like shitty/illegal labor practices, wage theft, all of the literal abuses—hoarding wealth creates and perpetuates inequity on a massive scale. Being financially stressed is one of the most impactful stressors of our lives, it doesn’t go away, and it literally kills people all the time.)

And look, I think we need to move on from all celebrity worship, but it’s weird to me that we assume you can be a Good, Moral, Just Person and also be a literal dragon hoarder at the same time.

(And they spend it on the dumbest shit!!)

When TMZ yesterday reported that Johnny Depp would be starring in the Savage x Fenty show and was (allegedly) personally invited by Rihanna, people were stunned. But why? She’s playing the Superbowl four years after announcing she never would as a stand of solidarity with Colin Kapernick. (Yes, I know, Jay Z’s Roc Nation has gotten involved in the years between, and yes she is one of his artists. Jay is also uhhh, not a good person!!! He’s a billionaire who tried to sell Cryptocurrency to the Marcy Houses, as if people living in financial strain can afford some bullshit fake art not real money gamble and then he tried to say that we were using Billionaire as a slur. AAAAHHH!!) And look, she gets to do what she wants with her career, and I get to judge her for it. Coming back to drop a Disney song, headline the Super Bowl, and invite an abuser to her lingerie show?? Lame. Football sucks! The NFL is my enemy! I cannot believe that we regularly subject people’s bodies to an unethical sport because a bunch of adults can’t fathom changing some rules around!! (They also weirdly cling to racist names and chants but…that’s actually a separate issue about how we build identities around consumables!) CTE should be a national shame and instead, it’s treated as if it’s still up for debate. The racism (perpetuated by the fans, teams, owners, the way the players in the league are spoken about), the domestic violence that’s swept under the rug, the fact that for some fucking reason New York taxpayers are funding the new Buffalo Bills stadium to the tune of 500 million dollars despite the fact that the teams owner is a billionaire. I hate it all! (If Kathy Hochul loses the Dems have no one to blame but themselves. Fucking get outta here trying to get me excited for Corrupty Cuomo’s lieutenant governor who was/is also absolutely corrupt!!! Wanna know why we’re paying for the stadium? Her fucking husband works there!) (Yes I will be voting for her rather than the white supremacist who is also running but like just ONCE I’d love to not feel like I’m holding my nose to vote!)

Anyway, after getting rid of Instagram and TikTok, I had decided to keep Twitter. Not that I use it all that much—I truly only started writing tweets in the last year—but it’s where I get my news, it’s my go-to thing to quickly scroll through, and honestly I love a housewives update and seeing what BTS fans are up to (because you can truly never guess!). And I’ve been slowly admitting to myself that all social media is toxic because the companies behind it are not trying to “foster connection” so much as “monopolize our brain”. They want to change our brain chemistry. And they’ve succeeded in so many ways! They want you to have to post in order for a moment to be meaningful. To say nothing of the fact that so many things are done for the photo and are therefore capturing a false memory. And they want interaction happening on there rather than out here because out here they can’t inundate us with advertisements and algorithmically predict what products we’re going to like. And honestly, I think marketing is hitting a death knoll because we’re all so versed in it. Making every individual their own Brand and their own Head Of Marketing just revealed all of the psychological tricks used. This is what Mad Men also illustrated extremely well!! (A great barometer for media literacy is the AMC shows that clearly went out of their way to depict how toxic men poison those around them, but the audiences made those same men into heroes. You’re not supposed to want to BE Don Draper!! Don’t even get me started on Walter White vs how Skylar was treated. Same thing happened when Wolf Of Wall Street came out—people blamed Scorsese for making Jordan Belfort look “too cool” as if a good half of the movie wasn’t high-octane depictions of a deeply dysfunctional, unfulfilled, miserable man. Like, that film did not make me wish Qualudes were still around!)

But theeeeen my least favorite billions boy got his stupid hands all over Twitter and is just so annoying that I have to go now! I do think Elon’s got a humiliation kink he’s working out, I think he also wants to be a Funny Cool Guy and that’s always alluded him and in the words of Luann de Lesseps “Money can’t buy you [comedic timing].”

(I read once that professional doms saw a huge drop in people coming in for humiliation play once social media took off—it’s so easy to get your kicks online, you just have to say one slightly pejorative thing about a beloved celebrity and their fandom will indulge that kink for hours/days/weeks! For free.)

Mass layoffs and having people print out code—there’s been a new spectacle every day. But that’s all it is. A distracting spectacle. A lot of the authors I follow are worried about what promotion will look like in the absence of Twitter, since so many of them are now tasked with not only writing the book but also promoting it. I think it’s weird that everyone is now supposed to be likable and accessible online in order to do their jobs. There are so many great books and authors who we never would publish today for the very simple reason that they could not engage in a modern press cycle. And they shouldn’t have to! I think it’s great that artists are sensitive and in touch with emotions in ways that make them fragile and I don’t think they should have to do Cons or press junkets that make them uncomfortable! How much great art are we losing because those artists won’t/can’t play in the modern space of promotion? (And how many Great Artists are also pouring all of their talents into ephemeral videos that are meant to capture our attention and then be immediately forgotten about when we scroll away?)

This is all such recent history. I don’t know when it was decided that there was no way other than this way to interact with each other but I am begging that we all figure out other ways to connect and create community. I did need to be taught about what mutual aid actually looks like, and you know what, it looks a lot like what my neighbors naturally do for each other all the time. They’re outside in their front garden areas, they talk to the guy who washes cars all day, I hear people return casserole pans and offer to help water gardens and walk dogs. (And all of these people also regularly repeat the newest Fox News conspiracy to each other, so I’m not trying to make a utopic statement with this so much as emphasize that humans, even ones who have shitty ideas being fed to them, want and like to help each other.)

Bring back singles bars!! I want to meet someone at a coffee shop SO BAD! I’m doing my part to provide as Woman Writing In A Moleskin where’s the person who is doing their part in being effortlessly charmed by me and asking me on a date?? Step it up, Brooklyn! I don’t want to be constantly reachable, I want it to be rude to call my landline at dinner time, and I want other people to start being approachable again. When we’re looking at our phones: that’s where we are. It’s not that different from reading a book or newspaper—I’m not trying to shake my fist at the clouds here—but I think there’s been a lie that we can multitask and do both, and I’ve been growing increasingly convinced that we can’t and never could, that was just a way to normalize pausing a live conversation to reply to a text conversation.

Online media is pivoting away from words to being all video. Audio mediums are going to hang on a little longer,  but the written word is on its way out. Writing is not the easiest or fastest method of communication. It was only in because computers and broadband used to not be able to run and hold video.

As Fran Lebowitz constantly points out, it’s very different from speaking. Writing is much more deliberate, there is some skill and some talent involved, and it’s hard to often capture exactly what we mean (especially in a few sentences as Twitter demands) (which, it only demands because it was originally supposed to be used as a way to have a group chat with your friends—old cell phones could only send 140 characters at a time, it was arbitrary to the medium it was built for) so everything is flattened and nuance is lost. Maybe it is good that we’re speaking now, but it’s bad that we’re speaking AT each other rather than TO each other. Entire generations are unable to communicate without adding tone indicators—and more horrifyingly they’re now doing that in person because they don’t know that a tone indicator online is making up for the fact that we’ve lost what our tones are literally indicating while we speak.

Twitter often feels like an echo chamber of the worst people with extremely bad faith interpretations. It’s a habit to scroll, and I do see some interesting/funny/newsworthy things through there. I really enjoy following journalists—but the lie of social media is that I won’t continue to read their work once I’m off the platform. It’s a little more work, sure, but most of them have newsletters or write for major publications. I follow their podcasts—and while I appreciate that I was able to find them through these methods, who’s to say I wouldn’t have found them some other way had Twitter never existed?

I don’t want to feel disassociated and deal with my crippling sadness about the state of the world through ironic memes. I do not want to detach from my humanity in order to make it easier to move through my day. I want to feel and cry and express that I think the world is headed in a very dangerous direction and all of these fucking billionaire losers are just speeding up the car. (Not a train in this metaphor! Because despite being modern Robber Barons, they refuse to build actual legacies and create public goods that keep the masses satiated. Hyperloops aren’t real, bullet trains are!!! Elon literally campaigned for a Hyperloop in LA for the sole reason of destroying support and funds for a rail system. And I am not a stan of anything—except trains! They don’t need to learn roadsigns, they don’t have to watch for pedestrians, and they don’t require fossil fuels to move incredible distances quickly, it is embarrassing that this country which was literally built upon the railroads has let them all go to such waste.) (The exploitation of the original railway workers is and should be a national shame, so the next time we do it, let’s do it without the extreme and deadly racism!)

They have all this money and for what? Bigger boats that they enjoy more than their homes for the simple fact they can drive away from everyone? Yeah, you know what’s never been a marker of people in touch with their humanity? Deeply isolationist behavior!! Money makes people lose their minds, it turns people against each other, and they start dying for scraps despite having entire meals. Gotta stay in that tax bracket baby!! Every time the New York Times publishes one of those “it’s hard to live on $400,000 a year, actually” articles I want to tear my hair out. People choose to buy big houses that require staff in order to clean them, they can go on vacation anywhere so why are they acting as if it’s some hardship to shell out for a cabana in Turks & Caicos? Go somewhere cheaper! Oh, they can’t because they’re desperate to cling to whatever status markers come along with having a house on that side of the highway in The Hamptons?

Excuse me, so sorry about that, I briefly fell asleep because of how boring a “problem” that is.

Last night there was a drone show ad for Candy Crush that took over the New York City skyline. Ooohhh I want to cry/die, get your fucking ads OUT of my sky. (The sunset was spectacular last night, it truly like healed me after a weirdly delicate day in which I could not stop crying. Seeing the city glowing in the softest blues and lavenders over queens, with shocking orange/yellow/green peaking through the highrises in Manhattan just reminded me of everything I absolutely love and feel immense gratitude for in the city.) (Also went on a morning adventure with my best friend on Wednesday and we got the best bagels (Murray’s—which now allows you to toast bagels and I never do out of some weird allegiance to their history) and walked around a still-sleeping SoHo and I truly love watching the city wake up. Full cycles of the sun! Hello moon, I missed you, I’m so glad I can see you in the sky!) The sky is not a screen. I am entitled to nature!!!

Elon Musk is a total shithead. He’s been a shithead to his numerous wives and children, he’s a union-busting nepo baby who took Daddy’s Emerald Mined Blood Money and awarded himself titles that he didn’t earn. (He is not the inventor of Tesla, he just bought the board and included a clause.) It could have been really cool to get good electric cars, but he’s a fucking idiot and everything Tesla became was designed as if they asked a 10 year old what features they thought a car should have. Whoopee cushion seats! Car doors that open like the car in Dumb & Dumber! An iPad instead of an interface with knobs so you literally have to look down in order to see what you’re doing! Car people regularly roast how shittily Teslas are made. The fact they don’t work with regular EV chargers is elitist and destroys a lot of the “good” they were supposed to do. Honestly, everything “ironic” (dogecoin, the boring company, etc) that Elon partakes in is a game! It’s meme culture personified and sold back to other unfunny folks who think that the height of comedy is “ownage”. (I would say pwnage but…does anyone even say pwn these days??) I call this type of humor Chipoltle humor because it’s not an actual joke, it’s a semi-mean sentence with some dickhead inflection laid atop. “Oh, you got Chipoltle bro? Was it gooood?” It’s what a seventh grader considers to be a joke.

The most aggravating thing is that it does matter that he bought the site. It does matter that he’s purging employees and spreading disinformation. Part of why I’m feeling very “shut it down” about the internet is it feels like this might be our one chance to force everything back into pandora’s box before DeepFakes send us into WWIII.

“Billionaires create jobs” was always a lie but in deep irony, fucking Manic Musk over here is firing a huge amount of Twitter’s staff (in a weirdly cruel way by telling everyone to check their emails at 9am to see if they can still log in to their company portal). He’s not a genius, he’s a rich kid who never faced any consequences! Bill Gates is not an innovator, he copyrighted a bunch of code that OTHER engineers had built through open-source sharing over several decades. Why did his ~business prowess~ in the ~tech sector~ also grant him the power to get life-saving vaccines to half the world?? Why don’t we have actual experts in charge of things instead of hoarders!!

Billionaires are just hoarders. Literal dragons.

In myths, slaying the dragon saved the town.

And the thing about all of this money is that they can’t take it with them. Sure, they can pass it on to their kids—but they’re joyless because they cannot purchase joy. They can get “respect” but it’s more fear-based than admiration. Not to say there’s not a huge amount of people who do still admire billionaires, but there was also a huge amount of people who attempted to eat Tide Pods so…

(Tide Pods activate the part of our brain that sees brightly colored squishy things and go “fruit! nourishment!”. I think seeing people without financial stress makes our brains go “money! safety!” so, it’s our nature being toyed with here, not just a lack of comprehension.)

Billionaires want to buy America, and now they can thanks to Citizens United. They’ve poured almost a billion dollars into this election cycle (and it’s only a midterm!!) and it’s certainly not going to people who want to hold corporations accountable, create regulations for the internet, or increase tax rates. No no, Peter Thiel will destroy democracy if it’s the last thing he does. Because he never got to sit at the cool kids table so now he has to own the cool kids table. (Musk lighting up on Joe Rogan’s podcast was him attempting to signal that he’s a Chill Guy. But he looked lame smoking. Coolness cannot be taught! Or bought!) I think a lot of it really does come down to unhealed wounds. They want everyone to exist in the metaverse because they control it. Also, they want what they want, even if that means destroying the world and the power of the dollar via backdoor investments from the Saudi’s to buy Twitter. It often feels like they’re attempting to destroy the world in order to drive us into the refuge of life online. There’s no other way for them to continue “growing” as businesses.

They don’t want a democracy, they don’t want to be down here with the rest of us and they think they’ve earned the right to turn off their humanity and continue investing in fossil fuels as if we’re not all going to literally have to watch the world burn. And they think they’ll escape in their space pods and have little avatars interact with each other and that’ll replace what we have—but what we have is due to the fact that the earth wanted us here in some way. Soil grew perfectly balanced foods for us, and the rain replenished that soil, and then we invented farming, and then we invented capitalism which caused overfarming and now there are no nitrates left. Silica? Never heard of her. You can’t get rich off of seeds if the plants naturally pollinate—so Monsanto destroyed seeds. (But money is fake. We don’t need money, we do need seeds.) Every time I hear about all of the trash in the ocean it rarely mentions that most of it is comprised of industrial fishing nets that get left behind. We’re not crabbing in Alaska this year because the population of crabs…is gone. We took them, and we canned them, and we used nets to do it. Tuna is going to vanish from the seas. And we’ll have no one to blame but corporations that were left unregulated due to greed.

(I’m not entitled to avocados year-round! I will happily make that trade if it means that we can slow the climate crisis. Life can get a little more inconvenient for some of us, I think that’s actually totally okay. It wouldn’t be a problem if things took a little longer if we could afford the time to spend, and the only reason we can’t afford things is wage stagnation. Unions for all!)

I don’t have a lot invested in Twitter. I never use hashtags, I rarely engage with anyone on the platform, and I certainly don’t have any income tied to the site. Leaving it will be easy because it’s been shockingly easy to leave other social media sites. They want us to feel dependent, but they rarely provide meaningful connections that we can’t ascertain elsewhere.

I believe in us! I believe in our abilities to rip our attention spans out of their greedy little hands! I believe that it will help us have more faith that other people are also constantly trying to do their best with what they have!!

So, fuck Elon. He can buy Twitter but he can’t force me to stay there. Who will be the Elizabeth Warren to his Bloomberg and absolutely humiliate him on a national stage for being such a shithead? (I volunteer!)

I want more connection so I have to build it. And I do believe in the “if you build it they will come” of it all. I don’t think we have to remain miserable and distrustful of each other. It’s so easy to feel like “this is how its always been and will be” but I think we’re forgetting that literally none of this looked this way 10-15 years ago. It happened quickly, they’re lying to us to keep us here because it’s easier to harvest our data in order to create more targeted ads for us.

Well, I’m out.

«Jack Black in School of Rock voice» See y’all cats on the flip flop laaaterr.