The Scent of Musk

Who Will Save Us from the Billionaire-Cyborgs?

If nothing else, the dysfunctional 21st century has provided a rich field for satirists, and some of the most effective satires in recent years have been directed at the rich and the super-rich. Last week I went to see Ruben Östlund’s darkly-hilarious Triangle of Sadness, in which a cruise holiday for an assortment of morally-dubious rich folk turns into a voyage of the damned, flipping the relationships between the ‘masters’ and their servants.

Östlund’s obvious disgust with his characters reaches a peak of insanity in a bravura fifteen-minute scene devoted almost entirely to collective vomiting. This may not sound like much fun, but the characters are so generally contemptible that you can’t feeling that they asked for it.

Triangle of Sadness takes its place in a 21st tradition that includes the sublime Parasite, The White Lotus, Squid Game, and Succession.

All these dramas are a response to the 21st century’s unprecedented levels of global inequality. Last year, the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook found that the richest 1% own almost 46% of the world’s wealth, and that adults with less that $10,000 make up 55.0 percent of the world’s population, but hold just 1.3 percent of global wealth.

At the top of the global pyramid ‘ultra high net worth individuals’ worth more than $30 million hold 6.5 percent of global wealth, yet represent only a 0.003 percent of the world’s population. Such a grotesquely disproportionate concentration of wealth is incompatible with democratic governance and any notion of the common good, and perhaps that’s why the rich have become targets of satire and ridicule, but the dystopian reality of our new Gilded Age is not easy to capture.

How do you send up Mark Zuckerberg, the high-tech dweeb who promised to connect everyone in the world, allowed his company to become a machine for disseminating political disinformation and hatred, before disclaiming responsibility for any of it, and then popping up as an avatar of himself against a background of the Puerto Rican hurricane to promote Meta’s new virtual reality software?

It’s not easy. And what dystopian movie can capture the everyday reality of Amazon, whose owner makes three times more money every minute than the average American worker makes in a year, and yet obliges his workers to wear electronic wristbands to monitor every moment of their working days in ways that Taylorism could barely have imagined?

Given these outcomes, it’s kind of satisfying to watch rich monsters get their fictional comeuppence now and then. But the world we actually inhabit is a world where the rich mostly get what they want and get away with what they want; where billionaires avoid paying tax whenever they can and lobby to undermine anti-trust legislation; where fossil fuel magnates fund the political parties that can best serve their interests regardless of their impact on society as a whole, and men like Palentir’s Peter Thiel dream of establishing cities on the sea where they will not be subject to any regulation or scrutiny.

Don’t they already have that, you might ask? Well yes, up to a point. But for these 21st century libertarian golden men, any regulation is an imposition too far and the world is not enough, and even life is not enough, at least not life as we know it.

This is why a number of tech billionaires, including Bezos and Thiel, have been investing in ‘post-humanist’ start ups that are looking into how to merge the human brain with machines; into ‘cryonic’ freezing techniques, or anti-aging medicines,cell-regeneration or blood transfusion science that can extend the human lifespan - well the life span of rich humans anyway - so that they can live to be two hundred or even three hundred years old.

The Russian billionaire and media entrepreneur Dimitry Itskov is funding the ‘2045 Strategic Social Initiative’, which is carrying out research to enable humans to ‘rebrain’ and offload their personalities onto avatars.

The co-founder of Google Larry Page founded Calico, a company which focuses on anti-aging research, and which has already genetically engineered earthworms to increase their lifespan to the human equivalent of 400 to 500 years.

And why not? After all, if you’ve made that much money, why should you just die along with all the earthworms and the little people? Aren’t you better than that? Why allow nature to just, like, dictate to you? As Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype observed, ‘I think involuntary death is clearly morally bad, which makes the quest for longevity a morally noble thing to engage in.’

Sigmund Freud did say that ‘at bottom no one believes in his own death’, but he never said that death was ‘immoral’. Having acquired more wealth than any group of people in history however, these 21st century lords of the earth are clearly even less disposed to embrace mortality than the rest of us.

Rocket Man

Take Elon Musk, currently the richest man in the world with an estimated fortune of $241 billion, and a man who has been the focus of even more publicity than usual over the last week as a result of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

In addition to Tesla cars and rocket ships, Musk has been a strong advocate of ‘post-humanism’, and argues that human beings need to merge with machines in order to ‘avoid becoming like monkeys.’ How, exactly? One possibility, Musk suggests, is to insert microchips in our brains, thereby creating billions of ‘hyper-smart’ people with a ‘high bandwidth link to the AI extension of themselves’.

Marvellous. And even as Musk seeks to live longer and become smarter on this planet, he already has a back up plan in case the planet doesn’t work out, because it doesn’t make much sense to live for two hundred years and be hyper-smart if Plane Earth goes down the drain.

Where other billionaires are buying private islands and stocking up with food and weapons for apocalypse, Musk wants to go to space. In fact he wants millions of us to go there, which is why his SpaceX company is seeking to establish a colony on Mars and transform the red planet into a ‘self-sustaining colony of a million people’ within 40 or a hundred years.

Why leave this miraculous planet and live in a bleak red desert colony that has no obvious way of becoming ‘self-sustaining’? Because faced with the possibility of an unspecified ‘extinction event’, as Musk puts it, humanity must become a ‘spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species’.

Musk isn’t the only one looking at the stars. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson love space, because space is as infinite as they would like to be. In a failing world that might not be salvageable, it’s a start-up to die for, or at least to live two hundred-odd years for, or wake up from a cryonic fridge in the 22nd century to find that, hey! You’re alive and you’re on Mars!

If these fantasies of space travel, post-humanism and immortal avatars seek to liberate the super-rich from earthly constraints, they also represent a deeper pessimism about the future of humanity and the marvellous planet that we are lucky to inhabit. The Azerbaijaii-Russian scientist and defence tycoon Igor Ashurbeyli has created the ‘micronation’ Asgardia, whose 170,000 members pay $100 a year to become members of the ‘Space Kingdom of Asgardia’.

This ‘kingdom’ could include a colony on the moon and habitable satellite platforms in low-earth orbits ‘free of the control of existing nations.’

According to Ashurbeyli, his ‘exterrestrial state’ represents an opportunity to escape from a world where ‘Humanity can’t cope with all its problems… It never could and it never will.’

So that’s that then. Instead of using their vast wealth to help solve these problems and ensure a dignified and decent life for the people who live on it, these billionaires seek to buy their way out of history and ecological breakdown, and build a world that replicates the increasingly dystopian world that we already have.

Regardless of Musk’s electric cars, the negative impact of the super-rich on climate change continues to mirror their disproportionate share of the world’s wealth.

We shouldn’t assume that the rich are bad people simply because they are rich, but on one level it doesn’t matter whether they’re good or bad. We should not be living in a world that is subject to their whims, and we would be foolish to leave the present and the future in the hands of megalomaniac billionaires who conflate money with wealth and self-importance, and who seek to live forever while the rest of us get sick and die, and dream of escaping a ruined planet that they regarded as their playground.

These men - they are usually men - may seek immortality or a new home on Mars, but they are ultimately subject to the same biological laws as the rest of us.

And whether they become avatars or live for twenty, a hundred, or two hundred years, we need to escape from the dystopian world that they now dominate, where one man can earn more money in a minute than his exploited workers can make in a year, because that is not a world worth having.

And until it changes, we will just have to be content with satire.